Water lily in marsh

Latin name: Nymphaea odorata

This is the most popular of the Water lily photos I've posted. It is indeed balanced, with an inky black water region, a green lily pad region, an interesting browned lily pad section, and the lovely flower at the centre. The reflection of the sun above the flower is evocative as well. The flower's brightness makes a good contrast with the darkness of the water and the lily pads. From a technical standpoint, I was able to avoid glare and get reasonable sharpness of detail by holding my polarizing filter over the camera lens.

Many pictures of Water lilies I've seen are bright and well saturated throughout. I like the fact that this one has a lot of dark elements, an inky look to the water, and insect-eaten leaves. It gives the feel of the marsh, a different feel from a swimming pond or lake edge. A marsh has the feel of a messy, lively hive of activity and fermenting plant matter. A bright lily in a marsh is the sign of a momentary escape from ferment.

Long-jawed Orb weaver spider

Latin name: Tetragnatha sp.

Here's a female of the same species as the one posted below. A good example of sexual dimorphism. Note the excellent match between her colouration and the dried out thistle she is on. It was really a bit of a fluke that I noticed her at all.

Long-jawed Orb weaver spider

Latin name: Tetragnatha sp.

I'm pretty pleased with this shot of a Long-jawed Orb weaver. It was taken in pretty poor light I think at 1/60 sec exposure time. This is a male of the species. I'm not sure exactly which species it is. There were many of these fellows hanging out on top of the leaves of the Touch-me-nots that covered the forest floor in the hickory forest at Selkirk provincial park where we went camping this past weekend.

Cobweb spider with prey

Latin name: Enoplognatha ovata

Here's another Cobweb spider at work. This one's captured a firefly or some other related beetle. I hadn't really known much about Cobweb spiders until this past weekend's camping trip. They are spiders that spin disorganized webs and usually have rather round abdomens. A Black Widow is a Cobweb spider. It's difficult to nail down which species a Cobweb spider belongs to. There are several and they vary a lot within species as well.

Cobweb spider with prey

Latin name: Enoplognatha ovata

Not that many people have looked at this picture on Flickr. I like it a lot though. Not surprisingly, in retrospect, pictures that seem to be popular are ones that show up well as thumbnails. I enjoy this shot because it shows a Cobweb spider about to bite into newly captured prey. It's hard to get a picture of an insect doing its thing. Mostly one is happy to capture one after having chased it all over the foliage or over countless rocks.

Mating Wool Carder bees on Lamb's ear

Latin name: Anthidium manicatum

Yesterday at around four in the afternoon I was still hoping to get some more insect pictures. However, I was unable to go to a wonderful park. Fortunately, our neighbours have a patch of Lamb's ear in their front yard. I got some photos of Wool Carder bees, including this one of two of them mating. The male Wool Carder bee will scare competition away from a nice patch of flowers but will let females through, then mate with them once they've fed. Females apparently gather fuzz from plants like Lamb's ear and then work it to make a nest in a manner similar to a person carding wool. From this picture, mating does not seem to be either glamourous of fun for the female, whose wings get bent down by the male (this does probably protect them).

The Wool Carder bee is an introduced species from Europe.

Colorado potato beetle larvae dining on nightshade leaves

Latin name: Leptinotarsa decemlineata

Nancy and I went to a garden centre this past Saturday. While Nancy was ogling herbs and ground cover, I looked around the place for insects to photograph. In a grassy area by a pool of water in a culvert I found many Colorado potato beetles munching away on Deadly Nightshade leaves.

The Colorado Potato Beetle is actually thought to have originated in Mexico somewhere. It feeds on plants in the Nightshade family, which inludes the potato, tomato, petunia, tobacco, and eggplant. The increase in cultivation of the potato led to its spread around North America. Members of the Nightshade family of plants produce alkaloyds at dangerous levels various parts of the plant. The orange colour of the Colorado Potato beetle larva may serve as a warning that it is toxic.

