Autumn Romance

 Love was in the air in my backyard today. Or under the leaves, anyway. Some insects have a distinct, short mating season, but some of them (and I could be completely wrong about this) seem to take the entire not-freezing portion of the year to propagate the species. Given that different kinds of insects overwinter in different ways, as eggs, larvae, pupae, or adults timing for creating eggs can vary. Katydids, for instance, lay eggs that don't hatch until the next spring, so mating continues into the autumn. But luna moths have about a two week period in June during which they look for mates and lay their eggs (though in some climates there are two generations of luna moths). So here it is, early autumn, and for two different species of assassin bugs…

For this assassin bug, food was more important:

It's not eating in this shot, but I found it walking on the ailanthus webworm web, and leaving behind a caterpillar that I think it had just finished feeding on. It would be an easy assumption to say that for insects it is always feeding season, but that's not the case. The aforementioned luna moths, for instance, don't have digestive tracts, or even mouths, in their adult form; they do all of the eating for their lifetime during their caterpillar phase, and store up enough energy to last their two weeks or so of adulthood. 

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Fly. I can't really tell, and I didn't want to make her fly away by getting too in-your-face, but her odd posture makes me think she may have been laying eggs. But I don't even know if this is even a female.

Other Bugs:

Wasp on goldenrod. There were quite a few wasps on this goldenrod patch today.

If this katydid was looking for a mate, he had very bad timing. There was a female katydid on this very plant last night, but not today.

Green stinkbug

Jagged ambush bug

There's more than just stilt bugs on this goldenrod…

I didn't notice the wasp when I took the picture. I could barely even tell if there was something there when I saw it on the computer.

It was terribly windy again today, as it has been all week, and it interfered with my photography (as it did all week), so though I saw a lot of bugs (mostly bees on goldenrod), you have now seen the only ones I managed to get fairly in-focus photos of.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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This bumblebee landed directly in front of the spider and quickly changed its mind about where it wanted to feed. It happened too fast for me to see what the spider's reaction was.