Bug Boundaries

Having spent so much time today on working on yesterday's blog I lost time for other things, and now find myself starting this blog post much too late. So I don't have much to say except that today was sunny, but colder, and still pretty windy. The number of crickets to be heard has diminished quite a bit. The number of bugs to be found today was much lower than yesterday. Today felt like a completely new season compared to the past few days.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 I think this is a different species of grasshopper than the ones I see in the rock garden all the time. Interestingly, it was also in a part of the backyard where I am not sure I have ever seen a grasshopper. Different insects have their own habitats even within the bounds of a single acre.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 Some kind of Hemiptera

Because of the snafu of uploading these pictures, and the fact that this blog is a day late as a result, and I will still have to post another blog tonight, I am just going to keep the rest of these in the order in which they (finally) uploaded.

The mums attracted multiple species of pollinating flies again, of course:

 Cricket

 Yesterday I saw a variety of hoppers, but today there was only this species. I did see them all over the backyard, though.

 For months there were ants tending to little herds of these hoppers on this particular plant. The ants raised the hoppers from nymphs, and they were all over the plant, almost every leaf hosting at least a few hoppers, but sometimes at least a dozen or so, tended to by ants. Today there was only one hopper left, all alone, with neither kin nor ants as company.

 Woolly aphid

 Twice-stabbed lady beetle

 Fly

 Leaf-footed bug

 

 I found this curious thing. It looks like a chrysalis on a leaf, but I think it is actually a chrysalis inside a leaf. There are insects that feed inside leaves, between the thin layers that make up a leaf. It looks like that is what happened here, and when it grew big enough, it pupated inside? There is definitely an opening where something could have crawled out (or a predator broke in).

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Bold jumping spider. You can just barely see the beautiful green chelicera. If only its pedipalps were open.

 

 I wonder if you can see what I did not notice when I took this picture?