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Writer & nature photographer, especially macro photography of arthropods. Board member, Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee (conservation nonprofit). Fan of California, Montana, the rest of the planet. Photo website: https://www.tomastlephotography.com/

Tom Astle

This morning I'm helping a friend who's heading up a spider diversity survey, so in honor of that, here is your Sunday Spider, snacking (a wee crab spider with a plant bug; Montana) #Bugsky 🐙🌿🕷️

Tom Astle

25 minutes of Photuris tremulans fireflies in Tennessee's smoky mountains.

A male mountain bluebird with a cricket he's bringing back to the nest. (Montana) 📷🌿🦉

Windswept marmot looking skeptical at 10K ft. on the Beartooth Plateau near the Montana/Wyoming border. If you're from back east, this is like a woodchuck, except in the mountains, and on rocks, so people here call them rockchucks. I do not believe they actually chuck rocks. But this one might. 📷🌿

Here's one more shot, a bit closer

Fractal melting in an alpine lake surface, taken with 600 mm. lens from a high vantage point. (Twin Lakes, Beartooth Mountains, Wyoming, just south of the Montana border; lake elevation 9747 ft.)📷

—of being strictly bilaterally symmetrical. Also, in the six individuals he’s seen in this species, they have never been 50-50 — always a bit more female, with female tissue crossing the midline but male tissue never doing so, as here on the thorax. (No photo credit by friend’s request for privacy)🐝

#Bugsky 🐙🌿 Shared with me by a fof in SoCal - this is a gynandromorph (both male & female) valley carpenter bee (Xylocopa sonorina). Females are black, males orange, so the extreme color dimorphism really stands out. Per Doug Yanega at UC Riverside, bee gynandromorphs he’s seen are mosaic instead—

A little caddisfly on a lichen-covered boulder, near a waterfall in Montana. Caddisfly adults look a bit like moths, and in fact their order (Trichoptera) is most closely related to moths and butterflies (Lepidoptera). Caddisflies have aquatic larvae which can spin silk.

Alex Wild

Tom Astle

Tree Swallow says "You shall not pass." (Montana) 🦉📷🌿

Tom Astle