I spotted this big, lurid green caterpillar crossing the road in front of our house on June 4, 2012. It alternated between playing dead, and thrashing violently in my hand.
I thought a big caterpillar like that, with distinctive-looking bumps on its rump, would be identifiable, but it was harder than I thought it would be. There were several similar pictures on BugGuide, but none of them had been identified beyond being some kind of moth. The face turned out to be pretty lacking in distinctive features. Although, if you look at the neck just behind the head, there is a white object that looks a lot like the ones on this tachnid-fly-infested caterpillar[1], which I coincidentally found the same day in about the same place.
On May 19, 2012, Sandy found this antlion larva for me in a little pit it had dug in the sand floor of one of our outbuildings.
Sam found this large crane fly on June 4, 2011, on our front doorjamb. The first picture shows it in the bottom of a 2.5-inch diameter plastic jar, and its legspan was almost completely across the width of the jar.
In addition to moths, on May 19, 2012 we had a bunch of “May beetles”[1] come to the light inside our garage. Here is a selection of them.
There were big ones, about an inch long;
This one was photographed on May 13, 2012. Sam found it crawling on the siding of our house. It was a bit less than a centimeter long, and looked kind of like a levitating grass seed.
I wasn’t having much luck finding this one at first, because I was looking under the “plant bugs”. But, after browsing through my copy of the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America, it looked like the “Stilt Bugs” (family Berytidae, were a much better match.
On May 19, 2012 we accidentally left the garage door open, and the ceiling light turned on. This turned the whole garage into a giant light-trap for insects, and we caught a lot of them. I’ll be posting images from that night for some time. So let’s start with an easy one:
Many years ago, we had a small aquarium with a couple of small fish that eventually died of old age. Rather than restock it, we poured the gravel and associated seashells out into a place in the yard where small animals had been trying to burrow under the house. Then we forgot about it. Now, jump to the present – on May 21, 2012, Sam was rummaging around in the yard[1], and found the forgotten aquarium gravel. She loves seashells, so she went through it to pick out the shells. And inside one of the shells, just peeking around the edge, was this tiny little jumping spider:
I’m going to call this a “red-tailed jumping spider”, because, hey, red tail:
We found these little bundles of dry grass sticking to almost every available surface on May 23, 2012.
This was not unusual. We find them every year. The unusual bit is that, normally, when we find them they are stuck firmly to the surface. But this time, we found some that were still actively crawling around.
I almost stepped on this one while pushing my bike up the hill on May 29, 2012. It was sitting on the road pavement, and looked so much like a mouldy bit of rotting stick that I nearly didn’t stop to pick it up.
Here’s one that I thought would be particularly appropriate for Halloween, as in some ways it’s even creepier than the doomed caterpillar in the previous post: it’s got spiders, and poison, along with the traditional drawn-out gruesome death!
To start with, I happened to spot this little drama right beside our front door on June 9, 2012. A wasp was attacking a hapless cobweb-weaver spider.
The spider seemed paralyzed, and the wasp acted as if she were stinging it repeatedly. This kept on for some time.
