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Insekten-Makrofotografie

20/10/2026

Insects do not have hands. What they have instead is harder to summarise, because almost any part of the body can be turned into a tool.
A stag beetle carries its grip on the head, the mandibles grown into something closer to antlers. A ground beetle keeps a shorter, heavier pair for seizing. A true bug feeds through a needle. A water scorpion folds its front legs into a trap. The sting is a modified egg-laying organ, the earwig’s forceps are a pair of cerci, and the dragonfly’s claspers at the tip of the abdomen are how the male holds the female. Fascinating... as usual.

17/10/2026

Green is the rarest colour in the night

Moths are masters of brown, grey and black. Melanin is the stable, cheap default pigment of their scales. Green is a different story: many natural green pigments in insects fade in light, and true green in a wing often has to be built from tiny structures instead of simply painted. Researchers have found that the intricate scale architecture behind green has evolved independently at least three times in butterflies. Today we show three moths that wear it anyway.

Images 1 to 3: Orache Moth (Trachea atriplicis). Olive and emerald streaks run across its forewings, each only about 2 cm long. Its caterpillars feed on orache and goosefoot. Once resident in the English fens, it was last recorded there in 1915, and today’s British records are mostly migrants from the continent.

Images 4 to 6: Oleander Hawk-moth (Daphnis nerii). Nicknamed the army green moth, it is a giant of the family, with a wingspan that can approach 12 cm. It migrates north from the Mediterranean and North Africa, and in 1953 an unusual 13 reached Britain. Its caterpillars feed on toxic oleander and are immune to it.

Images 7 to 9: Variable Burnet (Zygaena ephialtes). A day-flying moth with a strongly variable look. Burnets can produce hydrogen cyanide, and their bold colours serve as a warning to predators.

For each moth, swipe twice to enter the scale world: the first image is the whole animal, the next two are extreme close-ups of the wing scales, where overlapping shingles create the colour you just saw.

Which green surprised you most?

15/10/2026

Reaching 75,000 followers feels unreal. I never imagined I’d be on the road toward 100k. What started as a small corner for sharing the quiet wonders of insects has grown into something far bigger than I expected. Every photo, every story, every observation has been shaped by the curiosity and kindness of people who care about these often-overlooked creatures. To the insect friends who have found their way here from every corner of the world: thank you!

Thank you for the messages, the identifications, the field stories, the encouragement, and the shared fascination.

13/10/2026

A caterpillar is a larva with a job and a deadline. Eat, grow, and stay uneaten long enough to become a moth or a butterfly. That brief is shared. The answers are not.
Some are plain green and almost disappear on a leaf. Some wear spines, long hairs, or a saddle of warning colour. A few look like a twig, a bird dropping, or something you would rather not touch. Prolegs, hooks, horns and false eyes turn up in combinations that do not settle into one type. Even the head can be glossy and sculpted, or hidden under a hood of setae.
All of them are Lepidoptera, and all of them are temporary. The adult will carry scales and, usually, wings. None of that is visible yet. What is visible is how many ways a soft eating stage can be built before the change.
I keep coming back to them for that. Ordinary larvae, and already this far apart in colour, armour and shape.

11/10/2026

A pupa is the insect itself, in the stage between larva and adult. Feeding has stopped. Inside the shell the body is being rebuilt, and the wings, legs and antennae of the adult are already forming.
A cocoon is not that stage. It is the silk case some larvae spin around themselves before they pupate. The pupa sits inside it. Not every pupa has one. Butterflies mostly do without, and many moths do too, pupating naked in soil, bark or a folded leaf. None of the shells here are cocoons. They are the pupae.

Most of them here are Lepidoptera, and even within that one order the shell does not settle. Smooth, ridged, metallic, spotted, still showing the outline of wings and antennae.

Three are from other orders. Can you find them?

06/10/2026

A compound eye is not one lens. It is a field of them, hundreds or thousands of ommatidia, each with its own cornea, its own light path, its own small share of the view. From a distance that reads as a dark dome. Up close it breaks into a mosaic, and the mosaic is rarely plain.
Some eyes are a single colour, deep black or a clean glass green. Others band red into blue, or carry a bright rim around a darker centre. Hairs stand between the facets on one species and are absent on the next. Facets can be so fine they look like cloth, or large enough to count.

I keep photographing them because the variety does not settle. Ordinary insects, and the eye already this far apart in colour, grain and shape.

