Today, we’ve got something a bit different. While I’ve posted things that weren’t arthropods before, at least they were all animals. But, while I was out in the woods looking for late-season bugs on November 22, 2012, I stumbled across this:
“Sorry, Squire, I’ve ‘ad a look ’round the back of the shop, and uh, we’re right out of parrots arthropods.”
[pause]
“. . . I’ve got a slug . . .”[1]
Actually I’m not really out of arthropods. By the time this post goes live, I will have had all spring, summer, and fall to find more. But I’m writing this near the end of February 2013[2], and at the moment I’ve got all my usable photos from last year prepped and queued up. And the 2013 arthropods haven’t exactly started rolling in yet. So, you get this slug that Sam found under a pile of shingles on November 11, 2012. Here it is all curled up, depending on its layer of slime to disgust and repel potential predators:
We found this millipede crawling up the side of the house on the morning of November 11, 2012. We’d left the porch light on that night to draw insects, but I don’t know if this one was actually attracted to the light or not – millipedes crawl on the side of our house all the time anyway.
For as common as they are, it has been an excessively long time since I posted pictures of a harvestman (the last ones were way back in 2008). My only excuse is that they are a bit awkward to photograph, because of the long legs – do I photograph the legs and leave the body as an insignificant dot, or photograph the body and ignore the legs? Still, when this one presented itself around the porch light on November 11, 2012 and posed so nicely, I obviously had to try again.
By the time November rolls around, we’ve usually had several hard freezes and at least one significant snowfall, and so most of the insects are gone by then. But these show up pretty reliably at our porch light every November, and in 2012 I photographed them on both November 11 and November 22:
On November 11, 2012, Sam found this good-sized black-red-and-white leafhopper on a pile of shingles out back. It was about a third of an inch long.
This is a pretty distinctive little insect. The red wings with black veins, the black body with white speckles, and the white stripes down the sides pretty clearly mark it as a member of the genus Cuerna.
November 11, 2012 was a warm night, and so I left the porch light on to see if anything would be drawn to it. Quite a number of things came, but the population wasn’t nearly as biased towards moths as it was in the spring (in fact, we only got a couple of moth species). This medium-sized spider (body about a quarter-inch long) was one of the things that came. I don’t know if it was actually drawn to the light as such, or if it was hunting the other small arthropods that were drawn to the light, but at any rate, there it was. It’s definitely a wolf spider, with those two big eyes.
In November of 2012, we had a few nights that were above freezing, so I left the porch light on through the nights of November 4, 18, and 22. And each time, among the insects that came to the light were these small crane flies.
November 4:
On November 4, 2012, I decided that since it wasn’t quite freezing out (it was 34 degrees F, or about 1 degree C), it was worthwhile to leave the porch light on overnight to see what we got. The biggest things were these two moths, one with slightly blurred markings:
Rosie likes to collect acorns, and had brought a bucket of them in the house on October 7, 2012. And while Sam was looking them over, she somehow broke one of them (I think she dropped it on the floor). And inside, there were several of these fat little white grubs.
