A lot of my readers know that my research focuses on the giant water bugs. What I haven’t blogged about very much yet is this: my dissertation work is centered around giant water bug eggs.  I am an insect egg fanatic!  So, you can imagine my delight when this image popped up in my Facebook feed yesterday:

Image by Martin Oeggerli, published in the September issue of National Geographic.

Insect eggs are featured in National Geographic this month!  (It figures that, for the first time in years, I not getting National Geographic when this article appears…)  The photos are images created using a scanning electron microscope, one of the tools I use in my own research.  They have been painstakingly recolored from their original black and white format to reflect the colors of the eggs in nature.  The results are absolutely stunning.  I highly recommend that you read the article and take a look at the photos (though if you’re hoping that the structures of the eggshell will be identified, you’re going to be a bit disappointed – leave a comment below if you want to know the name of a structure in any of the photos).  There is also a video describing how the photos were colored.  The coloration is superb and took an incredible amount of work to produce.

I am mildly disappointed that there are so few non-butterfly or moth insects represented in the images because many other insects have extraordinary eggs, but the photos are so gorgeous I can’t help but love them anyway.  My favorite is the red lacewing butterfly image because it is what the most beautiful plant I can imagine would look like.    If any of you check out the photos, I’d be thrilled to know which one is your favorite and why.  Leave a comment below!

I’ll be posting about my own work using the scanning electron microscope to look at egg structures in the next few months.  If you like the National Geographic article, I encourage you to check back and read about eggs that very few people have ever seen up close.

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