This week marked the first time in almost 3 months that we're all physically back in the lab - well, that's because I was the last straggler, but I came back in from Tuesday and it's been really nice to see lab colleagues again, chatting in person, trying to solve a variety of problems together. Glad to be back.
Just a secondary link to an external site this week; I hope that others might enjoy these awesome photos of insects as much as I did. The link is to a news article showcasing images taken by a community science project at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles named BioSCAN. The project team get citizens involved in collecting data about insect diversity across urban LA, hosting malaise traps to trap insect specimens in their own backyards and other sites. The animals are preserved and then photographed through the microscope. The aim is to raise awareness of the abundance of insect life even in one of the largest human cities, where you might have expected the environment to be fairly inhospitable to other species.
I know I can go and look at our living, moving flies anytime I like, but somehow, in a week when I've been grappling with visualising how light from a flat stimulus on a screen projects onto the fly's compound eye, there's something about seeing a high-resolution image of a soldier fly eye that really focuses my imagination!