I put out what was supposed to be a cricket trap[1] a few days ago, but didn’t catch any crickets. What I did catch were some woodlice, something that looks like a carrion beetle larva, but I keep finding them scampering around where there is no evidence of any carrion, a stone centipede, and a few tiny things that included this little orange mite:
This one landed on me while I was out pushing Sam on her swing. At first, I thought it was a wasp, because that’s what it looked and acted like while it was flying, but as soon as it landed and closed its wings, it was clearly a rather attractive beetle.
Last year, I had an entry about ant lions, with pictures of the larval form (which digs pits in sandy soil and grabs unwary insects that stumble ino them). Well, here is the adult form, that S_ just caught for me out on the front porch:
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.
Here’s one that probably everybody in North America has at least heard, if not seen: field crickets. I recorded this sound clip on June 17, which was when the spring field crickets (Gryllus veletis) started singing[1].
Sam found this one under her crib on May 27. It’s a rather striking gold-colored beetle with intricate tracery on the wing covers.
This is certainly one of the Calligrapha leaf beetles[1]. Based on the dark green pronotum (the plate between the head and the wing covers), it looks like it is related to Calligrapha alni, the Russet Alder Leaf Beetle. I’m not so sure it is that exact species, though. While the pattern on the wing covers is very close, the examples in Bug Guide show more of a rusty coloration, and a bit less gold.
This is one of two water striders that I caught on the little stream that runs alongside of our road. They are normally almost impossible to catch, but I spotted a pair that was mating. They were moving pretty slowly, and I was able to corner them up against some rocks and nudge them into my collecting jar. They unfortunately stopped mating by the time I got them home, so I couldn’t get a picture of them both at once.
This one smacked me in the back of the neck while I was working in the yard the weekend of May 24, and got tangled up in the hair on my upper back until I grabbed it and pulled it out.
I then noticed there were several others flying about, so they are obviously something really common. It looks exactly like a Red Turpentine Beetle, Dendroctonus valens. This is a pretty likely identification, because (a) they are well-known pests of pine trees, (b) there is a pine plantation just behind our house, and (c) they emerge as adult beetles very early in the spring.
Back on March 30, there was a rare sunny, not-quite-freezing day, and we took the opportunity to take a walk down the road. On the shoulder of the road, right next to our yard, we spotted this caterpillar:
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.