amphibian

Saw this green frog today in the Dell Pond, a stormwater retention reservoir at UVa that looks like a pretty pond, part of the colonial architecture (but serves a purpose in rainwater maintenance!  I heard a lecture about stormwater in my Restoration Ecology class last year and will never look at drainage ditches the same way again.).  This guy will probably spend the winter hibernating at the bottom of the pond, nestled in some plant roots.

Also, if you click the image and enlarge it, you can see my reflection with the camera in his eye.

housefly

Taken through a standing magnifying glass, the photos of this housefly I killed show that sometimes the closer you get to something, the cooler it looks.

Look at that sweet proboscis--the flat pad at the end is the labellum and the bit that sticks out at the top of the mouthpart (just where the proboscis joins to the head) is one of the maxillary palps, used for tasting and smelling.  I wish these photos could really capture the detail I could see through the actual glass!  I just realized I should have set my aperture smaller to get the whole fly into my depth of focus...

larval

Potato beetle grub on a horse nettle.  You can see its "frass" (special term for insect poop) to the left, and on its head and upper body there are tiny mites that parasitize this agricultural pest.

botany

Indian pipe, a parasitic plant that possesses no chlorophyll and feeds off of other plants.

Wild viburnum.

twinapple & my 100th post

Fruit of two fused blossoms.

family

My little sister and our two cousins.

toast

hook line and sinker

heat lamp

dreaming of spring

As we fade into fall, a reminder of what new leaves look like.

aperture

Tree branches seen through a hole in the trunk, shot last winter.

delicate

White peony, one of my favorite summer flowers.

football

The jumbro-tron at the stadium during our college football game this past Saturday.

nearest and dearest

My best girlfriends from college.  Miss you all.

gossamer

Sunlight hitting spider silk.  I'm reading Animal Architecture by ecologist Karl von Frisch, and he talks about the incredible amount of engineering and repair that goes into spinning a web.  I will never destroy a spiderweb for no reason again.

horn galls

Caused by the larvae of various insects (wasps, beetles, etc), these galls look like tiny thorns on the leaves of a witch hazel tree.  The tiny grubs develop inside the gall, which is a structure the plant itself produces in response to chemicals released by the larvae.  The galls provide food and shelter for the developing grubs.

comeback kid

A rather long absence mediated by my laptop breaking, me losing all of my photographs, and the start of med school.  Here are some photos I've taken since then.

 

Watching teammates compete at a medschool class field day competition.

sun(set)flower

Just got home from a few visits and had to snap this one of a sunflower during the golden hour.

horsenettle

This member of the nightshade family (which includes tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant) packs an arsenal of hair-thin spines that can break off in skin and cause ferocious itching.  This, however, doesn't detract from the papery beauty of the white and purple flowers.

spike

Common mullein, a summer annual with thick, woolly basal leaves.  The flower spike was taller than I was (yes, that's not saying much considering my lowly 4'11").  Used in cough remedies and skin treatments.

aforementioned

Since there was talk of ticks in the previous post, I thought I would show you my tick vial from fieldwork at my summer internship.  These are about 1/3 of the ticks collected on my person...sadly enough I dropped my original, fuller vial in the meadow and couldn't find it in the three-foot-tall grass.   We filled little collecting vials with rubbing alcohol and poked any ticks we found into them--handy for exterminating them when you couldn't find a honey locust tree.

crown of thorns

Honey locust tree.  These have handy thorns for spiking ticks out in the field, since when you catch a tick on your body, it's pretty much understood that you kill it rather than release it back into the wild.  Sometimes, nature bites.

mackerel sunrise

I love mackerel clouds.  Although, since I saw these in the morning, that's technically not good, according to the "mackerel skies at morning, sailor take warning; mackerel skies at night, sailor's delight."

fawns

Mule deer at a golf course in San Jose. 

yuma

Sunset over Mittry Lake in Yuma, Arizona.  I spent a week there visiting a friend, where I snorkeled, fished, and learned to scuba dive.  In fact, all of our activities had something to do with water (including setting up my friend's saltwater fish tank), perhaps because the only bearable thing you can do in the oven-like summer is go swimming.