Female Dolichopodid fly

Latin name: Dolichopodid (family)

Here's a female Dolichopodid fly, also known as a Long-legged fly. She was being harassed by a hovering, hopeful male.

Male Dolichopodid fly hovering over female

Latin name: Dolichopodid (family)

I was so pleased to get some shots of a Long-legged fly in flight. This is a male Long-legged fly. He was hovering over a female hoping to mate. The light was good so I was able to have the shutter speed at 1/800 second. Faster would have been even nicer.

Surprisingly, this shot has gotten little attention on Flickr, much less than an earlier shot of mating worms. I am apparantly a poor judge of what will be popular.

Attempting a meal

I got this photo of a fly starting to bite into my leg last Sunday afternoon. I got another of a horsefly, but it was fuzzy. Have to try again for a clearer shot (cringe).

Sac spider

Latin name: Clubiona sp.

Our house has been the home of several Sac spiders. I generally consider myself to be a friend to bugs. For the most part if we find a bug in the house we gently put it outside. Not so for the Sac spider whose bite is cytotoxic (kills cells) and painful. Putting a Sac spider outside would risk having someone get bitten there. Lewis has a small body mass and would suffer rather a lot from a bite. I choose to kill those we find. This one I kept in a jar and photographed yesterday after work. Then I squished it.

Bug site

The University of Kentucky has a great site on bug identification and categorization, including sections on plant bugs and assassin/ambush bugs. Very helpful.

Grasshopper

Latin name: Orthoptera (order)

I don't much go in for grasshoppers, but the shot of this one turned out to be quite clear. Pictures of bugs on bright green foliage often get comments on Flickr from people who admire green things or things that are brightly coloured.

Assassin bug

Latin name: Reduviidae (family)

Here's an assassin bug. Its abdomen seems to be filled with what looks like bright green goo. I'm not sure if this is the case as I didn't try to squish it.

Damsel bugs?

Latin name: Nabidae (family)

I've come across a new category of bugs, namely bugs that stab and poison then suck their prey dry. This category includes Assassin and Ambush bugs (family Reduviidae) and Damsel bugs (family Nabidae). I think that the bugs pictures here might be a nymph (left) and adult Damsel bug. You can see their sucking parts, folded back in the nymph and pointed down in the adult. Perhaps they're male and female adults of the same species or different species. I don't know yet. All of these killing bugs can be found in profusion in grassy fields.

Phidippus clarus spider on clover leaf

Latin name: Phidippus clarus

I have been hoping to find Phidippus jumping spiders in Ontario and did indeed find one this past Saturday at Short Hills provincial park in the form of this female Phidippus clarus. Rather, Janneke found it and I photographed it. She's good.

Robber fly with bee prey

Latin name: Laphria sp.

My first Robber fly! This one looks like a bumblebee. I saw it with Janneke in vegitation in a dry creekbed we were visiting. It was conspicuous initially by carrying around a dead bee. Bumblebees don't do that. After a moment, I noticed that it didn't bumble around as it flew but rather zipped here and there in a very purposeful manner. The light was poor, so the pictures I got were blurry. Nonetheless, a fun first.

Robber flies apparantly can see very well with their two large compound eyes and catch their prey in midair. Their mandible is large and strong enough to pierce through the exoskeleton of a beetle.

AJAX and Ruby on Rails

O'Reilly has a nice aricle on Ruby on Rails and AJAX, the hot new DHTML/remote scripting "why didn't we do this before?" phenomenon.

Apparantly, the new Pragmatic Programmers book on development with Rails will do a good job covering remote scripting/AJAX. I'll be getting this when it comes out in July.

The problem with DHTML and remote scripting has always been the requirement to hand-craft each page in much the same way as one might hand craft a chair. The difference is that a chair lasts a lifetime while a page lasts until you need to refactor it. This is why Flex is so hot; it lets you do neat dynamic and remote-calling things with an easy-to-use API. We'll really be getting somewhere if frameworks like Rails can become easy-to-use APIs whereby you only need to worry about what you need to call on the client side and what you need to send on the server side and not about the plumbing.

