Compensating Factors

I had to search for bugs today with extreme time constraints, so I didn't find much, but what I did find was awesome, so maybe it's just as well. Too much excitement could lead to swooning, and as Jane Austen said, "Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint." Jane Austen had some creative spellings...

Today I found not one, but two new bugs, so naturally they are Co-Bugs of the Day.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 This sort of looks like a fly, sort of looks like a leaf hopper, and sort of looks like a motorcycle. I think we can safely eliminate motorcycle, but other than that, I have no idea what this is.

I also have no idea what this pose is about. More bug yoga? To be honest, I am not even sure this bug was alive. If it was, it was extremely accommodating of my photography.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

A much less accommodating beetle, but since I have never seen one like this before, and may never see one again, it gets to be co-bug today.

I've shown you lots of pictures of ambush bugs, but so far haven't been able to show you one like this:

The attack was fait accompli by the time I came along, but at least we can see the result. Bug tip: ambush bugs don't care if you have a stinger. They will eat you anyway. Well, suck out your guts, at any rate.

This is the largest lace bug I have seen so far:

 As in, I could actually see that it was a lace bug from several feet away with my naked eyes. This one was on a grape leaf. I mention that because from what I have read, they are host specific, so this could be a different species than the others I have seen. (Naturally my bug book mentions that there are over twenty species, and shows only three of them).

Moth in the wild:

 I can't tell if this moth has green lines on it, of they just look green because it's on a green leaf. I have seen moths that look like this on the front porch before, and they did not have green lines. But there are a lot of moths out there in the world...

I wonder about things like this:

Something ate the other five legs and then said, "Ugh, I am too full to finish this last one"? Though it really could just be the leg of a daddy-long-legs. One of their defense mechanisms is to jettison a leg when threatened, and when the leg sits there twitching and distracting the predator, the daddy-long-legs flees. The leg will grow back. I frequently see daddy-long-legs (and spiders, and insects) that are missing appendages.

Maybe I should have put that in Arachnid Appreciation...

Random Bug:

I posted a shot of this bug yesterday. It looked less menacing in the overhead view.

Just out of curiosity, I went back and looked at my blogs from the last week and counted how many different species of spiders were featured. In some cases I could not tell if two different individuals were the same or different species, so I counted them as one. Total count: 16. Sixteen different species of spiders in my backyard last week. And that is only counting the ones I saw, AND took pictures of, AND posted. Those are by no means the only species of spiders I have ever seen in my backyard. Off the top of my head I can think of at least ten others that I have seen in the past. I know this is nothing compared to the average tropical rainforest, but still, I think that's some nice arachnid diversity. And I didn't count daddy-long-legs, because those are not spiders.

Today, however, I am not in a particularly arachnid appreciating mood because I got a tick bite. Broke my streak of over a month without a tick bite. So disappointing. Also, due to my rushed bug walk, I don't have any spiders for you. Just a web and a daddy-long-legs. So, Arachnid Appreciation Lite:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

 I took these pictures of this spider web because it looks blue to me. I have seen lots of spider webs that are iridescent in the sun, but never one that so strongly appeared to have a color. And it's not just the way it looks in the picture, in real life this web looked blue.

 I did not see the spider that made it.

Well, I needed to post something  eight-legged today! Wait, except this one only has seven legs... Hmmm...