This is something I’ve been trying to film for years. Something I’ve seen captured in slow motion
only a few times before, an earwig in-flight. At first glance, it’s easy to miss that earwigs
even have wings. That’s because they carry them around folded up and hidden underneath
a small pair of hardened forewings. Watch as this one unfolds and reveals its wings.
Wing folding in earwigs is one of those magical fun facts in the insect hall of fame.
There are about 20 or so different fold lines in the wing and they fold-up to be
10 times or more smaller than when they’re outstretched.
No other animal wing comes close to this type of complexity.
And the species I filmed , a shore earwig, seems to just use a single
down- and up-stroke of the wing to throw it all open and snap it into place.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited to have captured an insect flight sequence than I was when
I finally got this. Seeing these wings in action, at 6,000 frames per second is amazing to me.
I’m glad I finally found a species that would cooperate and fly in front of the camera.
While that earwig was definitely one of my favorite clips of the year, i’ve also captured a
bunch of other new flight sequences. Now that it’s December and there aren’t too many insects are out
and flying, so I’m done filming these until next spring. So, I put this together to show you some
of my favorite captures of the past year, ones that haven’t yet made it into a video.
This is a tree cricket. They employ some impressive wing folding too,
as the hind wing is stored through a series of fan folds. Once the wing are up,
a big jump sends them into a flight. I’ve filmed grasshoppers and katydids before,
but these are the first true crickets to make it onto a video.
Next is another type of insect that also hasn’t yet appeared on this channel,
a trichopteran or what’s better known as a caddisfly. This is a northern caddisfly,
which is the name for a family of more than 300 species. I filmed these sequences, and some others
in this video, over the summer in a makeshift studio in my mother-in-law’s basement. You can
see evidence of that in bits of dusty cobweb stuck to the rear tarsal claws of the one on the right.
Here's another caddisfly, from a different family, a giant casemaker caddisfly. The “casemaker”
part in name refers to the aquatic larvae which construct spiraling cases out of plant material.
These adults are brightly colored, active fliers around the aquatic habitats they grow up in.
These are oak treehoppers. A spring-loaded kick from their hind legs sends them into a flight.
For the one on the left, slipping while jumping sends it into a flip, but it’s quickly
controlled and steadied with the wing beats. Some treehoppers, like these, go through a warm-up
routine before taking flight. They flap for a bit, rocking their bodies up and down. And compared to
the oak treehopper, they seem to manage their spring-loaded takeoff jumps a lot better.
Pulled back, here’s a look at both of those species. Their flight trajectories are wildly
different. The oak treehoppers start with a chaotic spin, and the green treehoppers,
with the keeled helmet, arc upwords and end up in an inverted flight.
Speaking of inverted flights,
this is a wheel bug flight that starts out great, but ends up in disaster.
One thing you’ll see that’s interesting about this clip is when the wings come
into contact with the platform. You’ll see them bend and absorb the impact,
demonstrating some impressive material properties.
This is also something I’ve been trying to film for years. Not because it’s hard
to get a crane fly to fly, but because it’s hard to find them
and then wrangle them in front of the camera with all of their legs intact.
This one, a hairy-eyed crane fly, amazingly still has all six of its legs still attached
to its body. It’s incredible to see how much airspace it takes up, in-flight.
The front legs extend nearly a whole body length out in front, and the middle and
hind legs do the same to the sides. In the air it’s like a flying, spindly cobweb.
This is a yellow-collared scape moth. There are a bunch of subtle details to admire on this moth.
For instance, the transparent middle portion of the hind wing,
and the slight glimmers of iridescent blues and greens that reflect from
the scales on it’s body when it maneuvers through the air.
This moth is a roadside sallow. Here in North Carolina, it’s one
of a few big moths you can find flying around in the colder parts of the year.
Some sallows even overwinter as adults This one came to a light in my backyard
in early November and will probably be the last moth I film this year.
Lastly, here’s a natural enemy of moths, a braconid wasp belonging
to a subfamily known for attacking moth eggs.
They use their long ovipositors to inject an egg into a developing moth. They’re what’s
known as koinobiont parasitoids, which means once they are in their host, they allow it to
develop and grow larger before eventually consuming and killing it from the inside.
So, I hope you enjoyed those flight sequences. Thanks for
being here and watching these bug videos with me.