I love Fire Upon the Deep so much! Love the slow release of details in those first few chapters that build the world without giving it all away up front! Also thought it was really clever how the author avoids making the book feel quickly dated as tech evolves past what was around when he wrote it, especially around the ‘what the internet will be like in the future’ bits by focusing more on human behaviour and how we would use futuristic versions of the internet instead of getting to specific about the way the future tech itself works. Cause human behaviour doesn’t really change haha.

Ahaha…okay let’s call it “exponential escalation” instead 😅 have you played with iNaturalist at all? That was my next step in the bug collecting, photographing and identification obsession chain haha

Ahaha a surprise high def butt worm, what a brilliant way to elevate a cricket portrait 😅

Oh yeah feel you with the slow creep from casual photography to full on ‘must collect and raise everybody i find!!!’ Next you will find yourself wasting hours each morning staring obsessively at your bug eggs to catch the exact moment the baby wasps start chewing their way out hahaha, and you will regret nothing :) I’ve been pretty into little plastic containers you get for glitter/makeup powder for on the go collections lately, as you can get a pretty good photo through the flat topped lids (my set up is a microscope with a mount on the eyepiece for my cell phone camera). But I love the idea of the larger glass box so you can create more of a backdrop and get shots with your macro camera! Definitely share some photos here of your set up as you work it out!

For the invasive ones, yeah best to put the whole bag in the freezer after you get your shots, but then id just toss the whole ziplock bag, leaving it sealed, into the bin rather than toss the contents back outside, just to be safe. That’s how I disposed of all my samples when I used to do big survey loops, rearing on the go, and didn’t want to spread things around.

Ive done heaps of parasitoid wasp rearing and my container of choice is actually just a humble ziplock sandwich bag! Put in your leaf material with the critter you’d like to try to develop, add a paper towel (if you’ve collected quite dry plant material like eucalpytus leaves or similar, make the towel damp to add humidity, whereas if you’ve collected very ‘juicy’ plant material like very green weeds or grass, the towel should be dry to absorb humidity), blow into it to partially inflate, seal it up and keep it somewhere warm and dry and out of the sun and check it regularly until something hatches! For egg parasitoids, you are looking for something extremely tiny flitting around the top of the bag where there is the most light. You might see them emerging in just a few days after you take the sample, or it might take more than a month (and fear not if the plant material starts to look pretty moldy and sad, I’ve had parasitoid wasps emerge from leaf samples that had gone completely moldy and I had nearly written them off!). Charlie Eismanns blog is also great for tips on rearing out insects. He focuses on ones that live inside leaves (called leafminers), but the principles hold pretty true for other types of insects as well (i used the same techniques for aphids for ex).

When you see a few black stink bug eggs mixed in among the pale ones like this, it generally indicates a parasitoid wasp has laid an egg inside the bug egg, and the baby wasp has hatched and eaten the bug egg from the inside! So instead of a bug nymph emerging from the black eggs, you would get a wasp emerging. If you’re a bug or moth (or most any insect really), you are not safe from parasitoids at any life stage - some wasps attack you in the egg stage, some the nymph/larval stage, and some the pupal stage. Unlike parasites which wanna keep you alive forever to continue to host them, parasitoids just wanna mooch off you a little while and then wanna kill and eat you to finish the job. You probably would hardly notice it if you saw one of the parasitoid wasps, as they can be just a couple millimetres long! There are some nice pics in this blog: https://bugtracks.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/stink-bug-egg-parasitoids/

Ah nice shot! Do you reckon it was sleeping? I’ve seen a Megachile genus bee (i think) holding a twig with its mandibles like that, asleep!