Reproduction at its most rampant…
[featured image] Parasitic platyhelminthes, particularly the flukes, have the most complex life cycles of any animal, involving two or more hosts and an elaborate sequence of developmental stages that allows each egg laid by the adult to spawn huge numbers of infective juveniles via asexual reproduction. The photo and video …
Magnificent mouthparts
[featured image] The Stenus rove beetles have featured in a couple of other posts, but the photos below are worthy of revisiting …
Time travellers
[featured image] When I was working on the book I’ve just finished I became a little fixated by the rotifers and …
Unfeasibly large gonads…
This post isn’t about the famous Viz character, rather the mind-boggling diversity of nematodes, which I touched on in a previous post. …
Pin head
[featured image] Last year in northern Spain we crashed our hire car, but after exercising our rudimentary knowledge of the Spanish language …
Mini-hawks
[featured image] In one of my older posts I banged on about the hunting prowess of some of the solitary wasps and …
A grisly end for an earthworm…
[featured image] Whilst camping in Cornwall recently we found this earthworm thrashing about in the turf. I thought nothing of it initially, …
A tiger beetle on steroids
[featured image] Tiger beetles come in all shapes and sizes, but on the whole they’re rather elegant, fine-limbed animals. With this said, …
Microfauna
[featured image] [This post is adapted from a book I’ve just finished, which will be published sometime next year by Thames and …