24 May 2019

It has its mother's eyes. And its father's...



Commonly known as a "water tiger," this four-eyed micro-AT-AT is the larval form of a predaceous diving beetle.

Via for the colorized scanning EM, whence the quote I used for the title; too bad the critter was wrongly identified there.  A major tip of the blogging hat to reader "unknown," who found the correct attribution for the image.

4 comments:

  1. It's actually a diving beetle larva : https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/720763/view/diving-beetle-larva-sem

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    Replies
    1. Wow. Thank you, unknown. I totally revised the post.

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  2. it kind of looks like an AT-AT walker from star wars? or maybe the walkers were modeled after these?

    I-)

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  3. Konrad Lorenz (how seldom do we hear that name today?) said that the bite of a Dytiscus larva is one of the most painful things in the natural world.

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