Also in the August 23, 2012 sweep-net were a number of these brown stink-bugs with sharp spines on their shoulders.
This is one of the Soldier Bugs in the genus Podisus, which are predatory stink-bugs that are particularly fond of caterpillars. An how do I know they are predatory? Because I found one predating, here – it’s just finishing off a caterpillar of some sort.
Today, we have a couple of grasshopper nymphs that were turned up while sweep-netting in tall grass on August 23, 2012. The first one is your basic green grasshopper. It’s almost mature, as it has visible wing buds, but it has at least one more molt to go.
Here are the rest of the small arthropods that we caught in the public library’s back yard on the August 23, 2012 Bug Hunt. Overall, the yield in the mowed lawn in August was a bit disappointing, as it had been a bit dry and most of the insects had gone elsewhere. There were enough to keep the kids busy, though, and these are the ones that actually got brought to me to photograph. The first is one of the Crambid Snout Moths (probably in the genus Agriphila) that one of the kids found perched under a dandelion leaf. You can just see its characteristic bushy mouthparts partly hidden under the leaf.
As part of our presentation on local insects at the public library on August 23, 2012[1], we had a “Bug Hunt” in the small park area behind the library. One of the things we did was to put a bedsheet under a pine tree in the middle of the lawn, and then wack the branches with a stick to see what would fall out. Mostly, what we got were these:
I found this spider (which I think was not yet fully grown) wandering around on our house siding near the front door on June 30, 2012.
Even though it was wandering around as a free hunter rather than crouching in a web, I don’t think it was a wolf spider, because it just has eight beady little eyes rather than the two big eyes and six small ones that are characteristic of wolf spiders.
August 23, 2012 was a big day for us as far as catching lots of insects. We were giving another insect presentation at the Portage Lake District Library that day, and so (among other things) we went out sweep-netting in the tall grass all along Clover Weevil Road, clear back to the swamp in the woods, until we caught enough random small arthropods to fill three of our 12″x12″ screen-sided insect cages. So, after the presentation, I sat down with the girls and the camera, and we went through getting pictures of as many of the different species present as we could [1]. This included a species of katydid different from the big, green, leafy-looking ones that I’ve posted in the past:
Sandy found this spider in the bathtub on August 19, 2012. It is clearly a funnel weaver, in the family Agelenidae, based on the projecting spinnerettes clearly visible at the tip of its abdomen, and the eye pattern.
This little brown jumping spider was running around on one of our window screens on August 18, 2012. I think it’s an immature male. He was scampering around pretty quickly and wasn’t too cooperative about being photographed.
The kids’ wading pool[1] was left in the yard all winter, and it was full of icy water when we had an early snow-melt on March 19, 2012[2]. Which is when Rosie found this fly drowning in it. So she rescued it and brought it to me.
I spotted this small fly on our window on August 18, 2012. It was a bit under a quarter inch long (about 4 mm), and it was a bit hard to see details with the naked eye. I didn’t realize until after taking some photographs that it was kind of an odd-looking little fly.
