Portrait of a New Zealand Katydid

nobody@flickr.com (Finn KS) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:57:45 -0700

Finn KS posted a photo:

Katydid Nymph

nobody@flickr.com (Finn KS) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:11:34 -0800

Finn KS posted a photo:

A katydid nymph on a rose leaf, with a rose in the background. This guy/girl crawled over my hand and hopped around quite a bit, even hopping onto the flash diffuser a few times. At one point I thought I had lost sight of it for good, only to walk off and have it jump off the diffuser and onto the ground!

Because the pseudopupils on this beast are so pronounced I though I would include a brief definition of this effect (straight from Wikipedia) seeing as I had wondered how this happened.

"In the compound eye of invertebrates such as insects and crustaceans, the pseudopupil appears as a dark spot which moves across the eye as the animal is rotated. This occurs because the ommatidia which one observes "head-on" (along their optical axes) absorb the incident light, while those to one side reflect it. The pseudopupil therefore reveals which ommatidia are aligned with the axis along which the observer is viewing."

Uploads from Finn KS, tagged katydid

Portrait of a New Zealand Katydid

Katydid Nymph