Big Bugs

Today the most striking bugs in my backyard were the biggest. Since this is not a tropical rainforest (though it sure feels like one at the moment), we don't get a lot of huge bugs here (probably to the relief of most people living in this latitude, but hey, it would be interesting), but we have a couple of pretty good sized bugs. One of them is one that I hear a lot this time of year but rarely see (you can guess what that is), and the other is just a large species of an order that I see fairly regularly. You can probably guess what the first one is, and it has already been Backyard Bug of the Day this year:

 Cicada. The cicadas we get around here are dog day cicadas, which are an annual cicada. They spend one year underground as larvae, and they emerge as adults (well, they emerge and then molt to their adult form) every year, as opposed to periodical cicadas, which emerge at longer intervals (there are 8-year and 17-year that I know of). Notable to me is that I have photographed cicadas on three days this week, and have seen them I think five times this summer. That is just about equal to the number of total times I have seen a cicada in my backyard in the previous 17 summers. Unlike the others I have photographed this summer, this one (after flitting from one plant to another nearby) was willing to sit still while I took a lot of pictures of it, close-up and quite intrusive.

The second big insect I found in my backyard today is the Backyard Bug of the Day:

 

 This might be a new dragonfly for me. It is a shadow darner. It is quite a big dragonfly; I think if it was sitting on the palm of my hand the wings would probably go past the edge.

Side view. This is the take-a-picture-from-far-away-in-case-it-won't-let-me-get-closer shot.

 Coincidentally, less than a minute before I spotted the Backyard Bug of the Day dragonfly, I found this one, which was quite small.

There are three species of caterpillars that are basically ubiquitous in the backyard lately, and today I found all three on the same crab apple tree:

 1) White hickory tussock moth caterpillars. Every year about this time I find them all over the yard, and in particular all over the trunk of this tree.

 

 2) Fall webworm caterpillar. I find them wandering on their own, but also...

... in their webs, still living communally as they do when they are small.

 3) White marked tussock moth caterpillar. I have been finding a lot of these all summer. Right now I am finding big ones...

 

 ... I am guessing this one is going to pupate soon...

 ... and also small ones. How small?

 

Other Bugs:

 

 Assassin bug with prey

 I think this is a tachinid fly.

 Sweat bee. Before I found the dragonfly I was going to make this the Backyard Bug of the Day just because I thought on such a sweltering day an insect with sweat in its name was apropos.

 Who is that hiding there?

 Katydid. Female.

 Looper caterpillar on purple cone flower petal

Meanwhile, in the dining room:

 The latest caterpillar to prepare for pupation has chosen a really bad spot. This is inside the rack that holds the water tubes the plant cuttings are in. I don't know if it will have enough room to straighten out before shedding its skin and becoming a chrysalis, and I know it won't have enough room to emerge as a butterfly and straighten out its wings. I can't do anything about the first problem, but once it is a chrysalis I can carefully move it to a better location.

The hatchling is now big enough to be in the enclosure on the plant cuttings, instead of in a container with a single leaf, because the only other caterpillar left is not much bigger than it is.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this yesterday–the half-eaten, dried up frog corpse is gone from the rock garden path. Something must have decided to eat it.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Ant mimic spider.

Funnel web spider. From where it was hiding in its den it could, if it had the right kind of vision (which it doesn't) have seen that huge dragonfly on the other trunk of the two-trunk tree where the spiders web is hung. It would have been so tantalizing, I am sure.

The cicada above was not alone. Here you can see what else was lurking nearby–a daddy-long-legs/harvestman.

Summer's Last Stand

This is the first week of school for most town around here, and summer has decided to reassert itself in its last week (of meteorological summer. The equinox, which starts astronomical autumn, is a few weeks away, but meteorological summer ends at the end of August). We're in another heat wave. Yay. I've given up trying to figure out the habits of insects regarding the weather, but I didn't find a lot of bugs today. If they are anything like me (and let's face it, they're not in most ways), they did not want to be out in the heat. I was out there nonetheless.

I love butterflies, as you probably know, but there have been some lately that have a really annoying habit. They zoom right past my head, as if they want me to notice that they are there, but will the land somewhere so I can take a picture of them? NO. And if they have landed, I can't get anywhere near close enough to take a picture before they fly away. So they are so unafraid of me that they can fly within inches of my face, but if I walk within twelve feet of them on a flower, away they go. And how come none of them are interested in the purple cone flowers this year? Those used to be bug magnets in general, and butterfly attractors specifically. This year... hardly any bugs on them at all, and no butterflies.

Sorry, the heat is making me cranky. You should have seen what I was like in Death Valley when it was 126ºF.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Leptoglossus oppositus, a species of leaf-footed bug. Order Hemiptera

 Buffalo tree hopper. I saw a lot of buffalo tree hopper nymphs earlier in the summer, but I have not seen many adults, less than usual, I would say. In fact, I think I have seen fewer leaf hoppers, tree hoppers, and plant hoppers in general this summer.

