South of our house, there is a little dead-end road called Springbrook Lane, and near the end of the road is a little pool, about ten feet across and maybe thirty feet long, and only a couple of feet deep. S_ thought it would be interesting to go down there with an insect net, and see what was there. She was right, it was interesting. A single scoop turned up a bunch of tadpoles and insect nymphs, including this one:
This is a dragonfly nymph. I’m not sure what species, but it was less than an inch long so it is probably one of the smaller ones. They all look a lot alike at this stage, and I guess the best way to find out the species is to let them grow up and see what they turn into.
So, somehow we’ve gone for two years without a single representative of the Odonata order (dragonflies and damselflies)[1]. Well, that’s not too surprising, they are pretty darned hard to catch with bare hands. But that’s all over now, having the nets has changed everything. We caught this one down at Chassell Beach[2] on June 20 – it was sunning itself on a walking path, and S_ snuck up on it with the net, and nabbed it. So then we brought it home, and put it into one of the 12 inch collapsable observation cages that we got from BioQuip. This made it much easier to photograph, I could just open the cage enough to put in my hand and camera and take pictures without much chance of it flying away. We could even get it to pose on my thumb:
S_ went through our copy of “Stokes’ Beginners Guide to Dragonflies”, and we decided it was one of the Clubtails, family Gomphidae. This is based on the widely-separated eyes and the, well, clubbed tail. Of the ones in the book, it looked most like the Dragonhunter, Hagenius brevistylus, although the pattern of yellow striping on ours doesn’t look quite right, and the eyes aren’t really green like the dragonhunter eyes are supposed to be.
Last week, we looked at some of the bugs that the kids caught at our annual Bug Hunt at the public library, focusing on the ones that had wings [1]. This week, we’ll look at the wingless ones (wingless either because they are larvae or nymphs that haven’t developed wings yet, or because they are spiders or crustaceans that never have wings in the first place).
The best of these were for an interesting woodlouse, that had pairs of yellow spots running all down its back. This is oddly colorful for a woodlouse, mostly they are just shades of gray.
On Monday evening, we put on another local bugs presentation at the Portage Lake Public Library[1]. After a short slide show, we showed off a bunch of bugs that we had caught in our yard, and then, we all went outside to the library’s back yard to see what we could turn up[2]. This year, I actually remembered to bring my camera, and tried to get pictures, some of which actually came out OK.[3] By which I mean, not completely unidentifiable.
The library is right next to the lake, and by luck there was a mayfly hatch going on, so I got a lot of opportunities to get pictures of mayflies.
We have two species of tent caterpillars around here, the Eastern Tent Caterpillar, Malacosoma americanum,
which makes “tents” on tree branches and prefers to eat leaves from apple and cherry trees,
We’re having a twofer this week, because I have two subjects with only one good photo each, and not enough to say about either one to warrant a full entry
The first is a little guy, about 4 millimeters long, that S_ found scooting across the floor in the living room. It was very like an earwig, with a similar sheen, flexibility, and tendency to squirm out of tiny places. The only thing is, it didn’t have the forceps at the end of the abdomen. Unfortunately, I only managed to take four nearly-identical pictures before it suddenly scooted off and disappeared under my photography stand, so this is the only real picture available:
At first I thought maybe it was an earwig nymph, since I wasn’t sure whether or not earwigs have their forceps all their lives, or only develop them as adults. The folks at Bug Guide soon set me straight, of course: V. Belov quickly identified it as a Rove Beetle in the subfamily Tachyporinae, which for some reason are called “Crab-Like Rove Beetles”. These are minute, mostly-predatory, very un-beetle-like beetles that generally live in the leaf litter and under rocks. They are very common, but not often seen, because they are pretty tiny guys. They have wings tucked under those little pads on the back, but it is evidently quite a project for them to unstow the wings and take flight, so they mostly don’t. I understand there are a few thousand kinds of rove beetles, so we certainly aren’t done with them yet.
This week, I got a couple of actual, no-fooling insect nets[1], and Sam and I went out to see what we could catch. There wasn’t much (it has been kind of cold and a bit breezy of late, so flying insects big enough to see easily were pretty scarce). Then, I saw something grey, blurry and unidentifiable flying past, quickly took a swipe at it with the net – and got it! It turned out to be this:
It’s a “Plume Moth”, in the Tribe Platyptiliini. Based on the color and wing shape, I think it’s most likely in the genus Platyptilia, and it could be a somewhat faded specimen of Platyptilia carduidactyla, the Artichoke Plume Moth.
[Scene: my office, afternoon of May 21. The phone rings]
Me: Hello?
Sam: Dad! Mom caught a GIANT WATER BUG! She tried to pick it up, and it GRABBED her! She shook it off, and caught it in a DIAPER! We put it in a jar! It’s GIANT!
Me: Wow!
Sam: Well, OK. Bye! [click, hummmmmm][1]
Sam and her bug in a jar
I found this on campus, clinging to the side of the Electrical Engineering building, so I put it in a pill bottle and brought it home to photograph:
It was just about 2 centimeters long, and had a strong metallic sheen, particularly on the underside.
Last week, I was laying on the floor[1] when suddenly this fellow scurried right under my nose:
and Sam yelled, “A spider! Can we keep it?” So, we got out a little half-gallon plastic aquarium that we’ve had laying around for some years, put in some of Sam’s foam alphabet puzzle pieces to give him something to crawl on, and popped him in. We gave him a cotton ball soaked in water so he would have something to drink, and have been feeding him flies: