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Titchy ptilids

[featured image] Looking through some specimens from a recent expedition to Burma I found some of these little chaps, featherwing beetles (ptilidae) to be exact. Now, saying “little” is a bit of an understatement as this one was just shy of 0.5mm long. Featherwing beetles are actually among the smallest …

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 …

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 …