Come dancing ...

A perfect autumn afternoon: no wind, crunchy fallen leaves underfoot, the smell of warm earth and these dancing swarms of midges, constantly shape-shifting as they rise and fall in a sunbeam.

You can see images of the aquatic stages of their life cycle by clicking here and more midges by clicking here

Ghostly Midges

So there I was, on Monday evening, leaning over this bridge over the River Towy at Nantgaredig near Carmarthen in south Wales, watching the sun set, when I was enveloped in a massive swarm of midges. So, just out of curiosity, I set my pocket camera to its macro setting, turned on the flash and held it skywards into the swarm .........

........... and this is what I got. The midges that are in the plane of focus are vastly over-exposed so appear as ghostly white silhouettes but if you double click to enlarge the image you can see the structure of some of them quite clearly. They fly with their legs outstreched.

If you enlarge this image you can see more of the midges that were too far away to be illuminated by the weak flash. They appear as black dots above the 'ghosts'.

I think they are non-biting midges Chironomus sp. The males dance in these large swarms and grab females that fly in, mating in mid-air.