Caterpillar with Brown Spots and Black Stripe Down Back
After we all went on a bike ride on the trail beside Portage Lake on August 12, 2012, we found this caterpillar crawling on one of our shirts:
This doesn’t quite look like any of the caterpillars in any of my reference books, or on BugGuide.
And here is the second posting for National Moth Week. It was over a year in the making, so it will be kind of long.
On May 28, 2012, we were visiting some friends who have a small farm a few miles northeast of us, and while Sandy was admiring their apricot tree[1], she saw these four eggs on a leaf that she thought looked interesting. That’s a metric ruler next to them, and the marks are 1 millimeter, so the individual eggs are about three millimeters long. There are a lot of insects that are smaller than this as adults, suggesting that whatever these are will be pretty large.
I was excited about these, because I was pretty sure that they were eggs of some type of Giant Silkmoth. This was backed up by the pictures of Cecropia Moth eggs (Hyalophora cecropia) in “Tracks and Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates”[2], which looked practically identical. Sandy must have found them almost immediately after they were laid, because they took close to two weeks to hatch. By June 10, they had hatched out into these little black spiky caterpillars (hatchlings are referred to as “first instar”).
This is the first of two posts I’ve been saving for National Moth Week
So, we were driving back from the store on August 19, 2012, and were about a mile south of our house on our pretty low-traffic road when Sandy abruptly shouted “WOW!”, slammed on the brakes[1], jumped out of the car, and ran back down the road to pick up something. She came back with this gigantic, lurid green caterpillar:
The door covering the outside entrance to the basement of our old house[1] is a great place to find Cellar Spiders. While I’ve photographed this species before, there is a particular behavior of theirs that I wanted to document. And so, on August 11, 2012, I opened up the cellar door specifically to find females that were carrying their eggs in their jaws. I found two. There was this one:
Sam found this planthopper in the yard on August 1, 2012. It was rather large as planthoppers go (1 cm long, or about 3/8 inch).
Based on the rather protruding “nose”, which is quite a bit bigger than what one normally sees on planthoppers, this looks like an adult Pine Spittlebug, Aprhrophora cribrata
I caught this spider on a window at work during the last week of July, and brought her home to keep as a pet for a bit. And I am positive that this is a “she”, because on August 4, 2012 she laid an egg sac.
It turns out she’s another specimen of a species that I’ve posted before. She’s a Bridge Spider, Larinioides sclopetarius. The previous spider was caught in the same place, and these are the most common large spiders that accumulate on that window. This is no surprise, because these spiders are well-known for building their webs on man-made structures near water (commonly bridges) so that they can catch things like midges and mayflies that hatch out of the water. And the building I work in is right next to Portage Lake, so it is close enough to being a bridge to suit them.
So, we’d all come back from a walk in the woods on July 31,2012, and I noticed this little beetle stuck in Sandy’s hair. It was only about a quarter-inch long.
This was another one that I couldn’t find myself, so I submitted to BugGuide for ID. It turned out to be one of the smaller Water Scavenger Beetles. V belov was of the opinion that it looked like Hydrobius fuscipes, a very common beetle that typically lives around forest pools that are filled with leaf litter. But, Tim Loh decided that it was actually Helocombus bifidus, a very similar beetle that lives in the same habitat, but that has longer maxillae and a different pattern of striations on the wing covers.
Sam found this cicada in the yard on August 1, 2012. It was a male that was still alive (but dying),
I found this elongated, leggy spider stretched along a plant stalk growing beside the road on July 27, 2012.
It’s a Long-Jawed Orbweaver, related to one that I posted rather blurrily back in 2009. In the closeup, we can see the jaws (chelicerae) that stick out of the front of the face are much longer than what we normally see in spiders.
Sam caught this grasshopper on July 27, 2012, in the garden on the south side of the house. It was pretty well camouflaged, looking like a bit of miscellaneous wood debris, or maybe a lump of dirt. I don’t really know how she even spotted it. Sharp eyes, I guess.
