Insect Picture of the Day

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Every so often I screw up¹. Julia Faelt sent this photo to me months ago. It was awesome, I wrote it up and published it and then forgot about it. Last week Julia wrote again, giving me further identification on the picture and telling me that if I really wanted to use the picture on the website, it would be okay. Well, wouldn’t she be surprised to see that I had already published it? I laughed and opened up InsectPOD and began crawling the archives. And this brings us back to the part where every so often I screw up.

This amazing spider photo comes to us from Finland. And since I screwed up, we actually have some ID, thanks to Julia’s frustration. I would have gone with Lycosidae, one of the wolf spiders, due to the shape of the carapace and the general size of the beastie. Julia’s first guess was Thomisidae, one of the crab spiders. An actual spider expert from the University of Turku gives us the answer however: Philodromidae, the grass spiders. “The eye pattern,” she says, “is unmistakeable.”

What is also unmistakeable is the shocking green coloration on this spider. What kind of camouflage is that? Did this spider evolve in a green paint factory?

The color and composition of this photo is just wonderful. For those who want to see some of the amazing Finnish (sp?) flora, here is a 1920×1440 wallpaper that is cropped wider.

Julia: My apologies for screwing up. And THANK YOU for an amazing photo!

¹ Yes, yes, technically this sentence is also true when begun with “very often”².

² Shut up. You’re mean.

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I have to admit, I don’t know a thing about this bug other than “Scott Roche sent it to me”. Some kind of gr’opper, to be sure, but beyond that? No clue. It’s do-it-yourself ID day again here at InsectPOD!

What else can we tell? Short, almost stunted wings. The tail end is partially obscured by a pine needle, but it looks like there’s some spurs back there, so I’m guessing this is a female, but again, hard to tell.

So how about it? Can you dig up enough information on BugGuide or wikipedia to id this gr’opper?

Thanks again, Scott–another great photo!

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Here’s another great picture from Scott Roche. This one is of a “wheel bug” or assassin bug. The fluted rills on the sides of its abdomen are pretty characteristic for this type of bug. The namesake feature of this bug is hard to make out in this photo because of the angle: between its shoulders is a ridge that sticks up in a rounded “wheel” shape.

I still can’t tell for sure if these critters are venomous or not, but they will bite, and quite painfully, if provoked. At least, that’s the theory. Several readers have written in to say that they handle these bugs all the time without incident. Maybe these bugs just find some people less biteworthy?

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Dragonflies have a saying: “How do you eat an entire human? One bite at a time.” Reader Scott Roche discovered this painful truth the hard way just moments after this picture was taken.

I am kidding, of course. Scott is here demonstrating that the secret to luring dragonflies in for photo sessions is to be sticky. I mean sticky not like syrup, but like in the joke: “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.” Dragonflies love to perch on twigs and sticks that poke up. Perhaps because this gives them a clear view of their surroundings? If so, do they do this for defensive purposes (”nothing can sneak up on me here!“), or offensive (”anything I see moving gets eaten!“)?

Then again, maybe dragonflies are smarter than we give them credit for. Perhaps they do this because they know the human owning the finger will freak out and take their picture (”I’ll meet you guys down at the lake in a minute. But first, this lady has a Nikon DSLR and it takes a bigger bug than me to pass that up.”)?

I mean, if I were a dragonfly, that would totally be why I would do it.

Thank you Scott… another awesome picture!

Feeling in the mood for a wallpaper? Click here for a 1600×1200 version of this image.

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I felt like today would be a good time to commemorate Pogonomyrmex barbatus. Last year, on September 1, I collected approximately 50 specimens in an ant habitat. They’re supposed to live for about 90 days, but almost all of them outlived that mark by a wide margin. The last one died this past week, just one week short of the 180-day mark.

I waited for over an an hour to get this shot. The ants were tunneling a new shaft up from below and just before breaking through to the surface, they decided to stop and widen the tunnel. It was maddening to watch them dig through two centimeters of gel in half an hour, and then take another thirty minutes to tunnel through that last millimeter. In this photo you can see the antenna of the ant on the bottom poking up through the first rip in the gel.

The ant on the top had been standing guard over a nearby shaft opening, and as you can see she responded instantly to the motion near her. Upon identifying the moving thing as part of a fellow ant, she set to digging with a will from above, and was soon joined by three other ants. In a matter of only a minute or two the hole had been widened into a shaft entrance, and the ants dispersed, resuming their patrols or looking for other tunnels to dig.

Then there was the day I tried to fish something out of the habitat with a toothpick. I made the mistake of getting too near an ant with it, and she seized the toothpick in her jaws and began a defensive action I can only describe as “stinging the hell out of it”. I literally had to put the toothpick down in a petri dish and wait for the ant to tire of attacking it before I could perform extrication.

They say ant habitats are great learning toys. I heartily agree. Those fine ladies certainly taught me a lot about emergent behavior, tunnel digging, and colony sociology. I learned about scent trails, patrolling and guarding. I learned that ants can tell dead ants apart from live ones, and will carry their dead out of the burrow. And I learned the proper technique for stinging the hell out of a toothpick.

Thank you, ladies. Maybe I’ll do this again with some of your nieces next year.

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This photo is three kinds of awesome:

1. The Jeremiah Trifecta is now complete.
2. Jeremiah had to get REEEEALLLY close to this spider to take this picture, and he chose to do so, in spite of being an arachnophobe, in order to take this photo specifically for InsectPOD.
3. No seriously, go back and read #2 again. And again. In fact, I’m upgrading this photo to seven kinds of awesome, and this and the next four all read “No seriously, go back and read #2 again.”

