~Today, more microscopy. A mosquito somehow slipped into my apartment and met a gruesome demise at my hands. Staring at her sad, shattered corpse on my palm, I decided to immortalize her tiny body by looking at it through a high-powered scientific instrument:
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| Wings at 40x. Note the fine hairs all along the wings, and indeed all along the entire body. These hairs help the mosquito to be extremely sensitive to any movement nearby. |
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| The head, squashed a bit from her demise, at 40x. Let's take a closer look at the eyes... |
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| Compound eyes at 200x; the one on the right is crushed in both from being swatted, then being flattened into a pancake by the microscope slide. |
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| The more intact eye, centered, 200x. Note the hexagonal arrangement of the compound eye. While you see only two images of what you're looking at (which are combined by your brain into a single image), she saw hundreds of small images. This sort of vision is optimized for detecting movement, since the slightest motion becomes more obvious when you're seeing it hundreds of times. |
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| Top of the head, 40x. The long vertical top-to-bottom structure on the right is one of the mosquito's folded legs. I think the thinner, horizontal structure is one of her antennae, because it looks to thin to be the blood-sucking proboscis. That may have been the broken-off structure on the far left. |
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| A closer view of the antenna at 100x. Note that it, too, has tiny hairs along its length. |
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