Comical Caterpillar

First I would like to acknowledge this beautiful summer we have just finished. Today was the last day of summer astronomically, and the last few days notwithstanding, if every summer was like this one I think I would like it a lot more. It might even be my favorite season. I may just be forgetting anything bad, but it was a pretty mild summer as regards the heat, and we had enough rain, and it was altogether lovely. Adieu, summer. Hello Autumn, also not my favorite season, and I don't think anything is ever going to change that.

Even though there are things that I do every day, like brush my teeth and go outside to look for bugs, I am not a person of routines. I don't do all the same things, and I don't do them the same way all the time. For instance, when I do my bug walk every day, I try to do it differently every day. I follow the paths, but not in the same order, and not always in the same direction. There are areas of the yard that I don't search very often, but every once in a while I check them out, just to see what's there. So today I started my walk in a direction I don't think I have ever started in, and switched around a few things and ended up on a path that I usually skip (because it's more utilitarian than scenic), having covered about a third of the backyard so far without finding a single bug to photograph, and I found an amazing bug, new to me, to be Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Pandora sphinx moth caterpillar. This is one of those insects that I see in field guides and think, "Gee, how come I never see that in my backyard?" I also look at this particular one and think it can't possibly be real, nothing would ever actually look like that. It looks like a comic strip version of a caterpillar; those eye spots look like they were painted on by hand. But here it is. It's a pretty huge caterpillar, easily 3 inches long when it's relaxed, and it stretches out more than that. It's shocking to me that I could miss something so big for all the time it has obviously been there, but having looked it up in Caterpillars of Eastern North America I don't feel so bad–they feed on plants that are low to the ground, from underneath the leaves. It's kind of amazing that I found it at all.

 It had company; 2 fall webworm caterpillars...

... and dangling from its leaf is a cluster of green lacewing eggs. The caterpillar ate this entire leaf, and I wonder what happened to the eggs...

Sorry, but you're about to see a million pictures of this caterpillar...

 Dorsal view...

 Many sphinx moth caterpillars have a curved spike, or horn on their back end, and according to the book, this one did, too; in its earlier instars it has a horn, which it loses in its last instar, when it is replaced by a "button." So we know this is in its last instar.

 Typical post of a sphinx moth that is feeling perturbed.

 Stretching to eat...

 ... stretching more. At least to 5 inches, I would say.

 I came back to look at the caterpillar a couple of times during my bug walk, and while I was mowing the lawn afterward, and at this point it had eaten that entire leaf, and most of the one next to it, and was on the move.

 

 I suspect the reason it didn't finish this leaf is because these two other caterpillars were on it.

 Caterpillars breathe through tiny holes in their sides called spiracles. This caterpillar's spiracles are the dots of the false eyes.

 Sphinx pose.

By the time I finished mowing the lawn the caterpillar had disappeared. There were other leaves it could have eaten, but given its size and the fact that it is in its last instar, I think maybe it wandered off to find someplace to pupate, which means I was extraordinarily lucky to find it when I did.

 Today I saw more frogs in my backyard today than ever before. I lost count of how many I saw–somewhere between eight and ten. Most of them were tiny ones like this, Amphibian of the Day:

 I don't know if they were all the same species, though; some were different colors (orange), and I don't know if that is a variation within a species, or a different frog altogether. I don't have a frog field guide to look it up.

I almost ran this one over with the lawnmower:

And I did run this one over with the lawn mower, for which I feel dreadful.

 Here it is hiding in a hole in the lawn after I ran it over. There was no blood, and it still had all its limbs, but I know it was hurt because when it would jump, it kept landing on its back and would have to flip itself over.

Remember this, a Backyard Bug of the Day from earlier in the week?

 I asked in the facebook bug group, and it is, in fact, a mosquito, species, Toxorhynchites rutilus, common name elephant mosquito! In an interesting coincidence, earlier this evening I was reading a thing about the most dangerous animals on earth, and I already knew what would be the #1 killer of humans each year, and that is the mosquito (humans were the second most dangerous, in case you're wondering). Of course, mosquitoes kill people by transmitting disease, and I know that, and I actually suffered from a mosquito-borne illness as a child, contracting dengue fever when my family lived in a much more balmy climate than I do now. Still, I stand by my defense of mosquitoes from the other day, meaning that it's fine to hate the ones that bite us, and kill people, but there are mosquitoes that don't do that. THIS is one of them. They don't bite people (or other animals). The adults feed on nectar from flowers. And what to the larvae eat? Well, they eat the larvae of other species of mosquitoes. They eat the larvae of the kinds of mosquitoes that DO bite us. In fact, they are used in some places as a biological control against harmful mosquitoes. So when you are cursing the bloodsucking monsters, just remember that there are mosquitoes that are our friends.

 See the fuzzy antennae? It's a male.

Other Bugs:

 Crane fly

 Brown hooded owlet moth caterpillar. This one could win the prize for the most outrageously colored caterpillar that will become a boring, brown moth. Every year when the goldenrod are in bloom I start looking for these, and for some reason I only ever seem to find them when they are at their biggest, about 2 inches long. It's puzzling, because something this bright you'd think would be easier to find, even when it's small. Well, this one is the smallest one I have ever seen, about an inch long.

 A large portion of my frustration during my bug walk yesterday was because there were dragonflies–at least two, if not more species–that were being exceedingly uncooperative. They would land on a rock, sit there until I would get not-quite-close-enough to take a picture, then fly off and land somewhere else. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. They were all doing this. Well, it kept happening today (though with fewer dragonflies), but at least I finally got a couple of shots, albeit from a distance. Sometimes dragonflies are wonderfully cooperative, and sometimes... not.

 Cockroach

The goldenrod flowers are still extremely popular:

 Wasp on goldenrod

Thick-headed fly and wasp. Goldenrod is a great place for a thick-headed fly. The adults feed on nectar, and they lay their eggs inside bumblebees, which are abundant on goldenrod at the moment (the fly larvae are parasitoids, and develop inside the bumblebees, which obviously doesn't work out very well for the bumblebees).

 Ailanthus webworm moth. I have never seen so many of these as I saw today. They are regular visitors to my backyard every summer, particularly in goldenrod season, but I don't think I have ever seen more than one in a day, or at most two. Today I saw at least 6 or 7.

Here's two

 One of the hundreds of bumblebees on the goldenrod

Virginia ctenucha moth. Not obviously moth-ish, but if you spend enough time around bugs you see it and know it's a moth, not a beetle. Though it does look mothy here. It was sitting on the goldenrod, beating its wings.

 Caterpillar. Not going to look it up.

 Woolly bear caterpillar. Interestingly, it only has black at one end, near its head, not at both.

 When you disturb them they curl up into a ball, which does not make it easier to move them out of the way of the lawn mower.

 Arachnid Appreciation:
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This spider was in my house–I was sitting on the bottom stair and a daddy-long-legs walked by, and shortly after this spider walked by. I didn't catch the daddy-long-legs, but the spider was relocated outside.