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On this page you may find some of the ambers of my collection that show particularities worth consideration and discussion.
Part of my collection consists in hundreds of pieces from amber necklaces. Many of them are still to be examined, all, however, contain some small insect or some other “strange” object. Recently I examined a piece of amber I believed to contain a fragment of wood. My curiosity increased while I was polishing it and at last I was deeply moved. It won’t happen often to see a small worm ( egg 0,5mm – worm 1,1mm ) hardly slipped out of his egg and imprisoned in a piece of amber.
Hereafter part of the interesting letter by Prof. Eugenio Ragazzi: “The evidence that the animal was able to
get in the still liquid mass, as you may see from the kind of cavity around the
body, gives further information on the process of fossilization of the amber.
Most probably the liquid contained in the egg allowed the worm to survive long
enough to be able to slip outside the egg. Maybe it hatched before time, trying
desperately to flee from hypoxia, as exchange of gasses
with the outside was no longer possible.”
It
is quite easy to find empty bubbles in baltic amber, whereas they seldom
contain water with mobile bubbles of air. It
is quite easy to find empty bubbles in baltic amber, whereas they seldom
contain water with mobile bubbles of air. The picture show an oblong formation, in three parts, containing a small bubble that travels from one sector to the next according the inclination of the amber. This allows for the following consideration: -
the presence of water is due to damp surrounding (rain, dew). -
the resin must have dropped down abundantly from the tree, running in parallel
to the main axis of the bubbles and
it must have been quite fluid in order to be able to include the water that
otherwise would have evaporated. -
if you look at the photo the
direction of the flow must have been from left to right (really from top to
bottom) as in fact the bigger bubble seems “flattened” and shrinked due to
the adhesivenessof the resin on its way down.
Swarm of 58 insects: Sciaridae (amber 28x25 mm) You
may often find more than one insect in a piece of amber. Considering that most
pieces of amber are relatively
small you may conclude that 40.000.000 years ago there must have been an
enormous quantity of insects or that the resin attracted them strongly. What
puzzles me is to find pieces of amber with dozens of insects of the same species
or also various species, so one might even think of collective suicide.
These
pictures, unfortunately not too clear, show some of the amber from my
collection: they were taken against the light with a macro video and blue filter
to increase the contrast.
The
nematocera: sciaridae seem to be more often subject to “collective suicide”
; it seems also particularly strange that all insects in picture no.1 (16) are
males.
Recently I bought two pieces of amber showing a rather big cylindrical formation, red brown and opaque . I was guaranteed that they are twigs trapped in the resin. As they weren’t expensive I bought them, though sceptical.
Apart a larva and some stellate hairs in one and two dipteria in the other they contain nothing interesting, and the surface of the twig shows nothing special. So
one day I decided to treat the two pieces with distilled water,and slowly the
twigs became transparent and one the amber set free its hidden prisonner, the
hollow twig had trapped a rather big insect. I
have not yet identified the insect that can be seen only in part, but I presume
that the leg belongs to a hemipteron.
A
parasite is an organism living at the expense of some other. Presumably
the oldest parasites can be found in amber and are mainly mite
(arachnida: mite)
In baltic amber mite can be found frequently, however, seldom as parasites. Probably you need a sharp eye and a very good microscope to detect these. My collection comprises various pieces containing mite, but I find it difficult to take pictures. The tiny mites (0.2-1mm) are nearly always hidden by the body of their host.
Looking closely at these pictures you may wonder how these insects managed to survive with a mite on their wing or their abdomen. Maybe they fell into the resin for their very difficulty in piloting You
will note that these parasite stayed firmly attached to their hosts and did not
abandon them to gain safety.
Probably this insect got infected with the egg and the newborn mites immediately attacked their host.
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