New Oikos Cover!!

From the April issue 2013 onwards, Oikos will have a photo illustrating ecology in action on it's cover.

To find the right photo for this year's cover, we had a photo competition during winter. The happy winner of the competetion is Sascha Rösner, Marburg, Deutschland. See more of his photos here: www.pixeldiversity.com

And here is our new cover:

And here, Sascha tells us how he took the winning photo:

Wildlife photography often entails long travels to distant and remote landscapes that harbour a particular species of interest. This picture of two sawfly caterpillars (Nematus spec.), however, was taken just three meters of the front door of the photographer's home. In the front yard, a small willow tree (Salix spec.) was densely populated with hundreds of these caterpillars. An easy opportunity to take the camera from indoors, attach a macro lens to the camera, mount it on a tripod, and take pictures (in fact, still wearing slippers). By chance, two of these guys apparently fed synchronously in the center of a leaf. Within 24 hours, the tree was completely naked, the caterpillars "abseiled" to the ground, and dug into the soil where they would morph into the imago flies some weeks later. Canon EOS 20D, EF 100 mm 2.8 @ f 7.1, ISO 100, tripod, remote control.