Andrew Trundlewagon's photos

Snow and sleds, Toronto, December

Winter games, December, Toronto

A blue jay in autumn.

Sea-doo, Thousand Islands, Ontario

A squirrel waits in the cold hoping for peanuts.

The last roses

A mural in an alley Montreal. I don't know if the melting watch on the mans wrist is a comment on the nature of time or reference to some of Dali's painting like "persistence of memory" which are strewn with melting clock faces.

Earlier in the year in mid-autumn.

A mother deer feeds her youngster. It is not the clearest shot as they were quite deep in the woods, and it does not show in a still image but the young fawn was so excited, waving its tail vigorously.

I don’t expect too many people to care for this one. First, it’s a beetle, second, it’s a black beetle. It is an oil beetle, (Genus Meloe, there are several species and they all look the same to me). When threatened they pump out a fluid from between their leg joints that contains cantharidin, a compound that is more than a little nasty. In small doses it is reputedly an aphrodisiac, the famous Spanish fly is based on cantharidin, but consume too much, (and by all accounts, a little is too much), and a grim, writhing, agonizing, death ensues. Their reproductive habits also tend toward the macabre. The female lays eggs in burrows. The first generation of larvae hatch, crawl up plant stalks to settle in flowers. Here they are picked up by bees. In fact, some oil beetles emit pheromones that attract male wild bees. The larvae climb aboard the bee. The male bee mates with a female bee, and the larval oil beetles are transferred to the female. One web-site referred to this transfer as 'six-legged venereal disease', which is a troubling comparison but apt. The female bee lays her eggs and stuffs the nest with pollen. Meanwhile, the oil beetle larvae having dropped off the mummy bee, set about to eat the pollen. Then they eat the larval bees. Then they make themselves scarce without so much as a thank you note.

A painted lady butterfly, St. Bruno Park, This year we have had an extraordinary number of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui).

Showy tick trefoil, (Desmodium canadenses) growing beside a lake, Mont St Bruno Provincial Park, Quebec. It is in the bean family, and this one is at the end of flowering and has produced seed pods.

The bridge is looking at you?

A blasted tree,

Here's looking at you. (Photographed as found, not posed).

The correct answer to any relevant question. (All questions to which it is not the correct answer being, by definition, irrelevant).

Need I say more..

The female Giant Ichneumon wasp, Megarhyssa macrurus, possesses an ovipositor several times her own length with which she drills into the side of diseased trees to lay an egg on the larva of another wasp, the pigeon horntail. The horntail prey larva is killed, and after hatching the ichneumon larva feeds upon it. The ovipositor is composed of a central delivery shaft through which the egg passes, and two outer sheaths that protect and stiffen the central “hypodermic needle”. At the beginning and end of the drilling process the last segments of the tail split apart and a flexible membrane is inflated between them, (see the other photo) and in ways not clear, at least to me, this assists in the manipulation of the ovipositer as it enters and leaves the wood. Before the drilling begins the wasp walks methodically up and down the tree, “feeling” with her antenna to sense the presence of the host larva buried below the surface.