I'll be building a site this summer using Rails and will most likely now be adding some AJAX behaviours to the mix.

Here's a snippet from the article that sets up a live-updatable search list:

Live Search:
<%= text_field_tag :searchtext %>
<%= observe_field(:searchtext,                 :frequency => 0.25,
               :update => :search_hits,
               :url => { :action => :live_search }) %>

<p>Search Results:</p>
<div id="search_hits"></div>

The great thing about this is that the plumbing is hidden. Set up the structure and the actions, implement the back-end, and voila!

Sudoku example from Wikipedia

Ran across a Wikipeida article on Sudoku, a logic game that seems to have come together over time, gotten turned into a game in the US, but become a raging sensation in Japan before spreading around the world recently.

It looks fun. You need to make sure that the numbers 1 through 9 occur only once in each row and column and once in each 3x3 grid. Apparantly it can be quite tricky to solve some puzzles. I've downloaded a sample and will give it a try.

This might be a fun thing to expose Janneke to, even if she can't complete one yet. I hope to be able to inspire my kids to be curious or to remain curious, rather.

The Wikipedia article gives a number of links to sites one can download puzzles from, including this one.

Cringely on Apple on Intel

Cringely proposes that Intel and Apple are planning on going into an alliance to give Intel a new and more reliable chip-selling channel and Apple a massive increase in market share and both of them a chance to dethrone Microsoft. That would be fun to watch!

Female Wolf spider with egg sac

Latin name: Lycosa sp.

Just for reference, here's a female from another species of Wolf spider. This one's carrying her egg sac as well. Took this picture a few weeks ago at Short Hills park. It was quite frisky. Note the different wrapping for the eggs and differing carrying technique.

Female Wolf spider with egg sac

Latin name: Lycosa sp.

Nancy found this amputee Wolf spider as she was digging up the front yardette last night. We're not sure if she caused the amputation or if it was pre-existing. In either case, we did not harm the spider further and after pestering it by taking photos of it we let it go. Hope to get some good photos of Wolf spiders with young on their backs soon.

By the way, I've come across what seems to be three species of Wolf spider in the past couple of weeks. They can be viewed and compared here. All of them seem to have a helmet-shaped cephalothorax and six eyes arranged in a rough v-shape with four small eyes in a row at the bottom of the v (although it's not obvious that there are four eyes in the picture posted here). Some Wolf spider photos I've seen have much larger main front eyes (the ones above the four bottom ones). Apparantly in the dark Wolf spider eyes reflect the light as well.

Another neat thing is that I took this picture at around eight o'clock at night. This worked partly because the sidewalk the spider was on is nicely reflective, but still. Love the summer.

Great field guide site

The ROM has put together a "do it yourself" field guide site. You choose the region of Ontario and the type of animal (amphibions, birds, or fish) and you will get a set of web pages with a picture and field guide type description of each species. Very very nice.

Pink spotted lady bug

Latin name: Coleomegilla maculata

Cute and colourful always wins out it seems. I've recieved quite a few visits to this photo of a lady bug interacting in some way with an egg mass. I hadn't known about this species but apparantly it's reasonably common in Ontario.

Beetles mating on my knee

Latin name: unknown

An example of mating beetles being otherwise occupied and not easily scared off. I did not put them there.

Beetles mating on blade of grass

Latin name: unknown

It's both easy and fun to take pictures of mating insects. It's easy because they're otherwise occupied and thus not inclined to fly or run away. Its interesting because, you know...

Six-spotted fishing spider

Latin name: Dolomedes triton

This is a Six-spotted fishing spider. Fishing spiders are also referred to as Nursery-web spiders. Fishing spiders hang out along the edge of still or slow moving water in areas that provide lots of cover (i.e. lots of grass or rushes). They have a varied diet and are able to take down prey as large as small frogs. They can skate along the surface of the water in a manner that looks similar to that of a water strider. If you disturb a Fishing spider it will skate out into the water then return to the shore, tracing a u-shaped pathway. Janneke enjoyed this behaviour and initiated it a few times. We found this specimen along the Grand river at the Elora Gorge conservation area.

