San Diego Trippin

Hey Guys. I went to San Diego to visit my brother earlier this
month and took some pictures with my new Canon PowerShot S2 IS dig.
camera. If anyone can identify what kind of bug that is in the first
pic, let me know! (THAT picture was actually taken outside of San
Diego, at my Dad's brothers' house in Perris, CA.)



It was huge! The length was like the size of my middle finger!



How many birds do you see? ;-)



Just for future texture stock



...actually...to see the rest from this trip....just visit my 'San diego Trippin' webshots page:

[url]http://community.webshots.com/album/427005464ToFeFy[/url]

...or....to see all of my collection....go here:

http://community.webshots.com/user/darktreemedia

glad to know I'm not the only one who takes texture snap shots on trips!

Your shoes are on the texture :smile:

If you're really interested in finding out what that bug is, check out
www.whatsthatbug.com. If you don't find it on their
page, you can email them the picture of it and they will tell you what
it is.

Thanks French! I went to that site and found out my bug! It is a "Tarantula Hawk"

I went to an info page about them and here is an excerpt:

Tarantula hawk stings are considered to
be the most painful of any North American insect. Christopher Starr
wrote an article entitled, "A Pain Scale for Bee, Wasp and Ant Stings."
On a scale of one to four, Pepsis formosa was one of only two insects
to rate a four. This compares with a one for a Solenopsis xyloni
(desert fire ant), two for a Apis mellifera (honey bee) and three for a
Dasymutilla klugii (velvet ant).

One researcher described the tarantula hawk?s sting this way: "To me,
the pain is like an electric wand that hits you, inducing an immediate,
excruciating pain that simply shuts down one?s ability to do anything,
except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in
these situations. The pain for me lasted only about three minutes,
during which time the sting area was insensitive to touch, i.e., a
pencil point poked near the sting resulted only in a dull deep pressure
pain."

http://www.desertusa.com/mag01/sep/papr/thawk.html

Woah! Ouch, good thing you didn't get too close :biggrin: That's odd, it doesn't really look like it would sting.

P.S. The guys at www.whatsthatbug.com are always looking for
higher quality photos of insects, maybe you could donate them the
photo, most of their's are pretty fuzzy.

Actually, my picture of the Tarantula Hawk is now on the front page :smile: .
For some reason they rotated it and now it is highly saturated and
looks like crap....oh well.

i see 15 birds

You haven't posted once since I've been here... I think.

Hi!

I see a mere 14, however...

thread revival...

---

Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/

Hi French Toast, yeah, I've definitely been gone from the pit for about a year.

since when did we have members #2000+ ???

It exploded a while after I came in. The whole HL2 Mapping boom.

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires