In Which I Am Attractive to Lepidoptera

I keep looking for patterns, trying to make connections, and I am drawing a blank. Yesterday there were bugs everywhere. Today... Not so many. The two days were pretty similar. So why the difference?

Here's my Frustrating Bug Story of the Day:
I was walking around, looking for bugs and not really finding anything, when I saw a butterfly land nearby. Butterflies landing are a good sign that maybe I can get a picture of one. So I walked toward where it was, and it flew away. I was still in the same general area, though, when it came back and landed in the same place again... and flew away. I thought perhaps if I stood near there it would come back and land again, and it did. Three times. On my shirt. It's sort of impossible for me to take a picture (at least, in focus) of a butterfly on my own shoulder (I maybe could have gotten it when it was on my stomach, if it hadn't flown away so fast), so I did not get a picture of that butterfly today.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 

 Larva of some kind. This was so tiny I almost didn't even see it. Only the bright red markings drew it to my attention. I don't know what the black blobs are.

 Here's a zoomed-in version of that picture.

Random Bugs:

 Plume moth

 Firefly

 The wood wasps are back to the maple branch, laying more eggs.

 Bumblebee on milkweed

Honeybee on milkweed

I found a curious situation today. I was walking past the bedrock in front of my house, down near the street, and saw a whole lot of big, red ants crawling down the rock. I could see that they then were walking across the grass and into the street. I walked across the street, following the line of ants, and saw that they went up the curb, across the grass strip by the curb, across the sidewalk, and into my across-the-street neighbor's lawn. I walked back to my own yard, and tried to see where the ants were coming from, but the line went into some brush where I couldn't get at them. Within only a few minutes (during which I was trying to take a picture of a different bug) the line diminished. When I went back about 15 minutes later, all the ants were gone.

With so many ants you would think I could get a picture of more than one at a time, but nope. I couldn't. I barely got any pictures at all - the ants were moving fast.

Beetle

Ladybeetle

 

 Robber fly

The gypsy moth caterpillar scourge is coming to an end for this year. As icky as it has been in my backyard, with so many of the caterpillars around, and frass everywhere, raining down from the trees, it has been much, much worse in other areas of this state and neighboring states, where acres of trees have been completely stripped of their leaves. Unfortunately, it is not coming to an end because something has killed off the invasive caterpillars, but because they are moving on to the next stage in their development: pupation:

 

  I found this caterpillar in the crevice of a tree trunk. Its body has shortened and thickened, and it has strands of silk woven around it.

Elsewhere in the backyard I found a leaf stuck oddly to a tree trunk, and when I peeled it back I found this gypsy moth chrysalis. Next to it is the shed skin from its final molt.

And on a rock, another caterpillar just beginning the process, while about a foot away...

... two chrysalides huddled together, anchored to the rock with silk. There is another gypsy moth caterpillar beside them that looks like it is an earlier instar. I didn't notice this at the time, or I would have taken a better picture of it, but if you look to the left of the smaller caterpillar there is what looks like possibly a beetle larva on the rock.

I absconded with the three chrysalides, in part because I want to observe them, and in part because I just don't want the moths to go out in the world and reproduce. I read somewhere that you can tell the sex of the eventual moth by looking at the chrysalis, but these all look basically the same to me, so I don't know which sex they are - it is a matter of comparing the size of the chrysalis, because the females (I think) are bigger. But when they are all about the same size, I don't know if these are bigger or smaller.

Interesting note, which I already knew about chrysalides, but still think is weird - they can wiggle.

We got home late this evening from the fireworks, and found a lot of moths had been attracted to the porch light again. Many of them were the same kinds from the other night, but there were a few new ones:

 I think this is a species of geometer moth.

 For a second I thought this was a moth on top of another moth, because that is what the wings look like.

 This moth landed on my hand and did not want to leave.

 Seeing those antennae sticking up like that was an unusual sight.

There were other insects besides moths, of course:

 Fish fly

Hopper

Caterpillar Update:

Still changing - now almost all of the brown has changed to green.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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I didn't get a good picture of this spider, because it moved too fast, but I thought it was interesting because...

... it had only one leg on the left side, and...

... it marched right over a bunch of aphids and didn't seem to care about all that potential food. I wonder if spiders are particular at all, or if any of them are specialists in what they eat. Or if a spider is a web builder, accustomed to catching its food that way, will it ignore potential prey like these aphids because they are not in a web. Or is it possible that it didn't evens see them - many spiders have poor eyesight, relying on web vibrations to catch prey.