Monday’s post will be up, but late. My laptop started crashing on my repeatedly and I wiped its OS and reinstalled everything. This includes Photoshop, so at the moment I have no way of getting at the insect pictures for tomorrow. I should have everything reinstalled and ready to go by lunchtime tomorrow, though, so hopefully I’ll have a post up for you by then.
THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!
NOTE: Do NOT click on the link above for the desktop if you are arachnophobic. I love spiders and it still gives me the willies. Fair warning: fangs are visible.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled Spider Friday picture to give you this photo of a orb weaver (or “garden spider”), species unknown. Why? Because I am writing this at 11:43pm on Thursday night, and this photo was taken just minutes ago. She’s about a centimeter long from eyes to tail, call it 3cm legspan. And yes, she is missing two right legs. (That practically makes her an insect, right?)
Last night I opened my sliding door to the deck, and discovered that this beautiful garden spider had set up shop right across it! Reaching up from the barbecue to above the sliding glass door, her web is free of the door, allowing me to open it and take photographs from just inches away. To encourage this behavior, I turned on the porch light to attract plenty of food and went to bed. Tonight, she came back! She’s torn down the tatters of her old web, leaving the three main guy wires (one up/left to the eaves, one up/right above the sliding glass door, and one down/left to the barbecue.). Update: I just checked on her and she’s nowhere to be seen. Hopefully she’ll be back in a bit to weave a new orb on the bones of her old web.
I’m pretty sure this is Neoscona oaxacensis, the Western Spotted Orb Weaver; these are common out here, and I actually have a gorgeous photo of N. oaxacensis that I was going to run next week. Now it will have to wait until the 3rd, since today’s scheduled post (the other side of last week’s Argiope trifasciata) got bumped to next week.
Sorry for the missed posts yesterday and today. I fixed the problem, but rather than triple up, I’m just going to resume where we left off. I apologize for the inconvenience.
I just noticed that InsectPOD didn’t update as expected. I’ll try to fix it as soon as I can.
Spider wasp!
Antelope Island is absolutely heaving with spiders. Seriously, in some parts there are a hundred spiders in an area the size of a car. And they’re not tiny, they’re huge garden spiders. It’s positively amazing. Talking with the guides in the visitor’s center, they handed me a flier saying that the island is famous for its huge population of Neoscona oaxacensis. We chatted for a bit and one guide asked, “What eats them?”
There is, of course, a thriving bird population on the island, but as you can see, there is also a booming business in spider wasps! This lovely lady has paralyzed a male N. oaxacensis and is dragging him down to his doom to her burrow. The paralyzing poison is permanent; the spider will never recover. In the burrow she will lay a single egg on the spider and leave him to his doom actually that’s correct, so to his doom.
The egg will hatch, and the larva will bite the spider and begin sucking out juices like a tick. Once it has grown a bit, it will burrow into the spider and begin eating it from the inside out. The larva is careful to avoid vital organs to keep the spider alive as long as possible—this process takes weeks—and then, just before emerging as a fully-fledged spider wasp, it eats the last of the organs, killing the spider.
If it’s any consolation, the spider feels nothing during all this.
I had a fun time categorizing this picture today. It’s filed under spiders and SFA (”Safe For Arachnophobes”) at the same time.
I love damselflies. They’re less skittish than dragonflies, and often consent to being photographed quite intrusively. I mean really intrusively. Here’s a closeup from the desktop version:
Happy Friday the 13th! What better day could it be for Spider Friday!
I was certain that Argiope trifasciata was well-represented here on InsectPOD, but after a search of the site I am astonished to find I have no pictures of this spider at all! Well let’s rectify this immediately, shall we?
I thought that Argiope meant “Silver something-or-other”, since “arg” is the Latin prefix for silver. And this spider certainly could pass for a silver-something-or-other!
However, this is a “false cognate”–a word that looks like a completely different word, leading you to assume the wrong meaning. In this case, the falseness of the cognate is very, very subtle, because while the word does indeed mean something very close to silver, it means it for a completely different reason.
Ready to geek out linguistically? I knew it! Seriously, I love you guys.
Okay, now watch. “arg” is a Latin prefix meaning “silver”. But “-iope” is a Greek suffix! I should point out that it is very rude to mix Greek and Latin word parts in polite company. “-iope” means “face”. (So for example, “calli-” is Greek for “pretty”, therefore “calliope” means “pretty face”. Try this as a pet name for your girlfriend sometime. If it works, please email me immediately.) So if “-iope” means face… guess what “arg-” means in Greek?
Hint: LOOK at this spider’s face. What color is it?
Hint, hint: Okay, okay, you’re too clever by half if you think it means silver. It doesn’t. Though it would be a wonderful bit of irony if it were.
