Insect Picture of the Day

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Reader Joe “b13″ Biondi sends in this ladybug photo.

Wow… I just… wow.

It’s perfect for a wallpaper. Click here for the the full-size (1400×1024) image with his url burned onto it for your desktop-photo pleasure.

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Happy Spider Friday, everyone! Andrew Lin sends us this picture of a tiny, unidentified spider crawling on a bit of ginger in his kitchen. If you look at the larger resolution you can get a feel for the scale of this spider–it’s probably only a few millimeters long. The white bits are ginger shoots sprouting up from the root.

I don’t have an ID for this spider, but I would be unsurprised if it were either an orb weaver or a grass spider. Probably an orb weaver; grass spiders are “running crab spiders” and though this spider has the sleek body, the legs have that mechanical “gantry” look that says “I am all about hanging upside down all day waiting for prey to come to me, not running around like some savage.” (Little known fact: orb weavers are the aristocratic snobs of spiderkind.)

Come to think of it, Andrew also sent in another picture of this spider, of it dropping from the ceiling onto the ginger… and I don’t think crab spiders use their silk to rappel, so that would further confirm the identification. (As if the sneer weren’t enough.)

Oh! I almost forgot! I strongly suspect that this spider was the inspiration for this webcomic strip, also drawn by Andrew.

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Reader Mark White sent in this great photo of a dragonfly he stalked at his daughter’s soccer game. He doesn’t know much about it, and sadly neither do I. I suspect it’s a skimmer, but that’s about like identifying a man by saying “I suspect he was right-handed.”

When I identify a bug, I often start with coloration, and this is why I am so obviously inexpert. Coloration is often meaningless for identifying species–for example, what color is Homo sapiens? Identifying dragonflies is a very complicated affair, but fortunately it is indeed largely based on coloration. Unfortunately, it is a very complicated affair. You and I look at that picture and see a yellow dragonfly with brown spots on its wings. A biologist needs to know a lot more: what color is the face? eyes? thorax? wings? And not just the coloration, but the pattern as well. Oh, and not just the wing, but the parts of the wing: what color is the pterostigma?

(Umm… yeah. I had to look it up, too. It’s the tiny bit on the front edge of the wing almost at the tip. In this photo it is reflecting light and almost looks pink.)

Anyway, once you know what all those colors mean, you can identify your dragonfly. Oh, but wait. According to bugguide, dragonflies can change color: right after emerging, they are sometimes nearly colorless and change coloration several times over the first few days. Some change color when they die. Still others change color with temperature (insert novelty coffee-mug slogan joke here).

So yeah. It’s mainly based on coloration, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. As far as I can tell, it’s a yellow dragonfly with brown spots on its wings.

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You know how dogs will sometimes hunker down and plant their butts on the carpet and then drag themselves across the floor by their front legs to scratch their bums? Isn’t that gross? That’s not what this gr’opper is doing. She’s laying eggs.

Thanks again to mARK bLOORE for another great insect photo!

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Merry Christmas from insectpod.com! I apologize for running a spider on a non-Friday but this was the only red and green bug in my entire photo collection. This photo comes from Joe, whom you might know as b13 on the comments sections here. Joe has a photo blog at b13fotographica.blogspot.com that you absolutely must check out, especially if you like ridiculously cute border collie puppies with your bugs!

Joe doesn’t have an ID for us, but says this spider is smaller than his pinky fingernail. I have already established that I am not any good at any identification, but I have also established that I don’t let this inadequacy slow me down. I think it’s a garden spider of some kind. The front legs are long enough to be a crab spider, and there are a few crab spiders that are shaped like this. However, spiky hairy legs are quite uncommon in crab spiders.

Ah! Bugguide.net to the rescue! While browsing through Genus Araneus, I stumbled upon a spider with identical coloration. I think this is Araneus cingulatus, which is indeed an orb weaver.

