On January 16, 2014, Sandy noticed that one of her orchids had little brown things stuck all over its leaves (mainly near the leaf bases). It was hard to tell what they were, they looked like little dried spatters of something. But, on close examination, it turned out that they were scale insects[1].
Sam caught this little crab spider in our house on January 3, 2014, the same day as I brought home the immature spider that I posted last time. This one also had a body only about 3 mm long.
Those four big front legs are for grabbing prey. When the spider is startled, it scrunches up into a little ball.
I was walking down the hall at work on January 3, 2014 when I nearly ran into this little spider. It was hanging from the ceiling by a thread, and was right around eye level. So, I caught it in a little jar and brought it home.
These two flies were on the south wall of our house on October 10, 2013 (one of the last pleasant, sunny days of the year). Their combined length was only about a centimeter.
From directly above, the wings had a faintly iridescent sheen.
I honestly didn’t think I’d ever be running a picture of one of these, but on October 17, 2013, Joe (one of our graduate students) presented me with a jar containing this house centipede that he’d caught in his apartment:
On September 22, 2013, Sandy found this peculiar mesh structure on a branch in the stand of poplars northwest of the house.
Here’s another shot for scale. The grid on the board underneath it is half-inch, so it was only about a quarter of an inch long.
Sandy found this caterpillar crawling on a milkweed leaf on September 16, 2013. I think we’ve found this species before, but last time it had lost all of the long tufts of hair.
So, on September 15, 2013, I was driving a fence post into the ground for a new stretch of electric fence[1], when suddenly I was swarmed by a whole bunch of these yellowjacket wasps. I’d evidently driven the post right through their underground nest. They followed me for almost 50 feet[2], although I only got stung a couple of times.
I caught one that was tangled in my hair and still trying to sting me, and froze her for pictures, so here she is:
Sandy found a couple of these in a cluster of wooly alder aphids on September 10, 2013. This one had dropped to the ground under the aphid cluster. It was probably all scrunched up like that because it was getting ready to pupate.
Light Green Caterpillar with Black Spots
Sam found these two light-green caterpillars with black spots on September 8, 2013. They were inside of a Queen-Anne’s-Lace seedhead [1]
The smaller one sure looks like the same species as the larger one, but one or two molts younger