S_ was given a vanilla bean orchid plant[1] a while ago, and it has been growing like crazy in a pot on the kitchen windowsill. Until, that is, she noticed that the growing tips were starting to die back. On closer investigation, she found that the tips of the plant were infested with these:
They are some type of basic green aphid[2], one of the very large family Aphididae. It took almost six months for them to put in an appearance, so I doubt that they were on the plant when we got it. They are probably a local species that got in through an open window.
So, I’m on my way home, pushing my bike up the last steep hill, when I look down and see this very, very pink caterpillar just starting to cross the road. Now, a shocking pink caterpillar is not something you see every day, so naturally I picked it up to bring it home.
I didn’t have a container or anything, so I had to carry it in my hand. It didn’t like this, and kept thrashing around pretty vigorously. It was about an inch and a half long, so it was pretty substantial and quite strong. The weird thing was, after a bit it stopped thashing and started slowly rubbing against my hand, and I could feel a vibration. And then, when I held my hand up to my ear, I could hear a faint purring[1]. This was very disturbing, it was an odd and not particularly pleasant sensation. If I’d been a predator, I probably would have dropped it. I was a little bit afraid that it might be putting some irritating or corrosive chemical on my hand, but no, it wasn’t. But somehow, the vibration was making it feel as if it was.
Sam caught this grasshopper in the yard, close to the house. She then brought it inside where she kept picking it up, letting it jump out of her hands, and then laughing uproariously as it flew partway across the room. Then, after it was tired enough that it didn’t bother jumping anymore, she built a “train” out of MegaBlocks, and put the grasshopper onto the first block as the engineer:
It turned out that the MegaBlock was actually a fairly good place for it to sit for photographs. It was a pretty good sized grasshopper, a bit over an inch long.
On July 19, I was up on the stamp sands from the old Copper Falls Mine with some friends[1], and decided to poke around a bit in the shrubbery growing along a stream bed. When I came out, I noticed this spider rapelling down from the edge of my hat:
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any of the add-on lenses for my camera with me, but I did the best I could. Fortunately, the spider was big enough that the pictures came out reasonably clear anyway. It scurried around pretty fast on the ground, making it hard to get pictures. But, one friend was sufficiently non-arachnophobic to be willing to get close up and take some pictures while the spider walked around on my hands (thanks, Mary Lynn!), which helped for getting side and face shots:
S_ caught this one in the yard on August 10, and put it into one of the little bug-capture cages that Sam got from her grandparents (they bought them at the local dollar store for practically nothing)>
I’ve seen these from time to time for years, but never really got a good look at one before. But, on August 15, this one obligingly landed on the concrete in front of our garage and quietly expired before my very eyes. This was a golden opportunity to get it onto my photographing stage, and take some pictures with the aid of my new robot slave[1].
It’s a Bee Fly, in the tribe Bombyliini, and if I had to be more specific I’d probably go with the genus Systoechus. They are sort of bee mimics, with the yellow body hair making them look like small bumblebees.
At the end of July, after Sam and I came back from a walk, S_ said, “I have a surprise for you!” and showed us this:
That’s my wrist it is crawling on, by the way. It was just a bit over three inches long. S_ said, “I found it crawling on the porch in front of the house. Isn’t it huge and ugly? I saw it and immediately thought of you!”[1].
In case you were wondering what last weeks damselfly nymph would have grown up to be, it would have been something like this:
This is another one that we caught with an insect net down at Chassell Beach on June 20, the same day that we caught the Clubtail Dragonfly. I mainly caught it by luck, I saw a flicker of movement, took a swipe with the net at the general vicinity, and there it was. I would say that it is probably one of the Spreadwings, family Lestidae, based on the way that it holds its wings partly spread out when it rests. Other damselfly families rest with their wings folded flat along the abdomen.
At the same time as we caught the dragonfly nymph, S_ also caught a number of these fragile-looking fellows. I thought at first they were something like, oh, maybe some sort of mayfly. So we put about a half-dozen of them in a jar, took them home, and . . . by the time we got them home, there were, er, noticeably fewer of them. Then we saw that one was eating one of the others, and we realized that these were no gentle detrivores, but some sort of active hunter. Unfortunately, they were of fragile constitution and the ones that hadn’t been eaten had died by the time I had the opportunity to take pictures, so I pulled one out of the water to photograph on the macro stage.
Given the fact that they were clearly carnivorous, we quickly realized that they were actually damselfly nymphs. Damselflies are related to dragonflies, except that they are much smaller. And, instead of having internal gills like dragonfly nymphs do, damselfly nymphs have external gills at the tip of the abdomen, that open up like the petals of a flower in the water (but unfortunately lay flat when they are in the air).
So, I came home on July 15, and Sam proudly showed me this fly sitting on a magazine. She had chased it around the house so much that it was too exhausted to move, and so it just sat there while I took pictures:
It’s one of the horse flies, which are some of the more obnoxious biting flies [1]. The things that make them obnoxious are that they are big flies (over a centimeter long), have a tendency to circle my head for a long time before trying to bite, and then when they finally *do* land to bite (usually right on the back of my head, at that point where the hair swirls around in a circle[2]), the bite hurts like the dickens and bleeds freely, because their mouthparts look like this: