My First Globby

My First Globby is not another in the new series of Labybird titles such as The Ladybird Book of the Hipster, but my first globular springtail. I’ve been a fan of springtails for many years (isn’t the Internet marvelous?), but most springtails tend to be elongated. Globbys, as you can see, are different. And globbys have the cute factor in spades. If I’m ever going to make it onto the Countryfile calendar, it’ll be with a globby. If globbys were the same size as ladybirds they’d win hands down. But Dicyrtomina saundersi, like most of its globby friends, is only 1.5 millimetres long.

This set really needed focus stacking to get a decent amount of definition, but these beasties like low temperatures and even an hour in the fridge doesn’t slow them down – if anything, it makes them perkier. At just over a millimetre long, getting anything in focus at all is a result, let alone getting an image set for stacking.

Dicyrtomina saundersi. Nikon D5200 Tokina 100mm+68mm f16 1/180 ISO 100
The extras are worth a look.

Today has been a day of painful acronyms: MoT, JANET DDOS. TF for TT28.