A Fallen Adversary

This mosquito messed with the wrong metallographer. I’m new to Georgia. It has been hot, muggy, and buggy. People told me this would happen, and I went anyway.

Here’s my attempt at turning lemons into lemonade. This guy kept whizzing by my ear and after too many swings with my hat, I finally got him. Normally I leave the buggos alone and try to rehome them outside, but this guy was being aggressive. Sorry to any mosquito lovers out there. Please don’t tell PETA. While I’m confessing, I should tell you that I also put a dead cockroach in epoxy resin a few weeks ago for… science. Guy’s, if you’re documenting it, you’re not messing around! It’s science.

I macgyvered a post-it note into a specimen sticker to hold him semi still. He was still twitching a bit after the thwack. I felt a little bad. He looked kinda sad :(

It’s hard to get these kind of images. Metallography typically requires very flat, polished surfaces to get good images. If surfaces are too rough, it’s hard to get an image that is entirely in focus. Multiply that problem by 1000x for a 3D mosquito like this. I usually work in cross-sections. Two dimensional planes. This guy is bonefide 3 dimensional, making focusing very hard.

Our microscope has excellent image stitching capabilities. That’s how you can take high resolution images of big stuff. Imagine a quilt, but all the squares are pictures taken with a microscope. That’s all done through software with our microscope and it lines up stiched images really well!

But that’s not all it can do. It can take images at many precise focal points and stitch the highest sharpness regions of those images together. That’s called 3D stitching, and it’s pretty powerful. It’s kinda like what 3D printing slicing software does, but in reverse.

These images were taken with 3D and 2D stitching. I really like seeing all the many lenses on the mosquito’s eyes; apparently they’re called ommatidia.

According to the cool people at proofpest.com: “Each ommatidium captures light and images from slightly different angles, which the mosquito’s brain combines to form a broad view of its surroundings.”

Woah. You’re telling me that the mosquito brain is performing 2D and 3D image stitching in the same way the microscope software took these images?

Mosquitos are just flying, bloodsucking, optical microscopy equipment. That’s Crazy!

I’m not set-up for buggollography, but I can probably do better than this. Just have to wait for the right specimen to crawl by. This was a fun little adventure into entomology.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/mosquitoes/how-do-mosquitoes-see

https://proofpest.com/anatomy-of-a-mosquito/

Turn’s out this is probably a female. All the bloodsucking ones are. I think I knew that at some point. Females need nutrients from blood for their eggs. The males are more like bees, feeding off nectar and various other sugars.

Grains

Blue’s Clues