Blending in with your surroundings is about more than just being green:

 Stinkbug nymph

 

 Closer look

 

Different species of stinkbug nymph

 Cicada. I only got one shot before it flew away. Usually they fly really clumsily and loudly, but this one just disappeared while I was refocusing my camera.

I got better pictures of the furcula caterpillar today:

 White marked tussock moths have been ubiquitous lately.

Another ailanthus webworm moth has eclosed:

 It looks like that one chrysalis is a lighter color now because it's empty and light is passing through it.

 It appears to have a hole in the top, so maybe that's how the moth gets out? Seems weird, but other than that it looks intact.

When I looked at the pictures on my computer I noticed something I had not seen in real life:

 There are tiny caterpillars crawling around in the webbing.

 A new generation of ailanthus webworms?

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Learning By Observing

I've got so much on my mind right now that I don't remember anything in particular about my bug walk today. It was a day just like so many other days, a walk through my backyard like many other such walks. Oh, wait, but I did learn something, and in the most fun way, by seeing it myself instead of looking it up in a book (or worse, on the internet). But more on that anon.
Backyard Bug of the Day:

I thought this was going to be easy to identify, but looking through my caterpillar book, apparently not. It doesn't look like the pictures. I am fairly certain this is a furcula caterpillar, but I can't tell which species. It should have been Backyard Bug of the Day yesterday, but I didn't think I got a good enough picture of it. I didn't really get what I consider good enough pictures today, either, but today's choices for BBotD were not stellar. So... This is a pretty interesting caterpillar. It makes a mat of silk on whatever leaf it has chosen to hang out on (why, I don't know), and when it feels threatened it does a couple of things. It sits up like this picture, or...

... It waves its forked tail around.

Other Bugs:

Can you spot the cicada?

I'm finding a lot of stinkbug nymphs lately:

Nope, nobody here but us leaves...

Grasshopper nymph

Assassin bug with bee prey

So, here's the thing I learned today: the identity of some caterpillars I have seen in the backyard lately. And I learned it in a more interesting and reliable way than looking it up; I observed what happened in my backyard. I found this today:

Ailanthus webworm moth. One of the few moths I can identify on sight, because it is very distinctive looking. Usually I see them either on my front porch, attracted to the lights, or on goldenrod flowers. But I spotted this one on a web. Not a spider web, but a caterpillar web:

This is one of a few caterpillar webs that I found in my backyard about 2 weeks ago; they all had caterpillars in them then, but soon they had chrysalides instead. I didn't know what kind of caterpillars they were, some kind of tent caterpillars I supposed. But finding an ailanthus WEBWORM moth in one of these silk structures made me realize that those caterpillars must have been ailanthus webworms. Now, I suppose it is possible that this moth just happened to have landed there. And none of the chrysalides in this web look like they have just been vacated, they both still look full (there may be others I can't see, hidden among leaves). But I remember now that last year I found a chrysalis that looked like these and kept it in my bug viewer until the moth came out, and it was an ailanthus webworm moth. So...

... obviously the caterpillars that became these chrysalides were ailanthus webworms. And now I know what they were just because of paying attention to what's going on in my backyard.

Soon there will be more moths...

And speaking of moths, here's another one. Some species of geometer.

White marked tussock moth caterpillar

 Bee

 This looks like a parent and child scene, but these are both larvae of some kind of beetle.

 Katydid

Soon these caterpillars will be heading up to the top of the enclosure to become chrysalides...

There were two that underwent the process today. 

 I happened to have the lucky timing to see this one, which makes two days in a row I got to see this extraordinary procedure.

 The hatchling is growing...

 And I had a surprise today. I noticed that the leaves of one of the milkweed cuttings I brought in last week with one of the above caterpillars on it had been eaten in a way that was more like a young caterpillar than one in the later instars like the caterpillar that came in on the plant. And then I spotted this little one, about half an inch long, which had obviously been on the plant when I brought it in, but was too small for me to notice it. It is lucky it didn't get eaten by the bigger caterpillar if they were sharing a plant when this first hatched; larger caterpillars will eat eggs and newly hatched caterpillars if they happen to be on the leaves they are eating.

 Katydid, female, on autumn joy sedum

This might be a new caterpillar for me and the backyard. It also might be dead of a spider bite. I am not sure.

I found something kind of... unusual in the backyard today:

On a rock in the rock garden, and one that I walk on all the time, so I know it wasn't there yesterday, a partly eaten, dried out frog corpse. I did not examine it closely. I just took its picture and left it there, mystery that it is. Obviously some animal left it there, but why not eat the whole thing?

It's fun to watch a tiny jumping spider walk along the spiny branches of a raspberry bush. You can't see it in the picture, but they leave a trail of silk as they go, and sometimes I find raspberry branches that have quite a lot of silk running along them.

Bowl-and-doily spider