Insect Picture of the Day

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Reader Tim Eisele sent in this pseudoscorpion after my first call for submissions. He sent in the photo with a note saying, “Hey, I bet you don’t have one of these!” followed about five minutes later with a note saying “…and then I noticed it was the fifth image on your site. Ooops!” Well, insectpod is very nearly to the point where I forget whether or not I’ve posted a given image, and anyway as you’ve already seen I’ll happily post the same kind of insect (Heck, I’ll even post pictures of the same insect) if the photos are good.

And in this case, the photo is excellent. Tim didn’t send me the size of his pseudoscorpion, but it’s photographed on paper and you can clearly see the weave, so the size probably 2-4mm, which is typical of Order Pseudoscorpiones.

Actually, now that I study this a bit more in depth, I think it’s very close to 3mm. I also think it’s from genus Chelifer, probably species cancroides. I also think it was originally caught in a bathtub in Atlantic Mine, Michigan, USA, but now I’m just showing off.

(So… yeah. As I was researching this little guy for you, I looked on bugguide, and found that Tim had posted this very picture over there. He supplied quite a bit more data, including a fairly convincing writeup of the genus and possibly species identification. You should go check it out, he’s posted two different views of the bug plus an amazing closeup of one of its pincers!)

Thanks, Tim, for the awesome photo–and for doing a lot of research so I could plagiarize it….