While this was photographed on July 26, 2011, I actually found it some time earlier. It had died on the sidewalk on campus sometime earlier that summer, and had been sitting around in my office until I happened to bring my camera to work and take pictures of it. I didn’t want to risk taking it home, because it had dried out and trying to carry it was really likely to break off legs.
I found this late in the season, on November 19, 2011. It was dragging itself slowly down the hall next to the big windows in the building I work in, so I scooped it up and brought it home.
I originally thought that this was a male, mainly because it was smaller than the other spiders I normally saw on those windows, and it appeared to be wandering around. But, after this posting first went up, I was advised in the comments that spider expert Dr. Richard Bradley said it was actually female, of a different species than I had thought it was. Thanks, Dr. Bradley!
We found this black-and-red ichneumon wasp hanging around our porch light on August 1, 2010. Here it is in long form so that you can see the whole thing:
She’s probably Cryptus albitarsis, the most common of the ichneumon wasps that have this particular coloration. And we can be sure this is a “she”, because the males don’t have those long ovipositors.
I found this unusually large jumping spider on one of the roof support pillars on our front porch on July 18, 2011. He was a big, black, furry, sinister-looking specimen, over a centimeter long.
Normally, jumping spiders are kind of cute, but this one has more the air of the insect murderer that he actually is.
When Sam caught this one in the yard on June 13, 2010, I thought it was going to be an easy ID. Pretty good-sized caterpillar, distinctive-looking striping; should be a piece of cake, right?
But, it turns out to be not so easy. I went all through Caterpillars of Eastern North America, searched BugGuide, posted it on BugGuide for ID, did Google searches on variations of “black caterpillar yellow orange stripes”, and even tried dropping the actual picture into the Google Reverse Image Search to find “similar” photographs[1]. Nothing. The pictures have been sitting on BugGuide since early October 2011, and nobody has even made so much as a guess yet, so it’s obviously a lot harder than I thought.
Sam found this lichen-covered rock with an inchworm on in on June 6, 2010. I’m pretty sure that the inchworm wasn’t eating the lichen, because the camouflage is all wrong.
It’s disguised as a twig, and the way it is posing, it would look pretty darned convincing if it were on a tree. But, being on a rock with a blue-gray lichen, it stands out like a sore thumb.
I found this fairly large moth (the body was about an inch long) hanging out on the ceiling of our garage, right over the spot where I park our truck. I collected it for photographs on November 22, 2011. But, it had actually been there for some time (maybe weeks) before I realized it was a moth and not just a smudge of dirt.
We just caught another one of these over the weekend, so it is probably time to post this.
On May 21, 2010 Sam and I found this hanging on the side of my father-in-law’s hunting blind in our back yard. I recognized it as a caterpillar that I’d originally posted way back in 2008, but hadn’t reared to adulthood to positively confirm what it was.
Sandy caught this on September 18, 2011 while sweep-netting in the grass on our septic drain field. It was about an inch long, not an unusual size for a caterpillar.
One thing that we noted right away, though, is that it wasn’t actually a caterpillar. If we count the prolegs on the abdomen, we see that there are eight pairs. If this were a butterfly or moth caterpillar, it would only have no more than five pairs of prolegs.
Sandy spotted these on September 10. They were on a Tag Alder bush beside the trail going to the back of our property.
I recognize these, because I’ve posted about them before. They are Wooly[1] Alder Aphids, Prociphilus tessellatus. And, these particular aphids were being tended and closely guarded by some good-sized ants (which were after the honeydew that the aphids secrete):