Macromite reveals the secrets…

…to his spectacular SEM images.

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Gigapan Ants

Click to Gigapan this Linepithema ant head

Gigapan is a technology that stitches together hundreds of individual images to form a massive single image.  It’s hard to appreciate its power from just the small SEM image shown above, but if you click on the photo you’ll be able to zoom to a marvelous level of detail.

More clickable gigapan ants below the fold.

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A wasp in intricate detail…

Heterospilus sp., head & compound eye, Costa Rica

Here are some shots from my training session this morning at the Beckman Institute‘s Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).  I haven’t used SEM for years- wow!  Great fun.  Click on each image to enlarge.

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A Glossary of Insect Surface Sculpturing

Areolate

In 1979, Rick Harris wrote a definitive paper illustrating the various terms used by taxonomists to describe the intricate patterns on the insect exoskeleton. His guide is tremendously helpful to those of us who struggle to decide if those ridges on the head of an ant are strigate or costate.  Via Sifolinia, I now see that Harris’s illustrations are available online:

A Glossary of Surface Sculpturing

Incidentally, Rick was the guy who taught me how to use a Scanning Electron Microscope, although at this point it’d be a minor miracle if I remembered any of it.

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