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:
This is an early-flying (May 16, 2010) moth that came to our porch light, but this time instead of being on the siding, it was up under the eaves.
Following the suggestion of Steve Nanz on BugGuide, it looks a lot like the members of the genus Hydriomena. These are geometrid moths, with inch-worm caterpillars, and unfortunately there are 56 species in North America which all look a lot alike.
This pretty large, mottled moth with pale green coloration on much of the wings was on our house siding on July 3, 2011.
On BugGuide, shotguneddie gave me an ID of the Green Leuconycta, Leuconycta diphteroides. These are often a lot greener than this, but are also often even less green, although they pretty much always have the dark trapezoid going most of the way across the middle of each forewing.
This rather elegant white moth with light-brown wing edging was on our house siding on June 1, 2010.
Brandon Woo on BugGuide pointed me to the Cycnia genus of tiger moths, which certainly does look likely. As for which one, it is really too bad that I didn’t get it to spread its wings so that we could see the abdomen, because several members of this genus have bright orange abdomens with black spots. Unfortunately, even this side shot doesn’t show the abdomen.
This small silver moth was on our house siding near the porch light on May 17, 2010. It was trying to hide its head under the siding.
This is the best picture I could get of the head. Unfortunately, when I tried to nudge it around a bit so I could see the head and side better, it flew off.
Here’s another couple of bugs that were caught in the little pond in the woods behind our house on April 22, 2012. Sam caught them in the same sweep of the net that turned up the Water Scorpion from last week. They were pretty visible as they squirmed and hopped around inside the net. And once I got them back to the house and into a little dish of water, they started backstroking around vigorously
These are Backswimmers, in the family Notonectidae. They are pretty distinctive, because they swim around upside down with their feet pointing up.
The Banded Woolly Bear is one of the most well-known caterpillars in North America (and here’s a photo of one of them that I ran a few years back)
But, what does it turn into? [1] We decided to find out first-hand this past spring, so Sam caught a couple of banded woolly bears that had come out of hibernation during a warm spell in March 2012. We put them in a jar with some grass, and within about a week they both spun cocoons.
On April 22, 2012 we all went to see what we could find at a small pond in the woods behind our house. At one point, Sam took our insect net and randomly swept it through a weedy patch near the shore, and asked me to look to see what was in it. There was a lot of dead plant debris caught in the net, so I reached in to pull it out – and saw that some of it wasn’t dead grass at all.
Here’s another one that I photographed in my office on July 26, 2011. But, it was actually found dead in the back window of a car some months earlier, sometime around February[1]. And who knows how long it might have been there, it was completely dried out and had probably been rattling around since at least the previous summer.
