A Movie Showing Insects Hatching

The 1st Bug Movie

I made this bug movie sometime between 2000 and 2001. I used a scanner, a drawing program, and an animation program. As usual, the bug eggs were attached to a leaf and in this case, it was a dry leaf. I brought the leaf inside and each day my daughter and I would check the leaf to see if the eggs were hatching. One day my daughter alerted me that the first bug had hatched.

The eggs were tiny. To see them better, I placed the leaf upside down on my flatbed scanner and scanned the leaf at 2000% as often as it took the scanner make a pass. I saved the images. Later I decided to take some of the images and construct a bug movie. I didn't add enough images to the movie; it is very short. Because a scanner running at 2000% is not fast, the images were taken every 30 to 60 seconds <- that is a guess, I do not remember the exact amount of time between images. For this reason, the movie is choppy.

One thing that struck me, and all of this is not shown in the movie, was the behavior of the first insect that hatched. It had been walking around on the leaf. It came back to the eggs shortly before the next bug hatched. It waited there and you can see what the second bug did as soon as it hatched. It walks over the eggs and appears to greet the first bug. I didn't notice this at first, but later I realized that the bugs were aware of each other in a way that I didn't expect.

The Greeting

The bugs touch antenna.

Notice the darker legs and antenna on the first bug. Shortly after hatching, the bugs became a little darker.

Donna Young
Updated July 24, 2011