Legendary photographer Weegee became famous for photographing murder scenes in New York in stark detail. And now we can bring you the entomological equivalent, thanks to Volker Steger, a photographer based in Munich, Germany.

He found a way of getting the bugs killed by his car into a scanning electron microscope, revealing the wreckage of their tiny bodies in incredible detail. The three images in this blog show the corpses of, in descending order, of a gnat, (most likely probably Cecidomyidae), a mosquito (Culicidae, and good riddance too) and a fly (Muscidae).

Getting the fragile remains into the SEM intact was not going to be possible by simply scraping the bugs off the windscreen, so Steger stuck clear plastic over his headlights. Once the dead insects had been collected, he simply cut them out and loaded them up. They were nice and dry already, he told me, presumably from the wind.

But Steger found his driving speed was critical ’Äì between 70 and 90 km/h (42 and 54 mph) was perfect. Below that and nothing died, above it and all that was left was amorphous splatter.

He says it seems the abdomen of the insect is the part that strikes the car first and kills it, probably because it is the heaviest part. The head and wings were often intact.


When Steger first went out bug hunting for the project, he was frustrated by a dry summer in Munich and a dearth of bugs. A work trip to CERN in Switzerland proved no more fruitful. It was only when his work took him to Genoa in Italy and past the paddy field in which arborio rice is grown that his luck turned. Paddy fields are "insect heaven", as he puts it. There are some more pics in this Spiegel slideshow.

He thinks that forensic entomologists could be interested in the work, as bugs have provided useful evidence of a criminal's location in the past. But you're more likely to see the images again in an upcoming advertising campaign for the Seat Leon Coupe ’Äì the tag line is "No bug escapes!"

Has anyone else seen SEM shots of unusual objects?

Damian Carrington, Online editor