Sam found this water strider on the hood of our car on August 31, 2015. While it looks to be in good shape, it was actually stone dead.
It was a hot, sunny day, and what we think happened was that the water strider was flying by, and was fooled by the light reflecting off the hood into thinking the car was a pool of water. And then, when it landed, the car hood was so hot that the insect cooked instantly, immobilizing it into a natural-looking pose.
While these were photographed in the woods west of the house on August 19, 2015, they bloom pretty much continuously from around the middle of July until the early part of September.
They are Black-Eyed Susans, Rudbeckia hirta. They are quite plentiful around here in sunny, grassy areas. Like a lot of other daisy-type wildflowers, the stalks and leaves are not terribly noticeable, and if it weren’t for the rather long-lived blossoms the plants would probably be overlooked completely.
We found this caterpillar eating a milkweed leaf on September 13, 2015. We don’t normally see caterpillars other than Monarchs eating milkweed, so this struck us as unusual.
Aside from its peculiar choice of diet, its main feature was its stripes.
I found several of these gigantic toadstools in the stand of aspen trees northwest of the house on September 3, 2014.
The head was about the size of a dinner plate, with little pale warts all over the surface
The girls spotted these tiny red insects on August 7, 2015. The flower was a daisy that was part of a cut-flower centerpiece on our dining-room table.
These insects were very tiny, barely over a millimeter. If it weren’t for their bright orange-red coloration, we might never have seen them at all.
While these photos were taken on August 19, 2015, you can find Common Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, pretty much any time of year.
This is an extremely distinctive plant. It grows in two stages. The first year, it forms this flat rosette of leaves, up to about a foot in diameter.
These two moths were photographed a couple of months apart, and have little to do with one another other than the fact that:
1. I only got photographs of each from one angle, and
2. They both turned out to be surprisingly difficult for me to identify, in spite of having what looked like clear and distinctive features.
The first one is a white moth with black spots, posing with its wings held up over its back like a butterfly, rather than flat or folded as is more typical for moths. It was at our porch light on May 18, 2015
Happy New Year!
OK, here’s the deal. I’m running low on easily-accessible bugs[1]. Which means that now is as good a time as any to broaden my focus a bit. The local plants really deserve the same “catalog ’em all” approach that I’ve been using for the arthropods. There are a lot of local plant species, and no really good guide to them all. So, what I plan to do from here on out is to alternate: on Wednesdays I’ll still post the bugs, but on Saturdays I’ll post the local plants.
And to start, here is a rather interesting one: the Spotted Touch-Me-Not, Impatiens capensis.
The term “venom” is used to refer to any poison that certain animals (or, I suppose, even some plants[1]) inject into their victims. This couples a toxin with some sort of injection system, like a stinger, or a hollow fang, or poisoned hairs. While there are a lot of venomous animals in the world, arthropods (and particularly insects) account for the vast majority of the ones that humans are actually likely to encounter. Which raises a bunch of questions:
1. What benefits do arthropods get from venom production that makes it so popular? and
2. How does one go about evolving venom?
Sandy planted some broccoli in one of our raised beds in the spring of 2015, and by the end of June we started seeing a combination of tiny caterpillars eating tiny holes in the leaves,
bigger, green caterpillars eating big holes in the leaves,