A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI
Posts tagged ‘found under rock’
Back on May 10, this is one of the things that Sam and I found under a rock. We didn’t spot it at first, because it looked a great deal like a small plant root - at least until it moved. It’s almost two centimeters long, but less than a millimeter wide.
If you turn over any given rock in Michigan, you are likely to find one of these:
This is a “stone centipede”, order Lithobiomorpha, so called because that’s what they live under[1]. They run like water, flowing around obstacles and into holes in a way that’s very much like the way a stream of water flows, and are kind of hard to catch. On top of the speed, they are slippery, and their dozens of legs are very good at forcing them through crevices, or out from between your fingers. Even their antennae have a disturbingly fluid nature, flowing over surfaces and contorting in a way that is more like what you would expect from tentacles than from antennae.
The back part of our property drains into Cole’s Creek, which empties into Portage Lake about a mile to the west of us. It’s a pretty substantial stream, and one of the better places for catching smelt[1]. S_ has been going down there from time to time to check if the smelt run has started, so last weekend she suggested that we all go there to poke around in a stream bigger than the one beside the house and see what we could find. We probably didn’t find anything that isn’t in our little micro-creek[2], but we did find some photograph-worthy specimens. Like these guys:
Not really a freshwater shrimp
Last Sunday, it was pretty warm, and S_ suggested that it would be a good day to take Sam down to the stream[1] to turn over some rocks to see what was underneath[2]. So, I grabbed this rock that was in the middle of the stream, turned it over, and found about 20 of these clinging to the bottom:
And, in the “Things found under rocks” category, we have this specimen from back in May[1]. It is a “pillbug” (also known as “potato bugs”, “sow bugs”, “woodlice”, “roly-polys”, and probably dozens of other names).
It’s spring! I no longer have to find arthropods under junk in the basement! Now the biggest issue in photographing them is speed - most insects, spiders, and centipedes move so quick that it’s hard to get a picture. I tried to get pictures of a ground beetle, a centipede, any of the thousands of flies that were popping out of hibernation, and a moth, and ended up with a lot of pictures either of fast-moving blurs, or of vacant spots where my subjects had been up until just a second ago.
Except for this one. This is a millipede, and based on the image at BugGuide [1], it is a member of the family Parajulidae. It was moving nice and slow, and allowed me to move it somewhere that there was good contrast, decent lighting [2], and nothing to hide behind.
