Insect Picture of the Day

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Well, it’s Friday again, and that means it’s time for another spider!

I had a nice phidippus picture ready to go for today, but yesterday Troy Belding sent me this amazing photograph of a green lynx spider, peucetia viridans, from his yard down in Houston, Texas. This is a male–VERY much so, as identified by the long, rosebud-tipped pedipalps.

Lynx spiders are extremely adaptable. Sometimes they’ll hunt prey by chasing it down, other times they’ll hang out on a flower and wait for prey to ambush. Entomologists say they are voracious predators, but their value in your garden is sort of a wash because while they are really good at eating pest species, they are also really good at eating beneficial species.

They certainly are cute, either way!

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Out of a desire to keep a family-friendly tone to this site, I have been forced to completely change the writeup for today’s photo, without any mention of the s-e-x word. The new writeup goes as follows:

The gr’opper on top is garrotting the gr’opper on the bottom to death.

The gr’opper on top belongs to an elite caste of geisha ninja gr’oppers and has spent years of her life honing her body into a living weapon. It is said they can pass unseen through crowds, run tirelessly for hours, and wait motionless for days until their unsuspecting prey passes by. Then they drop from above dealing swift death with exotic weapons, secret poisons, or even their bare hands. In this photo, the assassin gr’opper is wearing ashiko, or foot claws. This weapon was thought for years to be only a tool for climbing, but as you can clearly see here they are also useful in helping the assassin maintain a solid grip on her prey as she slowly throttles the life out of him.

The gr’opper underneath is the self-styled “Daimyo” Inago-sama, one of the infamous “grasshoppeer underlords” of Tokyo’s inner-city crime rings. Inago-sama is the bad guy here. He was single-handedly responsible for running larva-labor sweatshops throughout Japan and Thailand, and also had a major influence in the Black Flag smuggling industry. It is estimated that over a third of all recreational insecticide usage in Tokyo is supplied by this gr’opper and his connections.

Okay, okay, I gotta draw the line there. It’s one thing to sanitize the facts and another thing entirely to just make crap up. Here’s what you gotta know about this photo:

1. The gr’opper on top is actually male.
2. The gr’opper on bottom is actually female.
3. They are doing it.

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This is one last bee picture from the zinnias at my father-in-law’s house. This bee was maybe 8mm long and was very shy. I spent several minutes stalking it, and this was the best picture I was able to get of it.

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This little bug really worked the macro feature on my camera as hard as possible. I noticed I had a gnat on my hand after taking some photos down in the grass, and took a picture of it.

Turns out it’s not a gnat at all, but a bark louse. Bark lice are not part of order mallophaga, or chewing lice, which means this little critter was not interested in my hand (or hair) as a food source or nesting site. I think it was just taking a rest. When you’re that small, the world is a very big place!

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This fly is a bit larger than a housefly. It is a member of family sarcophagidae, which is greek for “flesh eater”. The adult flies actually only eat sugary liquids like nectar, sap and spilled soda pop. The genus is so named because sarcophagidae maggots are meat eaters.

Sarcophagidae share superfamily Oestroidea with blowflies, a more famous fly with flesh-eating larvae. Sarcophagidae have dull coloration while blowflies have a beautiful metallic sheen.

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This is a tiger fly taking a break from hunting gnats to clean its legs. Years ago I kept several jumping spiders in terrariums on my desk, and I got quite good at catching tiger flies.

Here’s how you do it: Get a clear plastic cup and hold it over the fly so that sunlight falls on the fly through the cup. This defeats the fly’s ability to see the cup and identify it as a threat. Gently lower the cup over the fly. When you are about an inch away from covering the fly, it will be able to see the sides of the cup coming down, and it will take off in the only direction it thinks is safe: towards the sun. The fly will actually fly up into your cup. Quickly drop the cup the rest of the way, slip an envelope under it and you have a neatly trapped fly.

The interesting thing is that tiger flies will panic for a few seconds and then calm down, and as long as you keep the open end of the cup pointed away from the sun, the fly will probably stay in the cup even if you remove the covering envelope. I once caught nine tiger flies in one cup using this method.

Tiger flies are aggressive and carnivorous, however. The flies began attacking each other immediately, and by the time I got back inside, there were only two survivors, sitting on opposite sides of the cup happily eating the dead.

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Can you spot the Polyphylla decemlineata in this picture?

This poplar tree in my back yard has had far more than its share of indignities. Stripped almost entirely clean of bark by an unsupervised puppy desperate for a chew toy, it surprised us all by surviving. Here it faces its next challenge: being snacked on by a ten-lined june bug.

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Meet platycryptus undatus, one of the most easily recognizable jumping spiders. This is a female, which you can easily tell by the lovely eyelashes visible in the high-resolution version. Actually, you can tell by looking at the short little pedipalps below her eyes. On a male these would be noticeably larger.

Platycryptus is easily identifiable by a wavy stripe down the back. Just like driver license photos, however, this candid shot turned out much more striking than the pictures I took for ID. This picture reveals just why I like jumping spiders so much: they are very interactive creatures. It is possible that she is looking at her reflection in the lens and warily studying it to see if that other female needs to be run off, but it is equally likely that she is merely looking at the camera itself.

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This unusual little bumblebee surprised me with its nearly albino coloring. All the bumblebees I am familiar with are yellow and black. It didn’t mind the camera but certainly didn’t want to stop gathering pollen to pose for a picture.

Some internet research reveals that these bees aren’t at all uncommon, and in fact I was once again unable to narrow the identification to anything closer than genus bombus, which contains all bumblebees.

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This dangerous-looking little bee is actually a harmless hover fly. It’s flashy coloration mimics that of bees and wasps, hopefully to encourage predators to look elsewhere for dinner.

The experts over at bugguide tell me this fly eats pollen and nectar, but beyond that all I know about this critter is that it isn’t shy for the camera at all. I was able to take a picture with the camera nearly within 3cm before it flew off.