There are quite a number of medium-sized brown crab spiders about, we regularly find them on flowers, on the side of the house, hiding in crevices, and similar places. Like this one, that we found on the kids’ plastic slide in the yard in the spring, on May 30, 2010:
The fact that she was so big so early in the year is a pretty clear indication that she overwintered as a nearly-mature adult. She probably spent the winter in the “subnivean environment”, the thin layer between the snow and the soil where it isn’t quite freezing, and the grass props up the snow enough that creatures down there can move around.
I’ve got two moths this time, both the same species but photographed a couple of years apart. First up is one we saw through the window glass on July 31, 2010. Unfortunately, these are very flighty moths, so when I tried to go outside to get pictures of it from the other side, it flew off. So, for a while now all I’ve had were these pictures of its underside.
Here’s a porch light moth from almost exactly a year ago (July 3, 2011). From the pose, the size, and the kind of wavy dark patterning on the wings, I think this is one of the Zales[1], a large genus of common moths.
I photographed this one trying to hide its head under our house siding on August 1, 2010.
Eventually, I got it to flutter down to a patch of concrete where I could get pictures that included the head, with the big feathery antennae making it fairly clear that it was a male:
I’ve been accumulating pictures of tiny little moths for a while now. And, as I’ve noted in the past, these little guys are pretty numerous and really hard to get good IDs on. So, this post is devoted to all the little moths that I don’t have many good pictures of, don’t know what their caterpillars were like, and probably won’t be able to identify beyond the family.
Well, OK, maybe I have an idea of what this first one is, that I photographed on April 27, 2010. It looks like an Aspen Leaf Blotch Miner Moth, but the only reason I know this is because I raised one up from a larva once, so I knew what its food plant was. And we have a lot of aspen trees around the house that were heavily infested with leaf miners that year.
There were actually a couple of these good-sized brown moths on our siding near the porch light on August 1, 2010. The first one was positioned where I could get a dorsal shot,
while the second one was visible from the side.
Continuing the long series of moths that were attracted to our porch light, here’s a gray, mottled one from July 4, 2011. Based on the spots that I circled on the wings, this appears to be one of the very large family of owlet moths.
It most closely resembles The Brother, Raphia frater. And, as with so many moths, it has a somewhat whimsical common name that nobody is quite sure why it received. There doesn’t seem to be anything obviously “brotherly” about them, and the discoverer is no longer available to ask about it.
Sandy and Sam found a nondescript brown pupa buried in the garden in spring of 2010, so they brought it in the house and put it in a jar to see what would come out. And on June 2, 2010, this is what we got:
We once had a small potted orange tree as a houseplant. But while it started out well, over time it started doing poorly. Some branches would die back, and others would keep producing buds but the buds would wither and fall off before becoming leaves. Looking more closely, we noticed that the buds, leaf bases, and surfaces of the developing fruits had a thin coating of webbing, andon October 18, 2010 I photographed the culprits:
So, my daughters used to have a pair of pet rats, that we were given as adults. They were very good pets, gentle with the girls and interesting for them to play with. The thing is, though, their coats were always kind of rough and had a bit of what we thought was dandruff. As they got older[1], their hair seemed to get thinner, and in the fall of 2011 they started getting rather itchy. And then on December 3, 2011, we looked at one of them particularly closely because he had developed some sores on his shoulder. At this point, Sandy noticed that one of the pieces of “dandruff” was moving. And then another. And then another. And then we got out the microscope, and found that what he had, was these:
