Lacewing eggs EDIT: and larvae

[mtuell]

I was attempting to image the little nub at the end of the lacewing eggs. Those eggs are pretty challenging subjects, I must say! Here is a couple of darkfield single exposures at 10x and 40x. The little button is definitely proud of the surface (it isn't just coloration), and seems to be attached by a little "wire" or few. I wonder if it is a sense organ of some type?





Looking at them from an almost side view is easier, but still hard! I'd be interested in trying a stack later, if they don't hatch first!





Despite my fascination with "Disco Lights Illumination" , these are straight darkfield (same BD setup, but no color filters) with 10x. There is also a regular macro shot in the "studio macro" forum.

Mike

[mtuell]

Well, dang! You learn something new every day!

I had no idea that lacewing larva are antlions! Who knew? Except Wikipedia, of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antlion.

Mike

[rjlittlefield]

I had no idea that lacewing larva are antlions! Who knew? Except Wikipedia, of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antlion.

No, that's a different beast.

Lacewing larvae are sometimes called aphidlions, but antlions are the critters that dig pits in sand.

Their adults are much different. See the article you reference, and compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysopidae. Same order (Neuroptera), different family (Chrysopidae versus Myrmeleontidae).

--Rik

[mtuell]

Well, Rik, I see your point. Looking at images of antlion eggs, I can't tell the difference. I don't think the larva will be different enough to tell to my untrained eye, either. So, I don't really know what it is, but I live in the desert and ants and antlions are all over the place, but I haven't seen a lot of those tender juicy aphids around. Not to say that aphids and aphidlions aren't here, I just think antlions may be more common.

Anyway, that's beside the point. I'm not on Facebook, so you guys get to see the baby pictures! I sent them off into the world this morning, I guess there was about 20 of them.

From the time I found them, to the time they hatched (after midnight last night, of course - kept me up until 3:30! Damned kids! ) I had them for about 56 hours or so. I took like 7 videos and shot over 500 pictures! It will take a bit to go through that, but here is a quick preview....








It was really interesting watching them hatch, stretch, clean themselves and dry off. The empty egg shells looked like opals with the epi-DIC that I happened to be using because I wanted 5x and didn't feel like taking it off the turret for a standard turret... I also got some DF BD, which looks cool, too. I'll put up more later.

Mike

[rjlittlefield]

Looking at images of antlion eggs, I can't tell the difference.

I'm curious -- where are you finding your images of "antlion" eggs? If I ask Google to image search of "antlion eggs", I see a lot of images that look like yours. But when I dig deeper into the pages that contain those images, I mostly find that they are accurately described as lacewings, along with calling the larvae "antlions".

At http://www.antlionpit.com/reproduce.html, it is claimed that

Egg Laying or "oviposition," occurs in the sand. When a female finds a suitable place, she repeatedly taps the sand surface with the tip of the abdomen. She then inserts the abdomen into the sand and lays an egg (see Figure 2). She repeats this procedure several times if she remains on a particular patch of sand. During egg laying she raises her wings and moves them very fast with short wing strokes. In captivity females lay an average of 20 eggs and show a preference for warm sand. After a successful oviposition fit females return to the tree, where mating possibly occurs again (Yasseri and Parzefall 1996a).

At http://www.ozanimals.com/Insect/Antlion ... mily/.html, there is described an Australian species for which

Breeding
The eggs are laid in groups with each egg on a short stalk, and each stalk linked together in horse-shoe pattern. The larvae are called antlions (or ant-lions) and are carnivorous. Some live in the ground making conical pit traps to catch ants and other small passing insects.

But the pictures of that beast don't have the long stalks and well separated eggs that yours show.

I'm not sure what you have either. Just raising some concerns that commonly come up when matching images of things against Google queries.

Nice images, by the way!

--Rik

[mtuell]

Sorry, I didn't spend much time... just a Google image search for antlion eggs, and they seemed to look the same. I suspect they were mis-identified, propagating the confusion!

I'll put up some more pics of lacewing larvae once I've had a chance to go through and see what I actually captured.

Thanks,
Mike

[mtuell]

Here are some more shots of the larvae.



The first one is an attempt (read: not with Zerene Stacker) at a focus stack. His mandibles were moving, so here I stacked the back part and then took that and stacked it with a single image with the head in focus. Could have turned out worse!

I made an animated .gif of the motion and will put it on my site, but here is a direct link : https://lavinia.as.arizona.edu/~mtuell/ ... -DIC-1.gif

You will notice that it was part of a focus stack from the first image, so the focus changes as it goes through the frames....

This guy was holding still, so I got a somewhat reasonable stack.



Here is one hanging out "behind" his egg shell, again, a reasonable stack.



These guys are amazingly flexible, as seen in this animated gif :
https://lavinia.as.arizona.edu/~mtuell/ ... -DIC-2.gif

This is a sharpened single frame.



And again, a single sharpened frame.



I'll put together a section on my site, on the DIC page, probably, to document this. I haven't even looked at the videos yet! Lots of material to work on!

I've also got some darkfield, but that was with a 10x and it overfills the frame, whereas these are 5x epi-DIC. I love the way the shells come out looking like opals!

Mike

[mtuell]

For those interested, the frame is about 2 mm wide...



Of course, the subject is 3D and not usually in the focal plane, so it is harder to judge actual size...

Mike

[Charles Krebs]

Nice!
Always fun to see the eggs and then what hatches out!

[carlos.uruguay]

Super!