While we were netting aquatic life in the pond west of the house on May 6, 2012, we turned up a number of things that were not arthropods. Like this little fellow.
I’m not quite sure whether this is a young specimen of one of the 45 species of freshwater mussels that are known to live in Michigan (and ultimately get to be several inches across), or an adult “pea clam” which never get much bigger than this. It is certainly a bivalve mollusc, though, which includes all manner of clams, mussels, scallops, oysters, and similar creatures. All of these have two-part, hinged shells that they can close up to defend themselves, and that are made up mostly of calcium carbonate (calcite and/or aragonite). The vast majority of bivalves live in the ocean, where there is more dissolved calcium available in the water (which makes it easier for them to grow thick shells in the ocean). The freshwater clams I’ve seen generally have thinnish shells, which makes sense given that they would have a harder time acquiring enough calcium to make them.
At work, there is a parking-lot light over the door that I normally use to go into the building. This light draws a fair number of moths. On May 5, 2012, this one kind of caught my eye, both because its reddish-brown color didn’t really blend in well with the gray concrete it was resting on, and because of the odd way that its hindwings stuck out to the side while its forewings were tented over its back. It was still there that evening when I was on my way home, so I popped it into a bottle that I carry for just this sort of purpose, and brought it home for photographs.
On May 6, 2012 we were back at the pond in the woods, catching small aquatic things[1]. One of which was this:
It’s a Leech!. OK, it’s not an arthropod, but it is an invertebrate, and we caught it while looking for arthropods. And you all want to see this one anyway, right?
This particular leech varied from a bit under an inch long, to almost three inches. That’s because they are very extensible.
I’d debated whether or not to run these pictures, as they are fairly old (July 3, 2009) and were taken with my old point-and-shoot camera. They are good enough for ID, though, and particularly show the distinctive white spots on its wings. In this case, the white spots are raised and almost look like tiny colonies of white mold.
These were caught in the pond in the woods on May 3, 2012. They were very active, fast-swimming beetles that tended to scoot around just under the surface.
I found this odd-looking bug crawling up the side of our house on May 18, 2012. It was about 6 mm long, unusually flat, and had very thick, distinctly-segmented antennae.
It looks to be one of the “Flat Bugs” in the family Aradidae. Most of the members of this family are in the genus Aradus, which contains about 84 North American species which mostly look very similar to this one.
We made another expedition to the pond in the woods behind the house on May 2, 2012[1], and caught some more interesting things. One of them was this spindly little specimen, that was standing on the bottom of the water in our tadpole pail. It was only a bit over a centimeter long, and so thin as to be practically impossible to see.
When I first saw it, it was standing fully submerged on the bottom of the pail, and seemed content that way, so I assumed that it was fully aquatic and left it there. But then by the next morning, when I was ready to photograph it, it acted as if it had died. After I had fished it out of the water and started photographing it, though, it started to twitch and then gradually sorted out its legs, acting as if it had some intention of getting up. So it looked like (a) it wasn’t actually aquatic, and needed to breathe air at least part of the time, but (b) it could evidently spend some non-trivial amount of time submerged if it had to.
There is a small wooded patch just behind our house that has a number of decaying chokecherry stumps. On April 19, 2012, we decided to tear apart one of the stumps that had practically turned to powder to see what (if anything) was living inside. And one of the things we found was this little beetle with bright-red wing covers.
When we we were back at the pond in the woods on April 22, 2012, Sandy spotted several of these skating over the surface of the water. Not only were they quick, but they could even briefly zip under water to escape if they were sufficiently alarmed. I finally caught one, though, and got it into a jar[1] to photograph.
There was a large funnel-shaped spider web under the eaves of our front porch through late summer of 2011, inhabited by a large female spider. And then, on September 10, we spotted this fellow sauntering jauntily onto the edges of the web.