Lucilia sericata

Haematopota pluvialis

Tabanus bovinus

Chrysops relictus

Hylobius abietis

Vespa crabro

Chrysopilus laetus

Diptera unknown

Sciomyzidae

Stratiomyidae

Cerambyx scopolii

Calliphora vicina

Polydrusus sericeus

Meloe violaceus

Halyomorpha halys

Tephritidae

Volucella zonaria

Lucilia sericata

Syrphidae

05/10/2026

I still do not have a good way to say how different these are. A thread, a bead chain, a club, an elbow, a comb, a feather, a fan of plates. All antennae. All from insects that live within a few kilometres of each other, some of them in the same hedge.
That is the part that keeps working on me. Not a rare specimen, not a trick of the lens. Ordinary insects, and the organ on the head already this far apart. One samples the air with a bare line. Another opens a stack of plates. Another carries something you would call a feather if you had not just watched it come off a moth. The insects are varied. The antennae make that impossible to miss.
Names below, from twelve o’clock at the large broad antennae, then clockwise.
1. Cerocoma schaefferi
2. Volucella zonaria
3. Platystomos albinus
4. Clytra laeviuscula
5. Abrachyglossum capitatum
6. Ophion sp.
7. Aglais ueticae
8. Meloe violaceus
9. Pyrochroa coccinea
10. Myrmeleontidae
11. Leptoglossus occidentalis
12. Nicrophorus humator
13. Camponotus ligniperda
14. Acrossus rufipes
15. Chrysops relictus

04/10/2026

Insect feet mostly are a short chain of tarsal segments ending in claws. Some end in a single hook. Some carry paired claws, padded lobes, combs of spines, or dense fields of adhesive hairs. Same class of structure. Completely different solutions.
At this magnification the differences stop looking ornamental. The foot is where an insect meets the surface, and the surface is never one thing. Bark, leaf, flower, prey, soil, and the body of another insect each ask for a different grip. Claws lock into roughness. Pads and setae hold on smoothness. Spines brace, rake, or keep the leg from slipping sideways. A foot built for walking is not a foot built for holding, climbing, or seizing.

Comparative work across orders shows that segment count, claw shape, pad size and the hairs between them occupy a very large design space. There is no single hidden insect foot underneath the variation. The legs we notice first are usually the long ones, or the ones with colour. The working end is easier to miss. That range is old. Once legs could specialise, the tip split into hooks, cushions, brushes, and tools that are barely feet at all. Joints, sockets, pigment and structural colour repeat as themes, not as copies.
This is why insect feet keep rewarding extreme macro work. The subject is not rarity. It is variability packed into millimetres.

🔬Aromia moschata
🇬🇧Musk beetle
🇩🇪Moschusbock

🔬Bombus lucorum
🇬🇧White-tailed bumblebee
🇩🇪Helle Erdhummel

🔬Timarcha tenebricosa
🇬🇧Bloody-nosed beetle
🇩🇪Tatzenkäfer / Labkraut-Blattkäfer

🔬Suillia variegata
🇬🇧Heleomyzidae
🇩🇪Scheufliege

🔬Carabus coriaceus
🇬🇧Leather beetle
🇩🇪Lederlaufkäfer

🔬Carabus auronitens
🇬🇧Ground beetle
🇩🇪Goldglänzender Laufkäfer

🔬Gryllus campestris
🇬🇧European field cricket
🇩🇪Feldgrille

🔬Anoplophora glabripennis
🇬🇧Asian long-horned beetle
🇩🇪Asiatischer Laubholzbockkäfer

🔬Rhagium mordax
🇬🇧Black-spotted longhorn beetle
🇩🇪Schwarzfleckiger Zangenbock

01/10/2026

Insect wings are a thin cuticle sheet braced by veins. That much is shared. Almost everything else is not. Some membranes are nearly clear. Some are dense, stiff, narrow, mottled, or reduced to a fringe. Same class of structure. Completely different solutions. At this magnification the differences stop looking ornamental. Comparative work across hundreds of wings and many insect orders shows that outline, vein topology and the membrane cells between veins occupy a very large design space. There is no single hidden “insect wing” underneath the variation. Butterfly wings are the surfaces we most often reduce to colour and prettiness. The rest of the insect world does not follow that habit. That range is old. Once forewings and hindwings could diverge, the organ split into shields, flight surfaces, signals, covers, and wings that are barely wings at all. Vein junctions, sockets, pigment and structural colour repeat as themes, not as copies.
This is why insects keep rewarding extreme macro work. The subject is not rarity. It is variability packed into millimetres.

27/09/2026

Forewing margin of the honeysuckle clearwing, Synanthedon soffneri.
The outer scales are the fringe. Work on other moths has shown that elongated marginal scales can interlock and hold the trailing edge as a single, flexible sheet in flight. On this narrow, largely clear forewing that fringe is what remains of the outline.
Moth scales can also absorb ultrasound and weaken the echo that returns to a bat. That effect has been measured on the dense scale coat of nocturnal species, not on the sparse fringe of a day-flying clearwing. For S. soffneri the outer scales are therefore better read as an aerodynamic edge than as acoustic camouflage.
Inward, the covering is still the usual overlapping plates. At the edge those plates give way to the long scales that do this work.

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