Spittlebug Nymph
After coming back from a walk on June 14, 2024, I found this little insect nymph crawling on my arm. In this picture, it is standing on the side of my thumb so you can see how tiny it was.
It is obviously a nymph because it had undeveloped wing buds instead of wing.
It was also fairly acrobatic, here it is climbing up one of the hairs on the back of my knuckles.
It is clearly one of the planthoppers, with its sucking-type mouthparts, and it looks like a fairly typical spittlebug nymph, in the superfamily Cercopidae
Normally you don’t see spittlebug nymphs crawling around exposed like this, they mostly cover themselves with a mass of foam both to protect them from drying out and to hide them from predators.
It is hard to identify which exact spittlebug species this might be from the nymph, because they all look pretty much alike at this stage. It is probably one of the “typical spittlebugs” in the family Aprophoridae. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the most likely candidate would be the the Meadow Spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius, but only because they are the most common spittlebug species around here.
I suspect that I probably brushed against the foamy shelter of this one, and it suddenly found itself stuck to my arm instead of peacefully feeding on plant juices. Although, they apparently sometimes abandon their spittle shelters and go wandering, so I could have picked it up that way.
They do cause some damage to plants as they suck juices out of the stalk, although they usually mature and go off as adults before the plant matures, and so the damage is not as great as from other juice-sucking insects like aphids.