This close up photo of a California five-spined bark beetle (Ips paraconfusus) is from a bark beetle series project my husband, Tony, is doing with the U.S. Forest Service (Seybold Lab)which provided the beetle and the identification. The beetle is about the size of a small grain of rice. Tony took the photo or actually photos as it is really a compilation of nearly a thousand individual photos by a special photomicrography system called Montage Explorer. He let me use it as it is an "unacceptable first attempt". Ever the mad scientist, he wants to use the "acceptable" photos to create a high resolution 3D interactive model of this beetle. Bark Beetles have been in the news recently as linked to the Global Warming phenomenon. Their explosive reproduction in our disrupted climate has devasted pine forests up and down the Pacific coast and the American southwest. They even get a mention in Al Gore's hit DVD "An Inconvenient Truth"!

This close up photo of a California five-spined bark beetle (Ips paraconfusus) is from a bark beetle series project my husband, Tony, is doing with the U.S. Forest Service (Seybold Lab)which provided the beetle and the identification. The beetle is about the size of a small grain of rice. Tony took the photo or actually photos as it is really a compilation of nearly a thousand individual photos by a special photomicrography system called Montage Explorer. He let me use it as it is an "unacceptable first attempt". Ever the mad scientist, he wants to use the "acceptable" photos to create a high resolution 3D interactive model of this beetle. Bark Beetles have been in the news recently as linked to the Global Warming phenomenon. Their explosive reproduction in our disrupted climate has devasted pine forests up and down the Pacific coast and the American southwest. They even get a mention in Al Gore's hit DVD "An Inconvenient Truth"!