Here’s the situation. I’ve been accumulating pictures of huge, ugly cutworms for some time now. And it’s high time I did something with them. I’ve been putting it off because identifying cutworms to species is kind of off-putting. They are the classic “generally tubular eating machine”, and they aren’t exactly rich in distinguishing features, so going through the guides is an excercise in frustration over some frankly unattactive insects. But, on the other hand, I suspect the average gardener doesn’t much care what the exact species is – they just want the buggers dead, dead, dead. And saying, “It’s a cutworm, you should feed it to the chickens, if you have any”, is likely to be sufficient for most purposes. So, in that spirit, let’s see what we have here.
Let’s start with the most recent one, that I think Rosie found in the garden on May 16, 2015. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the pictures until the next morning, and it had gone prepupal on us. It turned much darker and more greasy-looking than it was when she found it, and was pulling itself into a pupa shape.
Samantha found this cocoon stuck to a tree branch in fall of 2014. It was clearly a giant silkmoth cocoon (probably a Cecropia Moth). At this point we’d had good success in overwintering silkmoth cocoons for a couple of years running, so we put it in an insect cage on the cellar steps like we’d done in previous years.
Tiny scavenging beetle (and a little something extra)
On May 23, 2015, Sandy was working in her garden and found a dead woodlouse that had these tiny little beetles inside. You can see part of the woodlouse in the upper left side of the picture. The beetle we can see was only about 2 millimeters long.
I don’t think these are house flies, but they do appear to be among their many relatives. And they are busily engaged in making more. Sam and Rosie found this couple near our front door on April 12, 2015, and when I came out to get pictures the flies hopped onto the back of my left hand and kept right on with what they were doing.
Sam caught this butterfly on June 29, 2014, and kept it in one of our mesh cages until I could come home to take pictures[1].
It is clearly one of the Greater Fritillaries, genus Speyeria, but it isn’t immediately obvious to me which one.
We were down at Agate Beach (at the northeast end of Misery Bay)[1] on June 14, 2015, when Rosie found this excellent scarab beetle crawling around on the stones.
It looks like a Goldsmith Beetle, Cotalpa lanigera, the only beetle like this that lives in the eastern US. You can click on this next picture to see it full-sized, if you like.
On May 19, 2015, Sandy was digging a post-hole for a decorative fence she was putting up while Sam watched. And then, Sam spotted this beetle that had fallen into the hole:
It was a pretty good-sized beetle, probably 5/8 inch long or so, and it had prominent ridges in its wing covers and red markings near the wing cover tips. It also didn’t smell very good.
We all went to the public beach at Dollar Bay on May 2, 2015, and while wading around in the shallows I spotted something floating close to the surface that looked a great deal like a dead leaf. Aside from the legs, that is. On closer examination, it turned out to be this enormous dragonfly nymph.
Sandy found this in the parking lot up by the hospital in Hancock on April 11, 2015. This was pretty early in the spring, we were still getting regular freezes. She says she was talking to somebody when she spotted it, and surreptitiously captured the beetle without ever interrupting the conversation. And I’m glad she grabbed it, because the last time I photographed one of these beetles, it was long dead and its legs were mostly broken off, so I really needed another specimen to photograph[1]
Sandy found this tiny beetle crawling on her computer keyboard on January 12, 2015. It was only about 2 mm long, if that.
It appears to be a Cigarette Beetle, Lasioderma serricorne.