Off on a field trip to Costa Rica

I don't know the name of this waterfall. We were several miles away across a large canyon. T%here were several spectacular waterfalls that could be seen along this road. There is a genus of damselflies that are waterfall specialists that we would have loved to search for,but the terrain was just too rugged.

drones?

That might work. They are a bit too spendy for us, I don't know if the smaller hobbiest models can be controled at that distance.Years ago I was thinking about an RC model airplane that could land and take off from water. A pontoon biplane with rear facing engines and a scoop net mounted in front, to chase dragonflies around the airspace over a pond.Maybe I'll build one when I'm too old to swing a net.

Erythemis vesiculosa male in Costa Rica. This species has the common name Great Pondhawk. It gets as far north as the southwestern U.S. We also have 2 other species in the U.S., Erythemis collocata in the west and Erythemis simplicicollis in the east. Both of these are smaller than E. vesiculosa and the male's bodies are completely powder blue when they are mature. This is a male E. collocata for comparison. Erythemis are extremely territorial and the males chasing each other and defending their territory are common sights at ponds in July and August across the country.

I'm a broken record, I know, but damn that's some nice work. Thank you.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

This Katydid has the longest antennae I think I have ever seen, whether you measure total length or relative to body length. They are sensory, probably both tactile and chemical, so they are in constant slow motion Subjects like these are difficult to shoot. The tend to be shy and want to hop or fly away, or crawl under a leaf or around a stem. Getting the body and the full antennae in the shot means you have to move back and it is harder than heck to get both antennae and the body in focus as you can see in my shot. Often there are only a few seconds to setup and shoot before they are gone.A huge number of different kinds of antennae have evolved in the Insects. We see insects that have evolved highly specialized morphologies and functions for every body part and we classify them into groups based on how one or more body part has evolved. The major groups we have historically used are Order and then Family, but we are starting to use "clade" for the groupings and to map out "cladograms" that show us much more precisely have how they are related. Some insects have evolved in such unique ways that we have trouble grouping them with any others, but gene mapping is filling in more and more gaps in our knowledge.I don't think there is any other group of organisms that has evolved as much diversity as the insects, diversity of form and diversity of species. Insects have been evolving for more than 400 million years and they have spread everywhere except back in the sea and into deep polar regions. They have controlled the evolution of plants and thus also the animals that depend on plants.Insects are the perfect models for studying and understanding evolution. We can map speciation patterns within many if not all groups and we can also track natural selection and adaptation to environmental pressures because of short generation time and huge reproductive capacity.

The Palo Verde Field Station in Costa Rice is an interesting place and has a lot of potential dragonfly and wildlife habitat, but the wet season was delayed, so a lot of wildlife was scarce. Mosquitos were fierce though and relentless.The heat was hot and the air was wet. Our lodging was uncomfortable, 3 bunk beds per tiny room with a small reciprocating fan. Each bunk had mosquito netting around it and one of the two rules was: Tuck the mosquito netting under your mattress all the way around. This primarily to keep the scorpions out. We found scorpions on the netting numerous times so this was a good rule.We learned that the fan was doing an incredible job for comfort one evening when the power went out. Six people could not survive the night in the room without a fan. Even with the fan it was stifling hot. Rule number 2 was do not go out in the field alone, especially at night, because of predators and venomous snakes and poisonous amphibians.There is a simple warning on the suspension bridge over Reo Puerto Viejo at La Selva. We saw monkeys cross the bridge each day, but I did not get any shots.

This is Mecistogaser linearis, another large damselfly. The body is more than 5 inches long. They are usually seen on the wing, slowly flying in patches of sunlight as they search leaf tips and spiderwebs for prey. They never seem to land down at a level where they are easy to photograph and only light for a couple seconds. This on was about 20 feet above me.

Some of my friends got shots of quite spectacular woodpeckers. This is the only one I got close enough to shoot. A male Melanerpes rubricapillus, the Red-crowned Woodpecker along Rio Chires in Costa Rica.

Another shot of the same Iguana as earlier. This seems sharper to me, especially the eye. I have been making lots of large (for me) prints lately. It is so cool to be able to print using your computer and in broad daylight, compared to the old days when I started in the darkroom. This is a 16x20 print on 17x25 paper. The resolving power of digital is amazingly superior to what I used to be able to produce with Kodachrome film printed on Cibachrome paper. I love living in this technological age. Edited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

I have been working at organizing my digital photos the last few weeks. Mainly this means deleting the crap, since they are mostly organized by Class (insects), Order (odonata), suborder (dragonflies), family (Gomphidae), genus and then species. A lot are in a whole collection from a specific trip and don't end up in the above filing folders until I am through working on images from that trip. The number of shots from a 3-4 week trip may be 3000-10000. A lot of these are rejects for any number of reasons, and many may be very similar, so I try to select the best shots from each set and subset.Today I looked back at some shots that were originally shot on Kodachrome film in 1999 and then later scanned. These were shot in Bolivia in the rainforest on the east slope of the Andes.I would give almost anything for a chance to return and shoot these 2 species with a modern digital camera plus HD video.They are both in the damselfly family Polythoridae.This is a male Polythore boliviana. The first time I saw it in the field I was standing at the bottom of waterfall while my friend was climbing up the slippery rocks. One flew around me and landed on a large leaf. Until that moment I thought it was a butterfly, but when I realized it was a damselfly I netted it. My friend came back down because it turned out the damsel was what he was after. We managed to bag several more that day, but I am sorry to say I didn't get any photos in the field. The iridescent colors are caused by refraction, but the wing also contains pigment This is a male Cora terminalis. The bluish metallic color is pure refraction and the only pigment is the black wing tips. When you view the wing from a perpendicular position it looks completely transparent, but when viewed from an angle there is this incredible flash of metallic blue. Males will fly in tight spirals around each other in beams of sunlight coming through the forest canopy. The display has a shimmering, strobing, holographic effect that is like nothing else I have ever seen. The refraction effect almost entirely disappears after specimens are preserved. In the original description of the species by a guy at the British Museum named McLatchlan 1878 there was no mention of this effect. Some traveller probably brought him a bag of specimens from a trip across Bolivia and he described them without ever seeing live specimens. The type locality is just "Bolivia."We only found this species on one jungle stream in the mountains and we explored pretty much every stream we passed.EnjoyEdited by Tanypteryx, : No reason given.

Always good to see your pics.

Thanks!These 2 shots are not very good photographically, but they are fantastic species and photo subjects.I don't know for sure that Polythore boliviana is an example of mimicry, but there was a butterfly there that looked very similar in flight and that often interacted with the damselfly. I guess it is time to re-read Mimicry in Plants and Animals by Wolfgang Wickler.

Easy for you to say. All you have to do to get cheers is post your second-rate photos. The rest of us have to think up clever comments.

But.....I want to be clever, too.