Desert insects

Desert Scorpion

The honeypot ant - a perfect example of nature’s strategy to survive in bad times. The honeypot ant or honey ant, is a normal ant species, but has adopted a special strategy to survive when there is a lack of food. Some of the working ants eat food and divert it into sweet syrup and save this syrup in their abdomens. For that, there abdomen grows big like a pot, sometimes to the size of a grape.

I noticed this desert tarantula (aphonopelma chalcodes) lit up in my headlamps while driving this evening in Ironwood Forest National Monument (near Tucson, Arizona). This is the time of year when these beautiful (and harmless!) creatures go looking for a mate after dark, and this photo is lit by (off-camera) flash, as the night was totally dark and the moon had not yet risen. The one you see here is a male tarantula. It's the males that go looking for the females, who remain in their…

Camponotus storeatus

Noble Animals

Thorny Devil: They have remarkable adaptations for inhabiting arid (dry) regions. Their microstructured skin surface, with channels in between overlapping scales, enables them to collect water by...

Pachysoma rodriguesi walking across a dune in the NamibRand nature reserve, Namibia

got this male Chalcosoma atlas recently, he's amazing. I'm waiting for him to fly, that must be a sight!