Sam and Rosie found me this nice Stone Centipede under a rock on July 12, 2013.
I posted about these before, way back in 2008. The pictures at the time were actually fairly good, but a bit piecemeal because I couldn’t get detail of the whole body at the time. So these pictures are more to show the whole centpede at once.
So, let’s go straight from the sawflies that we had last time (with more legs than a standard caterpillar) to something with less legs than average – an inchworm. This was on the same mulberry bush as the two green sawflies, and was about the same size (and, in fact, you can see the sawfly larva as a blurry background figure in this next picture).
Today, we have three different sawfly larvae. These look superficially like butterfly/moth caterpillars, but are actually more closely related to bees and wasps (and you can tell what they are from the fact that they have too many legs, and often have very un-caterpillar-like eyes). The first one is a light green specimen that we got off of our mulberry bush on July 12, 2013 by putting a sheet under the bush and hitting the branches with a stick.
This one was a tiny insect (less than 3 mm long) that we found by beating the mulberry bush on July 12, 2013.
The black patches on the face look like eyes, but they aren’t. The eyes are further up on the sides of the head. It had the buggiest “bug eyes” I’ve ever seen on an insect. If the eyes stuck out any further, they would be on stalks.
Here’s a couple of stink bugs I found mating on July 12, 2013.
They look very like the predatory stink bugs I’ve been calling Webworm Destroyers, because of the carnage they wreak on the types of caterpillars that make silk nests. If we look at their undersides, we see that they have the fairly stout, flesh-stabbing mouthparts that are typical for predatory bugs (as opposed to the long, needlelike mouthparts that are more typical of the ones that suck plant juices).
On July 12, 2013, Sam and I took a small bedsheet, put it under a small Black Locust tree, and whacked the branches to see what would fall out. We turned out to get a number of these little red bug nymphs with a white band around their waists.
A couple of White Admirals – kind of beat up
For some reason, all of the White Admiral butterflies I get a chance to photograph are pretty beat up. Like this one from June 28, 2012 (found dead by the road)
(top view of relatively undamaged wing)
While the firefly species that actually light up[1] are kind of scarce around Houghton, they do exist. Here’s one that Rosie caught for me during the day, presumably while it was resting after an exhausting night of flashing lights [2].
I was watching a movie (“Despicable Me”) with the girls on July 7, 2013 when I noticed this rather large, mostly brick-red jumping spider landing on me, probably from the ceiling. So I popped it in a jar to save for after the movie was over. The spider was just about a centimeter long, making it one of the larger jumping spiders I’ve ever seen locally.
Small Reddish-Brown Caterpillar – Immature Pinion?
On July 7, 2013, I had just come back from walking the dog along the trail through the woods, and Sandy noticed this little reddish-brown caterpillar on my shoulder.
It was fairly small, less than an inch long, and had that kind of indefinable air of immaturity, so I think it was only a half-grown caterpillar. Which makes identification even more difficult than for an older caterpillar, because a lot of caterpillars have never had their younger instars documented properly.