Insect Picture of the Day

(This October, InsectPOD is celebrating with a special “creepy story”, the Hopper Case Files, told in installments. New readers should start with the first case file, The Missing Mayfly.)

I didn’t wait around to see if Viridiana would pursue. I figured she wouldn’t, since I had the advantage of speed. She would rely on stealth instead. I resolved to keep my eyes extra peeled for praying mantises for the next few days.

The next morning I went to the office to wrap up the last of the paperwork, to try and keep my mind off of things. I’m good at solving mysteries, but when you give me a load of crazy information like that all at once, I have to step back and let my brain sort things out in its own time.

And then there was the HSG. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to square things up with the mob, but there was no way I would give such a lethal weapon to them. I carried it with me, hidden under my wing in its holster. I tried to tell myself that I was wearing it to keep it safe from someone searching my office, but myself wasn’t buying a word I said. Myself told me that it was much more likely that I was carrying it as insurance in case Viridiana showed up… or in case I ended up in another web.

Those webs. I had been stuck in too many webs lately. When I was stuck in Argus’ web, I had vowed that I wouldn’t get caught like that ever again. I busied myself for most of the morning trying to work out how to do just that. But I’m a grasshopper. Getting stuck in webs is part of what we do. I did come up with one idea, though, and the rest of the morning was spent putting it together.

I had just finished with the preparations when the office door slammed open. A beetle twice my size with jaws like a hornet lumbered in.

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I waited for it.

“You gotta help me, Hopper,” he said. I hear that line all the time. “Or I’m going to kill you.”

That line, not so much.

“What seems to be the—”

“Come with me, Hopper.”

“All right,” I said. I picked up the case I had just finished packing. “I’ll just bring my gear, shall I?”

“Look, you bring your detectoring crap or whatever and just let’s go already. People are waiting.”

Well, of course it was a trap. I smiled to myself as I stepped outside. There’s something brisk and invigorating about being led unsuspecting to your doom. I’ve been led to my doom a time or two in my day. It never gets old.

Mad scientist mantises, lethal hornets, immortal mayflies, all that was crazy and beyond me. But being led into a trap by a hired goon? I felt like my world was finally right-side up again. This is what I do, people.

It really was a beautiful day. I began to whistle.

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Andrew Lin sends in this amazing longhorn beetle photo. Here’s what he has to say:

This thing was huge. A good four, maybe five centimeters long, not including antenna, I walked past it in the early evening, just as it was starting to cool down, did a double take, then ran to grab my camera. It was in the exact same spot as when I first saw it (unlike a plethora of insects I noticed when I was without camera. Walking around the woods without my camera. What was I thinking???).

Okay, so the bug is just cool six ways from Sunday.

I’m pretty sure this is a longhorn beetle of some kind, which would make it a wood-boring beetle, but beyond that I’ve no clue. Anybody seen this guy before?

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“He’s dead, Jim.”

Unfortunately, this giant* beetle had passed on before I got to it, but left a beautiful corpse. I know it’s not common to see a dead bug on this site, but David said that I was in charge of the days that I update, and so you see this dead bug because it’s large and interesting to look at. Rest assured it died of natural causes. Probably.

The research on this was pretty cool, really, and I learned a lot.  First, when I read the name I tried to imagine one of these huge bugs burrowing through the ground to find a root**, but couldn’t imagine how they’d do it.  Then, I learned that it’s the larvae that eat the roots by burrowing through the tree down to the tasty bits.  Okay, that makes sense.

Reading on, I learned that these beetles, as they mature, move up the tree and begin living in the foliage.  After a few minutes of thinking about this, I slowly stood up from under the tree, picked up my wireless laptop, and moved back to the patio.  I’m okay with bugs, and have generally gotten over my tendency to utterly freak out if they land on me, but I can’t imagine I’d be serene and calm if one of these suddenly fell from above to land in my lap.  I’d imagine, in fact, that that would be one beetle that didn’t die of natural causes.

*Okay, maybe not as big as this bug, but big for a North Delawarean bug at about two inches long!

**Where it would then read it the dictionary, which is very Boring.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Sandra Tayler called me to tell me that her neighbor had a bug-infested tree, and if I wanted pictures I needed to come over before they could get back from the garden store with pesticides. Can I just say that friends who have their priorities straight like this are awesome?

This is a locust borer, a name which has nothing to do with locusts or grasshoppers. This is a beetle that has evolved to the point where it can only feed and reproduce on one species of tree: black locust. (There’s another beetle that can only feed on honey locust.) Now, black locust is a weed tree that used to only grow in the mountainous regions of the Eastern United States, and so this critter was pretty well hemmed into its niche, happily boring 8mm holes into the trunks and branches of locust trees. But one day a landscaper discovered that rich people can’t tell the difference between weed trees and exotic plants, and since locust doesn’t look half bad and is pretty hard to kill, it became an instant favorite for landscaping jobs throughout North America.

As the black locust spread across the continent, so did the black locust borer–mostly by living on and laying eggs in the trees that were being shipped around the country. They are now quite happy to be regarded as a significant pest with a range that spans the continent.