A wasp in intricate detail...

Heterospilus sp., head & compound eye, Costa Rica

Here are some shots from my training session this morning at the Beckman Institute's Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).  I haven't used SEM for years- wow!  Great fun.  Click on each image to enlarge.

Heterospilus sp. mesosoma

Heterospilus sp., ovipositor

For contrast, here's a photo of a wasp in the same genus taken with my standard Canon macro gear:

Heterospilus sp. Costa Rica, taken with a Canon 20D dSLR & macro lens

We'll be deciding over the coming months which type of images to use for our project.  As you can see, there are some advantages to the SEM: crisp, clean images that give much better detail about the the structure of the insect.  But there are drawbacks as well.  SEMs don't look very much like what people see under a regular microscope, they lack color, and they are expensive. Hmmm...

More like this

We've returned from the 2009 Entomological Society of America meeting in Indianapolis. More on this later. For now, here are slides from two presentations I gave yesterday:
The lab I work in at the University of Illinois has recently acquired funding for several graduate student positions.  If you are considering a career in taxonomy, genomics, phylogenetics, biodiversity, tropical ecology, or parasitoid wasps,