Multiplicities of Crickets

One of the things that I have learned about bugs during the past few years is that there are a lot more of certain things than I thought there were. That was a terrible, ineffective way of saying I never knew that there was more than one kind of cricket. I feel kind of stupid about it now, but all the crickets I ever saw looked pretty much the same, so I assumed they were all the same kind of cricket, and I was just unaware of so many things that are crickets that I had never seen before. I knew there were a lot of different kinds of beetles, I think. And I knew there were at least two kinds of bees, honey and bumble, but I don't think I knew much more than that, and certainly not that there are twenty thousand species of them. I knew there was more than one kind of ant, because I had seen big and small ones, and of course heard of army ants, and red ants, things we feared as children without ever actually being hurt by them, or even encountering them. But crickets? I thought there were just crickets. One kind. Same with grasshoppers. And I spent decades of my life not knowing that such a thing as a katydid existed. And I had heard of stinkbugs, but never seen one, and I think I would have guessed they were a kind of beetle. I was completely unaware of the entire order of Hemiptera, except aphids, and all I knew about those was that everyone seemed to hate them. I didn't know ladybugs were actually beetles. Or fireflies, either. Perhaps the only order of insects whose variety I had any inkling of was Lepidoptera, because I knew there were many different butterflies (although the monarch is the only one I would have been able to identify, and if I saw a viceroy I would have called it a monarch). And it never occurred to me that there was more than one kind of mosquito, but who ever looks that closely at a mosquito to notice differences? Even now there's only one species of mosquito that I could possibly identify as different from the others, and that is the elephant mosquito which is bigger than a lot of others, and blue/purple–it's quite beautiful. Actually, I take it back, I did think there was more than one kind of mosquito, because I thought craneflies were huge mosquitoes. I hated them, of course, even though never, ever did one try to bite me.

I am not sure it really matters that I didn't know all of this, but I still feel like I was terribly unobservant, and oblivious to so much that was going on around me. I don't even have the excuse that I was not living in a place like I am now, or spending much time outside–I bought the land where my house is twenty years ago, and spent a lot of time here even before there was a house here–how did I never notice candy striped leaf hoppers?

If you're reading this blog, you know there are many different kinds of crickets. Here are a few of them...

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 Tree cricket. Helpful tip for spotting tree crickets: look for the antennae.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 Ground cricket

But, there's even more crickets:

 These two were on a milkweed plant. I have seen several on milkweed plants the last couple of days.

 Notice what happened when an assassin bug nymph crawled up onto the leaf. Very soon there were no crickets here.

 I don't know what's going on here...

The wasp was able to fly like this–here it has flown to another plant. The wasp doesn't appear to be holding onto the fly, so it's not carrying prey somewhere. It looks like the fly has somehow attached itself to the wasp.

I was wrong, all three of the black swallowtail caterpillars were still on the Queen Anne's lace today, but I expect at least one, if not two, to be gone tomorrow.

 Brown hooded owlet moth caterpillars. Yes, the backyard is still full of caterpillars.

 

 Looper

White hickory tussock moth caterpillar

 Assassin bug nymph. These were all over for months, but it has been a while since I have seen one.

 Leaf-footed bug

 The nymphs under the ants' protection

 I wonder if this is the adult they turn into, along with another nymph.

 Scorpionfly

 How many hoppers can you spot?

3 here, but there was one more in the other picture.

 Hopper nymph

Milkweed tussock moth caterpillars in various instars were all over the backyard today:

 Looking like the edge of a leaf

 I found this caterpillar, which looks like it has lost some of its hair...

 ... and what I did not notice when I took the picture is that it looks like there is another one on the other side of the leaf!

 Another of those white moths laying eggs on milkweed.

 

 This aphid was still on the leaf with the ones that hatched, but I didn't see any live caterpillars. My picture of the caterpillars was too blurry to post, but it looked like they have all died for some reason.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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