On July 19, 2019, we spotted this spider on the house siding next to our front door. She had caught a nice big beetle.
When I came in a bit closer to get a better picture, the spider got spooked and dashed off to her hidey-hole, next to her egg sac (that brown, papery-looking object off to her left). You can also see the egg sac in the upper left corner of the first picture.
For some years now, Sandy has been planting milkweed around the house for the Monarch Butterfly caterpillars. This has been very successful, we generally have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of caterpillars taking advantage of them. However, it is good to remember that the name is milkWEED, which means that you had better want them where you planted them, because they are very persistent plants. They also make a lot of seeds. These pictures were taken on November 4, 2020, which was the day the milkweed pods had finally dried enough to pop open and start spreading their seeds around.
Sandy found this spider on the spout of her watering can in the garden on May 23, 2019. He has caught a succulent little fly.
He certainly overwintered as an adult or near adult, since this was pretty early in the season. And I say “he” because his pedipalps, which are holding on to the fly, look enlarged at the ends.
Robber flies generally are flighty little beasts. Normally I don’t even get one good photo before they fly off. In this case, on July 2, 2019, I did manage to get one good shot at least:
Then a bit over a year later, on July 20, 2020, we found one that was a bit more cooperative. It had fallen into some water, and when we rescued it with a stick it pretty much just stayed still for quite a while. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to reset my lens aperture from using the camera on non-insect subjects, and ended up with a bunch of pictures that were way too blurry to use because of bad depth-of-field. But there were a few that came out kind of OK. Here is the second robber fly from the side, looking a bit bedraggled:
We found this pair of stilt bugs, Neoneides muticus, mating on June 13, 2020. Like a lot of insects, they mate by connecting together at the tip of the abdomen, and then they wander around as a pair for a while.
Here I have two specimens of what I think is the same species, collected just over a year apart: one on September 1, 2019 and the other on September 26, 2020. Sam caught the 2019 specimen, here it is on her arm:
Right at the moment, I am working through a set of photos that I took about a year and a half ago, and I’ve kind of forgotten some details that I really should have written down at the time. Like this inchworm. The date is from June 25, 2019.
Here is another dragonfly nymph that was living in the decorative pond we built in the back yard. We caught this one on July 12, 2019.
Here it is in a jar lid filled with water. It seemed happier this way than out of the water.
Back on September 14, 2019, the girls found this delightful larva for me while shuffling around some dead leaves.
When it was feeling threatened it would stand still with its head hidden like that, but then it would shoot out its head a considerable distance and poke around with it.
Sometimes I think we don’t fully appreciate just how alien arthropods are compared with mammals and other vertebrates, simply because (a) they are all over the place and we are used to them, and (b) they are mostly so small that we don’t clearly see the extent to which they do things very differently from us. Relative to us, in fact, they could be considered to be constructed backwards, upside-down, and inside-out. Here, let me explain what I mean by this [1].
1. Backwards? (digestive tract)
The last common ancestor of vertebrates and arthropods appears to be the (so far hypothetical) “ur-bilateran”, a bilaterally symmetrical, probably macroscopic organism with a photosensitive eye-spot, a bare minimum nervous system, and either no digestive tract at all, or a digestive cavity with a single opening that served both to bring food in, and to move wastes out. Here, let me make a quick sketch: