So bring us your Cardinals and Cardinal flowers, your Red Milkweed Beetles and Ladybugs, and all your various and sundry organisms with a dash or an abundance of red!
Here are a couple examples I like. Usually we think of sexual selection producing brightly colored males, not females, but in some lizards females get a color change during the breeding season seemingly related to hormonal changes during ovulation. So, the female gets what is called nuptial coloration.
First example of this is Sceloporus magister where the female gets a brightly colored head when gravid.
Hello! I find lots of red mushrooms, but I’ve never taken into account just how many until now. There are lots of vibrant red species that I’ve seemed to have taken for granted! Take for example your common fly agaric. Red is beautiful in fungi
I’ve been looking everywhere for these beauts and still have yet to find any. I think I should go to manchester state park, there seems to be a lot of hygrocybes there. The question is if they’re still out, thought!
I don’t know if this already counts as red, it’s probably more salmon-coloured, but it’s my favourite wild flower in Germany, and it has a bonus Crinoid fossil (which I have only just noticed) so I had to include it:
In person, this was probably the most vibrantly red organism I have ever encountered. Its name in German is “Scharlachroter Feuerkäfer” (Scarlet-red Firebeetle). I don’t think it’s physically possible for a name to describe how red something is better than this one.
Slightly less red, but slightly more common is this Striped Shield Bug. This used to be the insect I always wanted to find as a kid and for some reason never was able to. Nowadays, they’re absolutely everywhere if there is an Apiaceae-an plant close by.
Finally, any organism with “sanguineus/-a/-um” (“bloody”/“blood-red”) in its name is usually pretty red. This dragonfly is no exception. I’ve only ever seen this species one time, but in Summer, dragonflies of the same genus always fly around our garden pond and if you stretch out your hand over the water, they land on it and even let you carry them around. :)