Red beetle

Latin name: unknown

I have no idea what this beetle is but it's cute. Janneke spied it.

Orb weaver (Cyclosa conica)

Latin name: Cyclosa conica

Here's a closeup of another of those corpse-feigning Orb weavers. This one is hiding out on a leaf because I scared it off its web (I had blown on it to see if it was a living spider or prey). This one is larger than the other, posted previously, and is thus probably a female. You can see the conical posterior abdomen that gives this spider its name. Apparantly, the colouration on this spider is quite variable.

Orb weaver (Cyclosa conica)

Latin name: Cyclosa conica

Came across this spider in a meadow in Short Hills provincial park. It's an Orb weaver that makes itself inconspicuous by hiding at the end of a line of its prey. Rather than jettisoning its prey it keeps them and uses them to form a line leading from the centre of the web to the outer edge. It hunches at the centre end of this line and in this way makes itself rather inconspicuous. Looking directly at it I almost missed it.

Water strider adult and adolescent

Latin name: family Gerridae

I've had trouble being inspired by water striders. They sort of skate around on the surface of the water and that's about it. This photo is pretty interesting in that it's a clear head-on shot and includes a jeuvenile to the left and a teeny bug to the right of the adult's body. The underwater debris is also visually appealing/complex. The letterbox aspect ratio (2:1 here) is also interesting. I'll probably use it more in the future when it's warrented.

Google image search and this site

You can do a google search of my blog using the handy textbox found at the top of this page. Now that Google knows about me, this is working well for text searches to find blog entries. However, none of my images were coming up in a Google image search. This is probably because the images were titled "photo sharing" by the Flickr photo blog tool. Additionally, Flickr photos have non-meaningful names. In short, Google didn't have much to work with. So, I changed my Flickr photo blogging preferences to put the image title as the photo's title. This should work for future images. Additionally, I went back and fixed the titles for old blog entry images. We'll see if Google finds my images now.

Blocking traffic

Called UPS this morning to ask if they could stop one of their drivers from parking each day on University Avenue during rush hour. The driver does pickups at several buildings during these stops. I am personally not happy with the ratio of delivery driver time savings to inconvenience for hundreds of commuters trying to get home. Asking him to park behind the building and getting ticketed several times have not been effective techniques to get him to change his ways. If this doesn't work I'll try to get the parking people to tow him (he parks right beside a tow-away sign). This picture is part of a "Blocking traffic" group.

Fly on leaf

This shot of an unknown fly was taken at Short Hills provincial park on an overcast day. It has a number of desirable elements including a limited palette of colours with the subject and non-subject elements nicely separated by colour, the subject nicely focussed and the background unfocussed, and the blade of grass the fly is sitting on neatly bisecting the image.

Ant queen on stone

Latin name: Camponotus pennsylvanicus

It's rather rare (I think) to come across a Carpenter ant queen. I found this one on a stone in a creek bed in Short Hills provincial park. The lighting was not good, but I was able to get this fairly clear shot and lighten it up in the Gimp. I want to build a ring light to increase my odds in poor lighting.

Spider on sidewalk

Latin name: Lycosa sp.

Nancy discovered what I think is a pregnant female Wolf spider on her hand while digging in the garden and was good enough not to kill it but rather to call me out to photograph it. The light was nice and bright for this shot. I used a polarizing filter to keep glare from the sidewalk down. The result is an image with excellent fine detail.

Ant drinking from a droplet of honedew

Over the past few weekends I've had a few photo shooting windows of about 30 minutes while meals were cooking, it wasn't raining, etc. This shot of an ant drinking "honeydew" from an aphid came out of one such shoot.