braconidae
awild | December 9, 2009Heterospilus sp., undescribed species, Costa Rica
click to view the original image
I've been playing around a bit more with the freeware program CombineZP, and I thought I'd share this image of one of the wasps I'm working on in my current position. The image is a composite from 14 photos taken through a microscope at different focal depths.
The parasitic wasp genus Heterospilus is common and hyperdiverse in the new world tropics. It is also almost entirely unstudied. Our project is restricted to the taxonomy of the Costa Rican fauna, and we have about 500 new species just from that…
awild | September 29, 2008
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.
Heterospilus sp. mesosoma
Heterospilus sp., ovipositor
For contrast, here's a photo of a wasp in the same genus taken with my standard Canon macro gear:
Heterospilus sp. Costa Rica, taken with a Canon 20D dSLR & macro lens
We'll be deciding over the coming months which type of images to use for our project. As you can see,…