#insects mating

More zebra pillbugs in progress!

If I'm right in the ID, a serious agricultural pest, originally from South America. The larvae and adults are known to feed on almost 400 different species of plants, and can also damage subsurface irrigation. In this case, they were swarming on Jacksonia - the same tree as that brown Ancita earlier, in fact.

Baldivis, Perth

After they won April's Theme Contest with a lovely mayfly shot, octopus_fool's suggestion for the May Theme Contest - Insect (and the other inverts, why not ) Reproduction. This should turn up some interesting photos - there's an old saw about the pleasure being fleeting, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable, but ridiculous positions is certainly a feature of invertebrate reproduction. Consider spiders, or dragonflies, for example. And of course, that most acrobatic of animals, the slug.

Apart from them having Muscoid antennae, I was at a loss as to what these might be. Happily, servitude on Flickr came to the rescue, suggesting Platystomatid, and one of the genera that fold their wings down around their body, rather than along. On the basis of the brightly coloured heads, and metallic bodies, he was thinking they might be close to the genus Duomyia, which I'd compared them to myself, so I was on the right track for a while at least :)

Stiletto flies - possibly Ectinorhynchus - mating in a swamp in Munster, Perth.