Chrysalis Mysterious

There was no blog post yesterday because it rained all day, which was something we really needed. We ended up with less than an inch of rain from the back-to-back rainy days, but it's something.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is a Lepidoptera chrysalis of some kind, in other words, a pupating butterfly or moth. I don't know which; none of my books, not even my caterpillar book, show many chrysalides, and it's the kind of thing that's just too tedious to try to look up on the internet.

 It's pretty small, I'd say less than half an inch long. The "easiest" way to find out what it is would be to bring it in the house and put it in a container and wait to see what emerges from it, but there's a bit of a catch-22 to that method: I can't know what it is until it emerges, but I won't know when it will emerge without knowing what it is. If it is something that is going to overwinter inside the chysalis it will need to stay outside in the cold to know when to come out, so bringing it inside might keep it from emerging.

 You can see the silk thread by which it is anchored to the leaf (of a goldenrod plant), and the outline of the future wing and antenna. It looks more like a moth antenna than a butterfly.

 

 Fungus on a tree stump

Other Bugs:

 I can't remember the name of this, but it's a caterpillar that makes a case for itself by cutting it out of leaves. I see them dangling from trees (or other plants, like this one on a raspberry vine) around this time of year, though I have not seen very many so far this year. You can just barely see the caterpillar's head at the opening.

 Ants tending to a thorn mimic plant hopper

Apparently in the insect world being poked in the eye is not a big deal. Insects don't seem to react to it.

 Grasshopper.

I didn't see any bumblebees at all today, which was surprising in one respect, that a couple of days ago there were tons of them, and not surprising in another, which is that there are almost no flowers left for them to feed on.

 I did find a couple of these sweat bees (or this one, in different flower beds); this is the last of these flowers.

It seems to get along pretty well with other members of the order Hymenoptera; the other day I saw one feeding on the same flower as a bumblebee, and today I found this one feeding next to this wasp.

I think these are Common thread-waisted wasps, Ammophila procera. There were a lot of them around today. The fun thing about this picture is that I took it just because of the two wasps, but looking at it on the computer I found another wasp of a different species and a small beetle. See if you can find them.

The beetle is a little easier to see in this one.

In looking these up, I found that there at least two species that look almost exactly the same, the difference between them being silver streaks on their thorax. Fortunately I could see the silver streaks, so I think I got the id right.

 Ant on morning glory

 Squash bug

 Assassin bug

 Moth

 Assassin bug nymph

 

 Crane fly

Overall this summer has been really disappointing for finding bugs on the porch attracted to the porch light. There are not the quantities of porch-light bugs I have had in years past, or the variety. I haven't even had a Porchlight Lepidoptera Lollapalooza this year. But I found a couple of nice ones tonight:

 This is just a couple of millimeters long. I couldn't even tell for sure if it was an insect without looking through the camera. I guess it's probably a gnat, but it looks a lot like a tiny bee.

 Brown lacewing

 Flower crab spider

Spined micrathena