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We’ve had a couple of stinkbug photos on the site now, but none quite so beautiful as this one sent in by reader Chris Sanner. I am pretty sure this is a jade stinkbug, Banasa euchlora. Chris took this photo in northern Virginia around Thanksgiving of this year. Adult jade stinkbugs overwinter, and if you search the web you’ll see most human interaction with them is in the winter when they come in to get warm.

These little critters are usually found on or near Red Cedar, which is the same color of green with the same color of waxy white specks. The crypsis, or camouflage, is quite astonishing, as you can see from this photo taken by Patrick Coin.

I don’t know if they eat the red cedar or just live on it; all I could find out was that the cedar is their “host plant”. I did find out, however, that their particular mixture of defensive aldehydes smells like “armpit and gasoline“, according to gomichan over on LiveJournal.

I love this picture. I flipped it and cropped it differently (to provide a uniform background). The result is a pretty decent desktop wallpaper. As always, ping me if you want it in a resolution other than 1280×960.

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Now this is a strange one: this caterpillar photo was taken by reader Athena Fritz in Seattle, WA, USA… last week. I think this is a bagworm caterpillar, or at least some form of Springtime foliage-eating caterpillar. I know Seattle is green year-round but I am surprised to find such a critter alive in December at that latitude!

[Edit: Athena scolded me after posting this. She had indeed sent me some pictures taken in December, but I got them mixed up. This photo was taken in mid October, which downgrades this caterpillar from utterly bizarre to merely very improbable. Also, she points out that they live in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state, which is apparently not in Seattle. In fact, she insists that it’s clear on the other side of the state. When I pressed her on whether or not she lived far enough away from Seattle to not vote a straight Eco ticket, however, she just coughed nervously and changed the subject. Sorry for the mix-up, Athena, and thanks again for the photo!]

She says she found it on the floor in the house, which could mean that it was tracked in from anywhere, including having been refrigerated for a long time in some human storage facility. It’s a puzzler!

Any Seattlites out there know more about this one? Who knows, maybe it’s actually a common critter up there?

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Here’s another image from Andrew Lin, of a praying mantis on his screen. He says she’s on 2mm screen mesh, and my best eyeballing puts her at about 11cm (4.5″) long. I don’t have a date for this image but it came in a batch of images taken in October 2006 in Sacramento, CA, USA.

As you can see, this lovely lady is just starting to “show”. October is the end of mantis season in Utah; I can easily see the mating and laying season extending into November in California.

Andrew says that this is the correct rotation for this image; she was content to stay head-down while he photographed her. Interesting–look at the larger image, and you can see her tarsi folded up so that her feet rest against her femurs, making a little triangle structure out of her legs to rest on in that pose.

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It’s interesting to see which bugs seem to recur on this site. Reader Mark White sends in this spider picture of a funnel-web weaver near his home.

As a reminder, this is not the Australian “Funnel Weaver” spider, but rather the harmless Funnel-Web Weaver found throughout the world.

I don’t have a size for this spider but they are typically 1-2cm long. This one is female and looknig very well fed and hydrated–and probably about to lay eggs–from the size  of her abdomen. The thing to watch for is the curvature of the abdomen. See how it bows upward? That part of the body is essentially a giant sac of nutrients and water; it works a lot like a camel’s hump. In a less-pampered spider, the top of the abdomen would be nearly flat or even, in some extreme cases, bowed in.

I have also observed that this curvature is a good predictor of caution and bravery. A fat spider like this will flee at the first sign of danger because she has nothing to lose by running away. A spider with a shrunken abdomen, on the other hand, will be much more likely to exhibit aggression as she is closer to the brink of starvation. This spider would run away if a hornet landed in her web, but I have seen funnel-web weavers come flying out to attack dangerous prey. Invariably they are spiders that haven’t eaten in a while.

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Reader mARK bLOORE sends in this picture of a dragonfly at rest on his hand. I find this fascinating. I know how to coax damselflies onto a finger, but how do you trick a dragonfly into landing on your hand? Same way only bigger, I guess.

This dragonfly looks particularly sinister. If the insect world had black helicopters, this little guy would be it, no?

Perhaps that’s why it landed on mARK’s hand: it was trying to decide whether or not to eat him.