kimcwren's Favorites

this spruce had old adelgid galls on shoot tips and many and pine needle scales on the spruce needles. Maybe whatever was in these egg cases is a predator of adelgids or scales or maybe just incidental.

I think it's a dust mite? I was working on the computer one night, and noticed that a speck of dust was slowly but steadily making its way across my computer monitor. I had just acquired a used MP-E65mm lens, and thought Hey! Perfect opportunity to try that out! I took a whole bunch of photos, as it was moving, and managed to get this one in fairly sharp focus.

The colors around it are pixels on my screen.

For the second image: I immediately after photographed a ruler at the same magnification. The pale lines here are the same width as the lines on the ruler, and spaced accordingly as well. That space is a millimeter. You can see that nearly four and a half of these critters fit across 1mm. I'm not good at math, so you get this image.

A bunched to mat-forming sedge common in open understory at middle elevations. This sedge grows on steep loose slopes along the trails near the reservoir and seemingly stabilizes the loose slopes along the trail. Collected at the Hyalite Reservoir area near the picnic area on the northwest site of the reservoir. This bunch was falling onto the trail.

Ross's sedge a native bunched sedge that also is mat-forming to spreading via rhizomes. It most commonly inhabits open understory at middle elevations in the mountains. The bunches are usually less than 30 cm tall. This species produces pistillate spikes below the staminate spikes and both types of spikes are pedunculate, often short-pedunculate. The spikes themselves are often few-flowered, especially the pistillate spikes. The perigynia are roundish in cross section because the enclosed achene is obovoid or obtusely trigonous in cross section.

Flickr album https://flickr.com/photos/plant_diversity/albums/72157663234546098

Lots of these mini burls/galls on this viburnum. (I think it's Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum 'Shasta'). Notably, another viburnum of the same type about fifteen feet away doesn't have a single one. (Example cut in half was from twig on ground.)

Reminiscent of Pseudomonas savastanoi on Forsythia.