Last week, Sam brought me this jumping spider in her blue polyethylene sand bucket. The bucket actually turned out to be a reasonably decent photographing stage, the spider couldn’t get a grip on the side walls and kept sliding back down to the bottom, where I could focus on it [1].
I found this bumblebee on her back by the side of the road, waving her legs feebly in the air. So, I popped her into a collection bottle and brought her home. She’d probably had a near-miss from a car that roughed her up and stunned her a bit, but doesn’t seem to have done any permanent damage.
Back in early March, I was walking through one of the buildings on campus, and happened to notice that somebody had dropped a tortilla chip on the floor. One of the “spicy” kinds, I think. It looked a bit odd, though, as if somebody had liberally coated it with black pepper. And then I noticed that the black dots weren’t pepper – they were moving. What’s more, they weren’t confined to the chip. There was a line of them going about a foot across the floor, to a tiny hole in the concrete at the base of the wall. It was, of course, tiny little ants. So, I put the ant-covered chip into a small bottle that I keep handy for such purposes, and brought them home to photograph.
So, I came home from work on March 12, and S_ says, “We found some bees in the house! We took some pictures for you!”, and I say, “Really? I thought it was still too early for bees to come out,” and Sam was bouncing around excitedly telling me that I had to see the pictures right now, so we turned on the camera and hit the button for the display screen, and this is what I saw:
Back at the end of February, S_ and Sam went out ice-fishing. When they were done and packing everything into the car to come home, Sam spotted a caterpillar crawling across the snow. So, she caught it and brought it home for me to see. It was a black-skinned, furry caterpillar, but the fur was in pretty rough shape, with most of the hairs knocked loose, and so it didn’t really have any distinguishing features. Some of the hairs were black, and some of them were more reddish-to-blond, but that’s about all that could be made out. It was clearly one of the “wooly bear” type caterpillars, but only about half the size of the most well-known type (the Banded Wooly Bear). It was most likely going to grow up to be one of the many species of Tiger Moths, but which one? So, we decided to raise it to adulthood to find out.
We put it in a jar along with some reasonably green grass that we dug out from under the snow, but it didn’t eat any of the grass. Instead, within two days it spun itself a cocoon and pupated. The cocoon was made out of a mixture of new silk and the caterpillar’s hairs, and was about twice as long and wide as the pupa that was faintly visible inside.
Sam spotted this insect on the side of the house on March 14, while we were out getting pictures “in the field” with the new camera[1]. It was about the size (about 1 mm wide and maybe 6 or 7 mm long) and shape of a grass seed stuck to the wall, which is probably what it was pretending to be. In fact, until I looked at it through the camera viewfinder (which gave quite a bit of magnification), I couldn’t quite be sure that it wasn’t a grass seed.
In early July, Sam and I were out fooling around with the insect nets. When we got back to the house, I was cleaning out the debris, and picked up a green oblong that was about the size and shape of an immature quackgrass seed. But then, it wiggled, and I realized it was actually a little green pupa. So, I put it in an insect cage to see what would emerge from it. I unfortunately dawdled too long over getting a photograph, and missed photographing the whole pupa. Here’s the skin, though:
And here’s what came out of it:
We caught this medium-sized orange dragonfly with an insect net in the unmowed part of the yard last summer. I put it into one of our collapsable insect cages for photographing, and it was mostly fairly willing to stay still and be photographed once it figured out that it couldn’t just fly off.
Thin green plant bug – Megaloceroea?
On July 20, Sam and I took a butterfly net off to try and catch a particularly large black butterfly that we’d been seeing alongside the road[1]. We didn’t find it, but when we got home, we found that we’d accidentally caught this bug in the net without realizing it:
We’ve had a tarantula for some time[1], and her primary food is crickets. In the summer, we mostly just catch crickets outside for her to eat, but in the winter that doesn’t work so well and we have to buy them. The only local place to buy crickets is quite a long drive away and has kind of unpredictably irregular business hours, so S_ has decided it will be more convenient to just raise them herself (on which there will probably be more later). So, to get a starting population, she mail-ordered 500 crickets[2]. When they arrived and she transferred them to their new home, she found that there was something else in the box too:
