Up close with a couple insects on my tomato leaves tonight

[squirrel789]

Hello,

My wife bought me a little Carson pocket microscope online the other day. It was only like $15 - so it's nothing professional or fancy but it goes from 60X to 120X and the LED is quite bright, and the detail you can see if pretty amazing for such a little instrument. I finally had a chance to play around with it for the first time tonight.

I caught a couple of the tiny, black things I've been seeing on the underside of my leaves the past couple of nights when I went pest hunting. They usually move/fly away quite quickly, but I caught a couple using a little glass jar which I covered briefly with a paper towel dampened with a little isopropyl alcohol. It slowed them down, permanently

I got to look at them up close and thought it might be fun to try to take some pictures.

Just thought I'd share them in case anyone was interested or wanted to help ID them.

I think the first might be a thrip of some kind or maybe a winged aphid? I've only seen the little green aphids in my garden before. The other seems like maybe a small fungus gnat or a fruit fly (it just looked like a speck). Honestly, I'm not really sure exactly what they are though. The one next to my finger (for scale) is the insect I think might be a thrip. I was wearing disposable gloves, which why my finger looks so weird

I found it really interesting to check out all the tiny specks on my leaves and see what they really are. I would never have guessed how many different things I'd see, and even just the leaf structures were pretty cool to look at up close. I saw a lot of fascinating things, but mostly desiccated or crystallized dead bugs since I sprayed with some Safer soap spray the night before, and of course these couple of black insects I caught. I didn't bother with the aphids because, well, I just wanted to rid of those little suckers immediately. I only took a few pics tonight, but will take more if I find something interesting. They aren't as clear as when actually looking through the microscope, but they were just taken with a camera phone.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I thought I'd share a few of the pics that turned out the best. Thanks for checking them out.