I went for another after-dark bug walk tonight, because I went for a nighttime walk last night and saw a lot of insects in the stream, and wished I had my camera with me. Tonight I didn't see as much, and I didn't get many pictures that were good enough to post, but it is still very cool to see so many interesting things in the water, active in the dark.
Backyard Bug of the Day:
I don't know what kind of larva this is (possibly a damselfly larva), and I am not even sure that I haven't made it BBotD already. I don't feel like going back to check, because I am a lazy blogger, and it's so interesting.
If you look carefully, there are a couple more in this shot. There were several of them in this spot, on two rocks covered in moss, with the current washing over them.
Our path in the woods follows the stream, but not right beside it for much of the length, just because the lay of the land or the rockiness and wetness make it hard to walk close to the water. There are a few spots, though, where we can divert from the path to go to the edge of the stream to enjoy the beauty of it, and to look at what's living in it. I have a few spots where I check for bugs (and now salamanders). Yesterday most of those spots had lots of bugs in them. Tonight almost all of the bugs I saw were in one spot, an area that is part pool, part water rushing over mossy rocks. Subtle changes in location can be big changes in habitat for something tiny that lives in the water. And yet, all of the spots that I check are places where I have seen caddisfly larva in recent months, and, indeed on my night hike yesterday. Today I only saw them in two spots.
This one has a case made of leaves on the top, unusual in my limited experience because the leaves are flat, and not curled around the case:
I am pretty sure I saw this exact specimen last night, too. I didn't get a glimpse of the insect itself, or of the rest of the case, so I don't know what it looks like on the other side. I think it's interesting that it is obviously made of several different kinds of leaves.
You can only see two here, but there was another just out of frame. In this part of the stream there were rather a lot of them, and they were really active, moving around a lot, and pretty quickly:
Unfortunately, though there were a couple more species to be seen, the combination of low light, moving insects, and flowing water to distort the image made the pictures unusable. But not every insect I saw on my walk was aquatic:
This is an insect, of course. A moth, order Lepidoptera. Its mottled color makes it look a bit like lichen on tree bark.
This might not be exactly the right kind of tree for it to blend in perfectly, but it is still not so easy to spot:
Arachnid Appreciation:
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