I thought this one would be a good lead-up to halloween, for reasons that will become obvious.
I spotted this caterpillar on June 4, 2012 in an odd location: it was on a rock in the little stream that runs beside the road we live on, with its head immersed in the water. It looked for all the world as if it was trying to drown itself. It had an oddly bloated, sausage-like appearance, but wasn’t completely dead, so I brought it home to see what was going on with it.
I admit that a big part of my reason for bringing it home, was that I suspected that it might not be what it seems. See, I have this hypothesis that caterpillars that are out-of-place and doing things that appear suicidally dangerous, really are trying to kill themselves[1]. What’s more, I suspect that a big reason why they would be doing this, is because they are fatally infected with a parasite. And even though it is too late to save themselves, if they can get themselves killed they can keep their parasites from hatching, and so save their nieces and nephews and cousins from getting attacked and infected by them later.
We have a lot of Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), and I’ve had pictures of one before. So here are a couple more. This first one was caught alive in the yard with a net on July 11, 2010:
We had a huge migration of these butterflies coming into our area for most of this past spring, and Sam netted this one for me on May 18, 2012. Like most butterflies, I had a hard time getting it to hold still while displaying the tops of its wings, but it did give this shot:
Sam caught this pretty butterfly with her insect net on May 18, 2012 as the beginning of a significant butterfly-catching spree.
Like so many other butterflies, its resting position is sitting with the wings closed, so we can’t see the top sides of the wings. But, the bottom sides are pretty distinctive (and quite pretty) too. This is certainly one of the Sulfurs (genus Colias, and after careful comparison of the exact shapes of the spots I believe it is a male Clouded Sulfur, Colias philodice.
I found this little ant-like creature on the road while pushing my bike up the hill. She caught my eye because she didn’t look quite right for an ant. For one thing, she was redder than other local ants I’ve seen. For another, thing, her head and abdomen didn’t quite look right to be a local ant (the head was too broad, and the abdomen too conical). And for a third thing, she was pacing along in a fairly deliberate manner, and not scurrying in a random-walk pattern the way that individual ants usually do.
We had four or five of these flying around the house in early May, and I caught this one on May 13, 2012. They were similar to the standard housefly, except they were about 50% longer and broader, noticeably more black, and four or five times noiser than a housefly.
While we were netting aquatic life in the pond west of the house on May 6, 2012, we turned up a number of things that were not arthropods. Like this little fellow.
I’m not quite sure whether this is a young specimen of one of the 45 species of freshwater mussels that are known to live in Michigan (and ultimately get to be several inches across), or an adult “pea clam” which never get much bigger than this. It is certainly a bivalve mollusc, though, which includes all manner of clams, mussels, scallops, oysters, and similar creatures. All of these have two-part, hinged shells that they can close up to defend themselves, and that are made up mostly of calcium carbonate (calcite and/or aragonite). The vast majority of bivalves live in the ocean, where there is more dissolved calcium available in the water (which makes it easier for them to grow thick shells in the ocean). The freshwater clams I’ve seen generally have thinnish shells, which makes sense given that they would have a harder time acquiring enough calcium to make them.
At work, there is a parking-lot light over the door that I normally use to go into the building. This light draws a fair number of moths. On May 5, 2012, this one kind of caught my eye, both because its reddish-brown color didn’t really blend in well with the gray concrete it was resting on, and because of the odd way that its hindwings stuck out to the side while its forewings were tented over its back. It was still there that evening when I was on my way home, so I popped it into a bottle that I carry for just this sort of purpose, and brought it home for photographs.
On May 6, 2012 we were back at the pond in the woods, catching small aquatic things[1]. One of which was this:
It’s a Leech!. OK, it’s not an arthropod, but it is an invertebrate, and we caught it while looking for arthropods. And you all want to see this one anyway, right?
This particular leech varied from a bit under an inch long, to almost three inches. That’s because they are very extensible.
I’d debated whether or not to run these pictures, as they are fairly old (July 3, 2009) and were taken with my old point-and-shoot camera. They are good enough for ID, though, and particularly show the distinctive white spots on its wings. In this case, the white spots are raised and almost look like tiny colonies of white mold.