It’s close, though. Arg means “bright, white, or glistening”. Now, this spider happens to be white from eyes to spinnerets (but only on her back; we’ll look at her belly next Friday!) but all of the Argiope species seem to be white on their front half, or “face”. So there you have it: Argiope: “white face”.
Looking at other Banded Ganden Spiders on the Internet, this one really does seem to be some kind of albino freak. Most bandeds have yellow and black stripes across the back of their abdomens, not white on white on still more white like this gal.
I took this photo last Sunday on Antelope Island. There are so many spiders on the island that there really aren’t that many flies. The spiders have switched to eating heartier fare: grasshoppers and dragonflies. If you look closely, you’ll notice that this fine spider is missing her right front leg (lower left in this picture, she’s facing downwards). There’s a very good chance that she tangled with a grasshopper big enough to kick her, literally, to pieces.
Last Sunday I went to Antelope Island for some bug photos. As we were hiking down a hill, I noticed a HUGE ant scurrying along the ground. I leaned in for a closer look. She was not behaving like an ant. Instead of stumbling around mostly blind, she was clearly darting from cover to cover, and her motion was more stop/start, stop/start than the usual steady gate of a worker ant.
Oh, and did I mention she was HUGE? Over a centimeter long! I thought maybe it was an ant queen, or a spider, or perhaps some soldier ant who had overdone the steriods or something.
Ken Wolgemuth over at BugGuide quickly produced the answer: it’s not an ant at all: it’s a wasp.
Velvet ants are not ants at all! They are still members of Order Hymenoptera (making them distant cousins to ants) but velvet ants are actually wasps. The females are wingless; this little lady was just doing her, well, whatever it is that wingless wasps do on Antelope Island. Wander around and dart from cover to cover, mostly.
This Gr’opper was hanging out on Antelope Island last Sunday, which was convenient for me as I happened to be there as well. So was my camera! I mean, what are the odds of that all happening at once?
I don’t have a solid ID for you on this one, sorry. I think it might be Conozoa sulcifrons, but the eyes of every other C. sulcifrons I’ve seen are flat and monochrome. This grasshopper has eyes that look like it just asked a Magic 8-ball if it shouldn’t have dropped that third hit of acid.
It also has blue legs (check out the bigger image for a closeup). I have no idea what this means. Perhaps 95°F/36°C is frigid for a grasshopper.
From inspecting it as a layperson, I’m certain it’s in Suborder Caelifera (grasshoppers). I’m pretty sure it’s in Family Acridiidae, which literally means “acidic” or “bitter” and could be a reference to the “gr’opper tobacco” they spit up when handled. Family Acridiidae has the common name “short-horned grasshoppers”, and this grasshopper does indeed have relatively short antennae. I’m fairly certain it’s in Subfamily Oedipodinae, which literally means “swollen footed” but again has a common name which is more descriptive: “banded-winged grasshoppers”. This grasshopper does indeed have dark wings with a light tan band across them.
Lastly, I think it might belong to Tribe Sphingonotini, which is a more finely cut form of pasta than Sphingonoli. Okay, fine, notum kind of means the “shoulder area” of a bug: the front dorsal region of the thorax. Sphing-, or Sphinx-, of course, means “asking riddles of travelers and devouring them if they get it wrong”, and—Okay, FINE. It means “tightly bound” or “squeezed”. Sphingonotini is the Tribe-form of Sphingonotum which means “squeezed shoulder region”. If you look at the closeup image (or the full-sized larger image), the notum is indeed pinched in, almost like the grasshopper were wearing a scarf.
They do that, you know. Wear scarves, I mean. In fact, they—Oh come on, you guys. If I can’t make stuff up now and again, then SCREW SCIENCE.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Pogonomyrmex barbatus, the bearded harvester ant. These adorable little creatures harvest seeds and move them back to their nests, working like busy little, well, ants.
In addition to looking lovely, P. barbatus sports some of the most toxic venom of any insect on the planet. 10-20 stings would be enough to kill a small mouse, which is a good thing since mice are attracted to all those yummy seeds stored in the nest.
Harvester ants pose no danger to humans, even though their venom is targeted specifically towards our nervous system (well, all vertebrates, really). The reason is simple: it would take hundreds upon hundreds of stings to harm a human, and after the first sting or two humans get the heck out of there. Harvester ant stings hurt like the devil!
My Dad is a water operator, and his job requires him to crawl around in water meter pits, dig up trenches and repair pipes. All of which, from an ant’s point of view, basically means “tear up ant hills and then roll around in them.” As a result, Dad is an unintentional expert on ants (and snakes and spiders, but that’s a story for another day). When I asked him about harvester ants, he shrugged and had this to say about them:
“They know how to put the hurt on you.”
This hasn't happened in forever: Today's InsectPOD gives me THE WILLIES. Click for creepy garden spider ON MY PORCH: http://bit.ly/9XqhWk
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