Many years ago, we had a small aquarium with a couple of small fish that eventually died of old age. Rather than restock it, we poured the gravel and associated seashells out into a place in the yard where small animals had been trying to burrow under the house. Then we forgot about it. Now, jump to the present – on May 21, 2012, Sam was rummaging around in the yard[1], and found the forgotten aquarium gravel. She loves seashells, so she went through it to pick out the shells. And inside one of the shells, just peeking around the edge, was this tiny little jumping spider:
I’m going to call this a “red-tailed jumping spider”, because, hey, red tail:
We found these little bundles of dry grass sticking to almost every available surface on May 23, 2012.
This was not unusual. We find them every year. The unusual bit is that, normally, when we find them they are stuck firmly to the surface. But this time, we found some that were still actively crawling around.
I almost stepped on this one while pushing my bike up the hill on May 29, 2012. It was sitting on the road pavement, and looked so much like a mouldy bit of rotting stick that I nearly didn’t stop to pick it up.
Here’s one that I thought would be particularly appropriate for Halloween, as in some ways it’s even creepier than the doomed caterpillar in the previous post: it’s got spiders, and poison, along with the traditional drawn-out gruesome death!
To start with, I happened to spot this little drama right beside our front door on June 9, 2012. A wasp was attacking a hapless cobweb-weaver spider.
The spider seemed paralyzed, and the wasp acted as if she were stinging it repeatedly. This kept on for some time.
I thought this one would be a good lead-up to halloween, for reasons that will become obvious.
I spotted this caterpillar on June 4, 2012 in an odd location: it was on a rock in the little stream that runs beside the road we live on, with its head immersed in the water. It looked for all the world as if it was trying to drown itself. It had an oddly bloated, sausage-like appearance, but wasn’t completely dead, so I brought it home to see what was going on with it.
I admit that a big part of my reason for bringing it home, was that I suspected that it might not be what it seems. See, I have this hypothesis that caterpillars that are out-of-place and doing things that appear suicidally dangerous, really are trying to kill themselves[1]. What’s more, I suspect that a big reason why they would be doing this, is because they are fatally infected with a parasite. And even though it is too late to save themselves, if they can get themselves killed they can keep their parasites from hatching, and so save their nieces and nephews and cousins from getting attacked and infected by them later.
We have a lot of Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), and I’ve had pictures of one before. So here are a couple more. This first one was caught alive in the yard with a net on July 11, 2010:
We had a huge migration of these butterflies coming into our area for most of this past spring, and Sam netted this one for me on May 18, 2012. Like most butterflies, I had a hard time getting it to hold still while displaying the tops of its wings, but it did give this shot:
Sam caught this pretty butterfly with her insect net on May 18, 2012 as the beginning of a significant butterfly-catching spree.
Like so many other butterflies, its resting position is sitting with the wings closed, so we can’t see the top sides of the wings. But, the bottom sides are pretty distinctive (and quite pretty) too. This is certainly one of the Sulfurs (genus Colias, and after careful comparison of the exact shapes of the spots I believe it is a male Clouded Sulfur, Colias philodice.
I found this little ant-like creature on the road while pushing my bike up the hill. She caught my eye because she didn’t look quite right for an ant. For one thing, she was redder than other local ants I’ve seen. For another, thing, her head and abdomen didn’t quite look right to be a local ant (the head was too broad, and the abdomen too conical). And for a third thing, she was pacing along in a fairly deliberate manner, and not scurrying in a random-walk pattern the way that individual ants usually do.
We had four or five of these flying around the house in early May, and I caught this one on May 13, 2012. They were similar to the standard housefly, except they were about 50% longer and broader, noticeably more black, and four or five times noiser than a housefly.
