Found this pair mating on a grass stem over summer. Last photo shows how they, erm, connect, which I found rather fascinating.
I think the exact species of Christmas beetle is Anoplognathus pallidicollis.
I was actually trying to take a photo of a Green-headed Ant when a tiny moving white spot caught my eye. Shot this video with my iPhone 13.
It's possibly N. Gullans. More info, including images of the very different looking female of the species available here .
[Reposting, because original post wasn't showing the photo.]
I'm going back through my archive of interesting insects (well, to me, at least!) and will be gradually posting highlights here.
This plume moth was resting on the fly screen, so the size of the screen's grid squares give an idea of its size.
I like to go spotlighting at night, but my lazy way of attracting moths and other nocturnal insects is to leave a light on inside to attract the insects to the fly screen. The fly screen method also has the advantage of letting me easily see if the underside of their wings or body are particularly colourful. It does have the downside of encouraging a whole bunch of tiny hoppers squeeze their way in to fly to the light, and leave a pile of tiny dead bodies, which is not so good.
I knew this was a sawfly, but couldn't find what genus it was in, let alone the exact species, so uploaded it to iNaturalist and hoped someone could ID it. They did, and it turns out to be a not often observed species. The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) only has 7 records for it.
This is now the 5th observation of it on iNaturalist.
If I'd realised how rarely this sawfly has been documented, I would have caught it for a proper photo shoot (before released it again, obviously)!
EDIT: exciting update - this may be the even rarer Clarissa wilsoni, which has one documented sighting on ALA... and it's the holotype. No sightings since, it seems! So I need to go back through the photo outtakes and go through this video to see if there's any glimpse of the sawfly's waist. Apparently, it's the colouring on the waist that will make it clear whether it's C. divergens (very uncommon) or C. wilsoni (only recorded the once, ever).
These tiny bees are usually very fast, but right now it's the sweet spot where it's not cold enough to stop them flying, but it's cold enough to make them quite sluggish. So I was able to get up close and personal with my iPhone, with the flash on, to record one collecting pollen.
The species is most likely Tetragonula carbonaria.
EDIT: a Twitter account has stolen this video in its entirety, used the identical title of this post to accompany the plagiarised video, and with no attribution made of this original post to Reddit. Sometimes I hate the Internet.