Insects on a desert rose

The weather's been unseasonably warm this winter so far. We actually have the air conditioner on and it's the day after Christmas. Today it rained. These insects were hiding from the rain underneath the seed pod of a desert rose.

These photos were all taken with my 105mm macro lens. I set the camera to AV mode and tried various aperture settings until I found one I liked. 

Hurricane flowers in the rain

It's been raining a lot lately.  This has made it a good summer for the hurricane flowers. These bromeliads, scientific name Billbergia pyramidalis, tend to have their flowers after a storm has come through, and that's how they got their name. Like many other bromeliads, the hurricane flowers produce an inflorescence made up of lots of small flowers, and you can see a few of these in the photo below.

I also went to White City Park today, a nice park in Fort Pierce. I found these air plants there, growing on the limb of an oak tree overhanging a pond full of water lilies. Most of the water lilies had closed up, I guess they open in the morning. I'm not exactly sure of the species name of the air plants, it may be Tillandsia fasciculata. There are a lot of species of Tillandsia around here; Spanish moss and ball moss are both members of Tillandsia. Although these plants might seem like something that would be parasitic, like mistletoe, they actually just use the tree as a place to grow. They don't take its nutrients or water. The air plants get everything they need from rain, air, and dust.