Wolves Wild

Insects and other arthropods go through a series of stages or instars as they develop towards the adult form. As they grow, their exoskeletons must be shed before they can grow a new and larger one. Sometimes there are variations is the precise shape or colour patterns of each successive instar.

Such is the case for shield bugs, including the most common around here, the common green shield bug. Seen here, the fourth and fifth instars of a green shield bug. Pictures taken a week apart, possibly of the same individual – resting, at any rate, on the same leaf of a hazel bush.

Water lily, flowering under netting. Growing in the pond, with impressive koi carp, taking up most of a front garden on the route of one of my regular walks.

Charcoal burner mushrooms growing under trees in Bantock Park. Although they are grey, quite small and not very conspicuous, they had been kicked over when I revisited the site the following day.

Unripe hips on a rose bush, giving a picture almost entirely in shades of green.

They look like weird knobbly fruit near the ends of oak twigs. Actually, they are galls, growths in the wood caused by a tiny wasp laying an egg there, acting as protective cover for the young wasps in the gall. These are knopper galls, and the wasp which produces them is another recent arrival. First recorded in England in the 1960s or 1970s, now quite common.

Giant polypores, a quite common fungus which grows on dead wood, near the base of a tree in Bantock Park. The first two shots are of the same cluster of fungi, seen a week and a half apart.