With this photo, Araneus diadematus pulls slightly ahead in the popularity polls against Phidippus audax. If it can continue this winning streak in the critical states of Texas and Ohio on March 4th, it may be able to clinch the Democratic party presidential nomination. But enough about politics.

There are two things I really like about this photo. The first is that you can see a fly stuck in her web at the top of the photo. The second is that I laughed out loud when I saw this picture, because the “lolbug” for it was immediately obvious in my mind.

By clicking this link you acknowledge that I have taken this opportunity to apologize in advance to Jeremiah.

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OH HAI. Hay ’sup? I see whut you did there. I have never had so many lolbugesque captions be suggested by a single photograph! Ceiling wasp does not approve. I can has nectar? Aggressive wasp is aggressive….

Jeremiah took this photo while touring a house he was about to rent.

I should point out that this was one of about four wasps he saw while touring the house. In the middle of Winter in New England¹. He says he’s no longer living in the house, which is probably just as good as this was a good sign that they’re in the walls.

Unfortunately I can’t tell my wasps apart real well yet. From side angles in other photos Jeremiah sent in, this might be Polistes dominulus, the European paper wasp, but the reddish eyes and face make me lean more towards red paper wasp. It’s probably for the best if so; red paper wasps are much less aggressive. I’ve read several reports of humans peacefully coexisting with paper wasps; the one case of “I had to destroy the nest” I read about came when they built their nest right above a door jamb. Going through the door would startle the wasps, and with the owner’s head a foot away from the (recently startled) nest, he got stung two or three times before deciding to knock the nest down. By contrast, another wasp nest was just four feet to the side of that one, and he never had trouble from them.

Thanks, Jeremiah, for another great photo!

¹ Help me out here geographywise: is there a proper delineation for “New England”, and if so, does it include Delaware²? I recently suggested to someone that Pennsylvania was in New England and oh my did I find out I was wrong. It’s sort of like jellyfish gender, “only they can tell the difference” but boy, can they tell the difference.

² This just in: No.

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I caught this little critter on the fence last October. The fence is vinyl, and it should be smooth, but I had just bought my first grass trimmer the week before and the fence was completely bespeckled with the copious detritus of my gleeful yard devastation. Man that was fun. It’s electric, but it’s got like a half-horse motor on it so when it goes, man it goes. None of that sissy “can’t cut through the tough grass” for me, no sirree. This baby takes out half-inch tumbleweeds with barely a pause.

What’s that? Oh yeah, the bug. I have no idea what it is. Some kind of green thing. Maybe a beetle. You got any ideas?

The grass trimmer has a curved neck on it, supposed to make it ergonomic but I dunno. Half an hour of trimming and there’s no way you’re getting out of a sore back, I know that much. But worth it. Lots of fun, and totally manly, so nobody can make fun of you for being a sissy about it later, you know?

Right, right, the bug. One thing the beetle did that I found interesting was land on the fence and sit still, all folded up for several minutes, and then start unfolding and refolding its wings. I caught this photo here in mid-refold. If you look closely, it looks like it only has four legs. This is because the back legs are tucked up under the shell, shuffling and scraping around the wing surfaces.

Why does it do that, I wonder? Is it cleaning its wings, or perhaps refolding them? Is it trying to dislodge mites the camera cannot see?

Maybe it’s trying to get dead grass out of its shell. Man that stuff was everywhere. That trimmer shoots shattered grass stalks six feet up, easy. Sometimes I sit at the kitchen table and stare out at the yard and make little “brrzzzmmmm…brzzzip!” noises. I wish I could use the trimmer on the snow. That would rock.

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When Jeremiah’s wife Maria cried out, “We have an infestation of ladybugs!” he jumped up and ran the other way. She started to laugh at him, and then he returned carrying the camera.

As it turns out, “infestation” meant “two”, which is perhaps the smallest possible number for an infestation. I suppose solitary infestations are possible, such as when a june bug lands in your hair¹ or a cockroach falls off the ceiling over your bed and lands on your face². But even then, I have to admit that “an infestation of ladybug” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Jeremiah got several great pictures, but I like the detail of this one the best. The shine on the carapace and the mottled texture of the pronotum and eyes is awesome.

Thanks, Jeremiah!

¹ This happened to me as a child once. It was terrifying.

² This happened to me in Puerto Rico³ as an adult. It was terrifying.

³ So we’re talking about one of those 3″-long carribbean mutant cockroaches. I had been asleep, and I dreamed that someone had slapped their hand across my forehead. And then their hand skittered down my face and onto my neck and tried to crawl under the neck of my pajamas and I really don’t want to talk about this anymore.

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There comes a time in a man’s life when he realizes that he has posted too many pictures of woolly bear caterpillars.

I’ll let you know if that ever happens to me.

This is “Waldo” from last Monday’s photograph. He actually moves around, though not often and not with any alacrity. It was 6°C outside when I took this photo. This was the highest temp of the day (and week, it snowed again the next day).

I can not get over the fact that these bugs are alive and active during the winter! Tim Eisele sent me a research paper documenting winter-active spiders, and about half a dozen of the species mentioned are found out here. Most of them are only active down to about -2°C but some were active all the way down to -5°C! Those bugs have a fascinating problem: they’ve got really good antifreeze in their blood, but if they eat a bug that has a lower concentration of antifreeze, the digested food can actually freeze in their stomach! How freaking crazy is that? All the way crazy, that’s how crazy!

So! It looks like I’ll be bundling up warm and heading out with my camera to photograph these bugs that are too crazy to come in out of the cold. For now, here’s Waldo. Who’s a cute widdle fuzzy-wuzzy den?