I’m in Japan this quarter, imaging plant embryonic development, and I’ll have something to say about my actual work here pretty soon — but today I solved a little mystery. A few times I’ve seen really fast insects zipping by and been a little alarmed by their orange-and-black coloration, since Japan has some enormous and nasty hornets. They never bothered me, though, and never hung around long enough for me to figure out what they might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tonight as I came out of the lab at sunset, I saw a bunch of these things flying around the fragrant Weigela<\/a> hedge. They turn out to be hawkmoths! Probably the very cosmopolitan Macroglossum stellatarum<\/a>, because they have some truly impressive speed and the coloration looks right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only hawkmoth I’d seen before was lab-raised Manduca sexta<\/a>, and that species is like the Spruce Goose<\/a> compared to these little dynamos. These buzz just like hummingbirds, and almost all my photos are just blurs. So that was my sense of scientific wonder for the day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n — KMP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m in Japan this quarter, imaging plant embryonic development, and I’ll have something to say<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[22],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-scipos"],"authors":[{"term_id":22,"user_id":1,"is_guest":0,"slug":"scipos","display_name":"SciPos","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/0bb1f4cb5ff99dd034602ced0e2534fc.png","url2x":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/0bb1f4cb5ff99dd034602ced0e2534fc.png"},"author_category":"","user_url":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/","last_name":"","first_name":"","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/scipos\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}