While coming up the hill on my way home from work[1], I spotted what looked, at first, like a medium-sized ant. It didn’t look quite right, though, so I caught it and brought it home. It turned out to be this:
Water boatmen, like this one, are all over the place. They can fly, so they end up in bodies of water ranging from full-blown lakes, to puddles and birdbaths. This particular one was at the mouth of Cole’s Creek, just down the road from our house.
While cleaning up some stuff in the basement, out of the corner of my eye I spotted something bounding up in the air. And by “bounding”, I mean getting up about two feet off the floor. So I went to investigate, and found this:
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:
April 4 was pretty warm[1], so we went down to the Pilgrim River just east of Houghton to see if the walking trails beside the river had melted off enough to be passible[2]. While we were there, we noticed that there were small, black insects hanging out on the wooden bridge railings
An accidental capture
So, while we were capturing the Gammarus for last week’s entry, we scooped up some water from the stream into a jar to put them in. In the process, since the stream was so shallow, we got some debris off of the bottom into the jar, too. Then, when we got it back to the house and started looking at what we had, S_ noticed that one of the bits of debris was oddly symmetrical and had a hole in one end[1]. So, we put it into the petri dish along with the amphipods, and waited to see if anything came out. Something did:
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:
Back in November, I posted pictures of a male crab spider, today we have some pictures of a female, for contrast. She probably isn’t exactly the same genus, but she’s fairly close.
In February, I posted a picture of a larva of a carpet beetle. Well, now we have some pictures of an adult[1] that I found climbing up the side of the shower, to round out the set:
This is the second Ichneumon wasp (photographed last June), that I mentioned in last week’s posting:
The very long ovipositor (in this case, longer than her body!) is pretty characteristic. While it looks dangerous, it isn’t a stinger and she’s harmless (to us! More on this later . . .) – the ovipositor is used for laying eggs in awkward places.