Barklouse Nymph Macro

More cute (and visible...) in large ("L").

Another cute invertebrate! This one was even (/much!) smaller than The Adorable Spider (oh, go on, have another), in fact I'd go so far as to say that it would fit on the tip of a pin. I lost it soon after taking my photographs, or perhaps inhaled it... (*sob*). This is it on the edge of a piece of printer paper! It was perhaps 2mm long.

Well, I had no idea what it was, but fortunately happened to be meeting my tutor (an entomologist...) just 30 minutes after taking these, and he identified it with a squeal. It isn't even an adult, but a final instar nymph (the last developmental stage before it becomes an adult proper, that is why it already has wings...). There are a whole order of these tiny insects, divided into 41 families and at least 5,500 (described) species... They are known as barklice, booklice, or psocids (after their order, Psocoptera). Booklice can devastate libraries (they must love Oxford), but most actually eat microscopic fungi and algae, and books just get damaged in the process (as the insects eat the fungi that they often harbour, or the paste that glues the pages and binding together).

I had my flash out, so had a photo amble around the garden and took a whole load of images. I've put a set of my favourites (include three other images of this adorable little thing) on Flickr:
Macro Set
Highlights:
Herb robert
Hellebore
Rosemary flower
Barklouse from above

p.s. A blip on a slightly different scale last year --------------------->