A few nights ago I noticed something trundling across the carpet into the downstairs bathroom. I grabbed my camera and a flashlight and snapped this shot of an assassin bug nymph. I’m not really sure if it needed to go potty or if it was just up to get a glass of water.
If you haven’t seen these nymphs before on the site, they’re actually jet black: the white coating is lint and dirt that they glue to themselves with spittle to form camouflage. When they molt into their final adult form, they’ll discard the camouflage as well and be a beautiful, shiny blue-black.
Ladybug vs. Aphid week heats up today as the aphids seriously get serious. Today’s picture comes from Jeremiah Fargo, who had this to say about it:
I was out all day today, and got a shock when I looked at my garlic. It seemed as though it was very, very dirty.
Of course, a closer look revealed that the little black spots weren’t just dirt. They were insects thriving off of my lovely garlic shoots! Gah.
A quick look at bugguide.net told me what I already pretty much knew: Black Aphids. Well, I’m just glad they’re there and not on my other plants that are a quarter of an acre away. knock on wood
So… yeah. The aphids are calling the ladybugs out right here and right now. They’re all like “Hey Ladybugs! You got nothin’!” (They really said that. Aphids are well known for their trash talk.)
The ladybugs are all like “Yeah, whatever, one of us could eat all of you in an afternoon.”
And the aphids are all like, “Oh yeah? Well, how about this?”
Jim Phillips sent in this stinkbug picture last Winter when I first put out the call for images. I’m not sure how it got shuffled to the bottom of the pile, but I found it again, so here it is.
Jim titled this picture “Yule Log Bug”, and I like it because it really shows the diversity of stinkbugs. We’ve seen green stinkbugs, and brown ones… and now one that’s both.
I also like the flash reflection here from its eyes… and I still can’t get over the way stinkbugs’ eyes are clear back on their shoulders like that.
Another photo has reached us from the shadowy halls of Warehouse 23, and you know what that means: Steve Jackson is at it again!
This time Steve and I made a good tag team, in a comedy of errors kind of way: he sent me a different image of this bug, which I quickly misidentified as a box elder bug. But Steve said the bug was 45mm long, which is WAY too big for a box elder, so I went back to BugGuide and dug deeper. After some twenty minutes of research, I was able to misidentify the bug again, this time as Oncopeltus sexmaculatus, the six-spotted milkweed bug.
A lot of folks would have shrugged and said, “Okay, thanks,” and forgotten about it. But not Steve. He went out to BugGuide and looked at the bug I had seen, and said “Ehhhh… I’m not so sure.” Then he had a go at searching BugGuide, finally landing on Oncopeltus fasciatus, the Large Milkweed Bug. He thinks that’s a better identity for this bug, and I think so, too.
The really funny bit is that this identification came out as the result of typo: the bug was actually 15mm. Had Steve not typo’d it, I probably would have told you all it was a box elder bug all along (until one of you corrected me).
Jeremiah Tan saw yesterday’s stinkbug picture and sent in this goodie, along with this information:
I’ve recently found this bunch of young ‘uns on the
wall just next to my bathroom window!
Each one is about the size of uh…this capital “O”.
They should be around the 2nd instar, ‘cos I saw their moulted skins on the
window sill itself. At least, I hope they were moulted skins and not the
cannibalised remains of their weaker siblings.
Now I now why I keep on getting stinkbugs in my room….
Yes, the reason is clear: It is because you share a bathroom. (Also, because stinkbugs have no sense of personal space.) A word of advice: don’t lend them your hair dryer, you’ll never get it back.
This little guy landed on my laptop last night. Look at the size of that stabbing beak! This bug doesn’t just like blood, it likes arterial blood.
Okay, actually that’s just an antenna.
I think.
Oh man. I hope.
A really funny thing happened next: it began fussing around on my laptop and I couldn’t figure out why. So I did what any rational human would do when confronted with a seizure: I grabbed my camera and videotaped it.
My laptop has an anodized aluminum surface. To a human, it’s a satiny finish to the metal. To a gnat, however, it’s covered in cobbles exactly the right size to snag the hooks on your feet!
I’ll post the video if I can get it compressed enough while still being able to see the leg flapping action.
Jeremiah has caught the bug photography… uh… bug. Here’s a stink bug out on his lawn.
Lots of interesting bits on a stink bug. I’m always intrigued by their head shape. I keep expecting to see two tiny little eyes up at the front, and then I notice the huge bulging blobs down by his shoulders and realize that if those are his eyes, then what I thought of as the head was really just his big freaking nose.
Cooler people than me read InsectPOD. Much, much cooler. Julia Fält from Finland saw Earl’s Lace Bug from yesterday and sent in this photo.
It’s also a Lace Bug. Instead of a macro lens, however, this was taken with a Scanning Electron Microscope. The picture is dated 2003, but it was her “first try with SEM” along with colleague Tarja at her university in Finland. She says that the bug is a species from genus Tingidae, “Lace Bugs”.
I don’t know what more to say about this image. It’s just amazing. Wow. Just… wow.
