Month: November 2020

Insect Top 40

Last Sunday I decided to make a list of my favorite insects from the year. I was going to stop at 31 and reveal one for every day of December, but then I realized there were 40 days left in 2020 that day. So I made an Insect Top 40.

Coming in at #40 is this Cylindromyia genus fly. I realized I’d taken pictures of them last year, thinking they were wasps. Good job, little one. Your mimicry worked on this human, so it probably works on some predators as well.

Next up is this Western Tiger Swallowtail. I made a rating system based on the quality of the photo and the uniqueness of the story behind the insect, with bonus points for insects that seemed rare or largely undocumented.

Some of these pictures will be repeats from past posts. This nymph shield-back katydid, #38, is one I think I shared last spring. I saw them for a week or two in late April at this young stage, but I didn’t see any after that. The adult, I think, is brown and the swoosh on the cheek becomes the edge of its “shield.”

Today’s finalist is a mountain leafhopper, Colladonus montanus. The picture above is slightly different than the one I used on the playing cards, below, and shows the blue tinge below the collar better, I think.

I just had a new shipment of Yard Cards delivered today. They’re so fun! I plan to give away dozens of decks, and I have two local (like within five blocks) stores lined up to sell them, so it will be fun to spread the word about the diversity waiting to be found in any yard or park.

Stay curious!

Crazy Hair Day

To the naked eye, this insect was a floundering flyer with some fuzzy funny business going on around its head. Sit back a little farther from your screen to see what I mean.

I’ll admit, I didn’t know what kind of fly this was. I suspected it was male, because flies with flamboyant antennae usually use them to detect females. But there’s more than antennae going on here … there are three types of oversized appendages on this guy, who turns out to be a mosquito. First, the stick-like thing projecting straight in front of the insect is its proboscis. It’s using it to test the plant to see if there’s anything tasty there.

Next, there are two pairs of feathery headgear. The ones on the outside from this top view are the actual antennae. If this was a female, the antennae would sense carbon dioxide, looking for a blood source. Male mosquito antennae can pick up vibrations, to detect the specific hum of a female of their species. The other two protuberances, which bend back over the head in the top picture, are palpi. These are mouthparts that have escaped the mouth area entirely, and risen to remarkable heights. From what I’ve read the palpi pick up smells, such as female pheromones.

That’s all for this week. It’s been chillier and wetter so the insect spotting is slowing down, but I’ll keep looking. Cheers!

Sawfly Seen Near Seesaw

Last Friday I met a friend and her four-year-old at a local playground. It was a cold but sunny day and as we were wrapping up, an orange insect landed on my jacket. I was pretty sure it was a fly, but I snapped a few awkward pictures of it on my right upper arm anyway.

At home, I noticed the antennae weren’t fly-like, and neither were the eyes. But, to me, it didn’t look like a wasp either. Someone at BugGuide quickly identified it as a conifer sawfly, in the Diprionidae family. Well, I’d never seen a sawfly before, I thought, and researching them took me down a fascinating new system of trails!

Sawflies are a sort of (mostly) vegetarian, non-stinging wasp, and are in the wasp, bee and ant order, hymenoptera. They’re best known from their larval stage, because their caterpillar-like larvae have feeding frenzies on plants that humans care about. Also, the adults only live for a couple of days, so people don’t see much of them. They don’t have wasp waists, which makes them look more like flies, but they can have distinctive antennae. The conifer sawfly who visited me was female–the males of her family have amazing, feathered or “pectinate” antennae. As I perused various species, I realized I may have seen a sawfly before (warning: low image quality to follow).

On a camping trip in July, I’d seen this enigmatic creature. It wasn’t quite a fly or a grasshopper but it looked like both. Now, I think what I saw that day was also a sawfly. Compare the image of this Rhogogaster genus sawfly from Portland. By the way “sawfly” is not its name because, like me, people say “I saw a fly!” It’s because females have a toothed ovipositor that swings out, like a portable knife blade or saw. There are great pictures at the idTools website here.

One more thing to know: Like moth and butterfly caterpillars, sawfly larvae also have three sets of “true legs” up front, but they have six or more sets of stumpy prolegs as well, whereas lepidoptera have five or fewer proleg pairs.

Fall Flights

The insect above flew in front of me and landed on the street yesterday as I left the house. I thought it was a moth, and a boring one at that, but I leaned down to get a picture anyway. Turns out, it’s a caddisfly! With the help of iNaturalist, I’m fairly sure it’s in the Limnephilus genus, a northern caddisfly. The scientific name means “marsh loving,” so I’m curious how far this individual flew. The closest wetland is about a half mile away, but it could also have hatched from a more local, suburban pond.

I saw this lovely caddisfly at the arboretum last week. I think this one is in the same genus as the one in my neighborhood. You can see what look like little legs in front of its eyes. Those are sensory mouth appendages called palpi which, it turns out, are not very useful and are vestigial. Adult caddisflies don’t eat solids, and some don’t even drink. They’re in the Trichoptera scientific order, which means “hair wing,” and you can see that feature on the specimen above.

This little Stenus genus rove beetle is the only recent addition to my yard list. It was on a grass we recently planted at home, and may have hitchhiked from the garden center. There’s an interesting article at Monga Bay detailing how Stenus beetles can quickly extend the bottom part of their mouth to snap up prey.

The yard list is now at 268. I hope to add to it before the end of the year, but it will take some diligence.

	Scorpionfly! And a f… on A New York minute
	TickleHead on Hello yellow!
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	TickleHead on Red, Green and Blue

Ticklehead

micro adventures with a macro lens