OK, I can probably guess what you are all thinking: “Tim, do you really mean to tell us that you went all the way to Australia, and didn’t photograph anything but bugs? What about all the kangaroos and other interesting mammals? Are you out of your mind or something?”
Well, as a matter of fact, I am out of my mind I do have a few non-bug pictures. Tasmania is absolutely lousy with wallabies in particular (wallabies are basically small kangaroos, about the size of a small dog or large cat). When Sam and I went outside after sunset, we could hear them out in the apple orchard, hopping around (THUMP! . . . THUMP THUMP . . . THUMP!). Unfortunately, they are nocturnal, so it was pretty hard to get a picture of them with my camera equipment[1]
I spotted this large, long-legged spider on the ceiling near my parent’s north-facing[1] window.
This looks a lot like the cellar spiders that we have in large quantities in Michigan, except for one detail – the size. This spider was easily four times as big as the ones I’m used to seeing[2]. Here we can see that it is so big, the legspan was wider than Sam’s wrist.
After finding a lot of small creatures under the bark of one log, I went checking a bunch of other dead logs, and found another silk tunnel with something inside of it. It looked similar to the silk tubes made by the dead-wood borer moth caterpillars from last time, except fatter.
While looking under the bark of decaying logs and stumps, I found a lot of these silk tunnels, with caterpillars inside of them.
When prodded, they would writhe around and crawl out of their tunnels.
Like the bugs from last posting, this beetle grub was also found under the bark of the decaying log (in fact, you can see the mating bug pair from last time right there next to the grub’s head)
We can tell it’s a beetle larva, and not a caterpillar, because it only has the three pairs of true legs in the front, and not the “prolegs” running down its rear portion that a caterpillar would have.
Out in my parent’s woodpile, there was a log that was just old enough that the bark had gotten a bit loose. So I peeled away a piece of bark, the way that one does, and found a huge number of these bugs:
One of the things that Sam really wanted to do on this trip, was get to an actual ocean beach and collect seashells. While she has been to Lake Superior beaches many times, both the number and the diversity of shells are pretty limited (Lake Superior mainly just has freshwater mussels, snails, and the occasional crayfish). So, on the afternoon of June 18, 2013, my mother took us to Seven Mile Beach, which is a bit over seven miles of straight, sandy beach between Smithton and Stanley[1]. We had a little trouble finding it (the access road that actually leads to the beach isn’t marked), but we got there.
This beach is protected from wave action by Robbins Island to the west, and by the Stanley peninsula on the east, so shells accumulate here with a minimum of damage. See what looks like gravel running down the beach in this next picture?
The third thing that I found under a rock on June 18, 2013 was this fine, large wolf spider. This first photo is in a little 1-1/2 inch diameter dish, and as you can see the legs were about as wide as the dish was.
Continuing with the Tasmanian photographs, this hairy grub was found under the same brick where I found the wood roach (nominally on June 18, 2013[1]). It was about a quarter-inch long, so not too big.
It only had the six true legs, and no prolegs on the abdomen, so I think it was a beetle grub.
Happy New Year! And now, since it is winter in North America and our local bug population is way down, for the next few weeks we’re going to have something a bit different. In June of 2013, Sam and I took a trip half-way around the world to Australia (specifically to Tasmania, the island just south of the main continent), to visit my parents[1]. And while we were there, I figured we should make some attempt to photograph the arthropods that lived in my parents’ house and backyard. So I took along my camera, and away we went.
On the way, we had an unscheduled 2-day layover in Los Angeles[2], which was surprisingly low on insects. We did find a scarab beetle in the hotel, and a grasshopper in the airport near the departure gate, but that was about it. Unfortunately, my macro camera was still packed for travel, so these were photographed with our little point-and-shoot. It doesn’t show in the picture, but the grasshopper’s jumping legs had odd feet that were reversed from what we are used to seeing – they pointed forwards like a human foot, instead of backwards like most grasshoppers.