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Photo#29551
Onthophagus taurus, major male - Onthophagus taurus - male

Onthophagus taurus, major male - Onthophagus taurus - Male
Hudson, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, USA
August 21, 2005
Photographed with 1.5x closeup lens in my "light arena," consisting of a frosted transparent plastic waste can surrounded by four 12-inch circline flourescent bulbs, all encased in an opaque plastic shell and cooled with a small electronics cooling fan. Both other shots are taken through salvaged lens from photocopier.

Major males are reportedly the product of an abundance of food stored in their larval chamber. They are said to possess longer wings than minor males, perhaps partly to compensate the areodynamic drag of their horns. Major males use their horns to compete for breeding rights.

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Onthophagus taurus, major male - Onthophagus taurus - male Onthophagus taurus, major male - Onthophagus taurus - male Onthophagus taurus, major male - Onthophagus taurus - male

Hirox
Dear Jim,
This week my laboratory had a demonstration by representatives from Hirox microscopes; microscopes designed exclusively for digital capture. There are no eyepieces!
Anyway, the lighting on these scopes was absolutely superb, and seemed to be "perfect every time". They capture video, and have attachments for angled viewing and rotation about a point. If you are interested in microscopy, definitely you should check these guys out. The images these things generate would be absolutely amazing posted on Bugguide, or used in a teaching laboratory. Anyway, I will likely never get to play with one of these, but I would love to.
Their webpage is http://www.hirox-usa.com/. The video capture demonstrated on their webpage is not remastered or anything. We gave the representatives specimens, and within 30 seconds we were viewing this kind of crystal-clear imagery.
Anyway, I sound like an advertisement, which I usually don't. It is worth a look at though.
Take care.
-Sean

 
Nice!!
How about prices? Did they divulge how much the taxpayers would have to shell out to supply a public institution with one of these units? Maybe we can finally get good movies of insect behavior.

I'm impressed with what I saw in the demo. Although my camera has a higher max. resolution, I lose gobs of pixels because I have to crop so much. Looks like their zoom is capable of getting very close.

Tomorrow I'm hooking up my TV (which I hardly watch anyway) to my Canon PowerShot Pro so I can use manual focus on my subjects. I can't guage sharpness well enough in the camera's LED screen, and the autofocus doesn't always focus on what I want it to.

 
I did not stay for the sad pa
I did not stay for the sad part of the demo...but I got some word that they start around 14 grand or so.
Hooking up a TV is the only way to go for fine focus with a digital/scope combo. I use a nikon coolpix 5600, and it has A/V output. A borrowed TV worked well for some shots, but I have yet to convince my advisor to get me a cheap TV so I can do my work. I am using quick digital shots of Culex egg rafts to count the eggs. They can then be placed back on water to hatch. Counting the traditional way means I have to cook the eggs under my light while frustrating myself losing count of the 100-150 eggs/raft. I also use the camera for measuring winglength, snapping the shot with a size reference and number in each frame and measuring it in SigmaScan. I am sure NIH Image or ScionImage (freeware) does the same thing, and it is pretty useful. Snap the shots and measure at leisure.
AS for the Hirox website, the subjects they chose for biological examples were much less impressive than the specimens we had them do. We had a live Corethrella larva and an adult Aedes aegypti, which was way prettier than that lousy dried-up Culex on the website.

 
Ah, so it's been tried and it works!
Good to know my idea doesn't belong in the hair-brained category.

I googled some of the Latin names you tossed out. Amazing how male frog calls attract female Corethrella, and recordings of frog calls will lure them to traps. (Also mentioned in www.vet.uga.edu/ivcvm/2000/McKeever/McKeever.htm is that a tick species homes in on cliff swallow calls.)

Makes me wonder: Did dinosaurs vocalize? Were there blood-sucking insects that fed on them and homed in on their calls? Are those species still around today and would they still respond to a dinosaur call? Could a saurian call be duplicated by trial and error, using their bloodsuckers to verify? Ahhhh, Science!

 
As far as is known, mosquitoe
As far as is known, mosquitoes only use olfaction and vision for host-seeking. The males, however, use auditory receptors on thos feathery antennae to detect females.Corethrella is a bit different in that regard.
The earliest dinosaurs were probably the main hosts of the first blood-feeding mosquitoes, and by the end of the Cretaceous most of the families of hematophagous Diptera were present. Too bad how in Jurassic Park they had a Toxorhynchites!

 
OK I spoke too soon on the ma
OK I spoke too soon on the major families of bloodsucking flies being present in the Cretaceous. The oldest Tabanid was found in Eocene deposits, Glossinids from the Oligocene, and Hippoboscids from the Oligocene. The mosquitoes, blackflies, and biting midges (basically the hematophagous Nematocerans) were present in the Cretaceous. Here is a good site on fossil flies: http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/fossilcat.

 
Bummer
Barring the possibilities presented in the Congo's mokele mbembe, Corethrella never heard the croak of a dinosaur :-(

light arena
I had been wondering about the origin of the striking metallic colors in your beetle photos...
The colors remind me of my grandmother's knick-knacks; she loved to spray-paint everything either silver or gold.

 
Rats!
"spray-paint everything either silver or gold"

My secret's out ;-)

I should probably try a polarizing lens to reduce some of the reflection.

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