Spring is in full swing here. We went from struggling to find a bug of the week, to having several to choose from.
Today the tiny caterpillar wins. Can you tell which end is the head? (It is the black dot, which is the head capsule).
The bud it is sitting on will turn into one of these:
Growing a passion vine is a great way to get to see caterpillars, beautiful gulf fritillary butterflies, and very unusual flowers.
See that new “Bug of the Week Archive” button in the navigation bar at the top? Go ahead, give it a try.
The list includes virtually all the Bug of the Week posts from this blog, organized by order or arthropod group.
The archive might be useful for:
A vast majority of the arthropods on the list were found in one small suburban yard near Phoenix, Arizona, which leads to the thought:
“What a very lot of bugs there are!”
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about the archive, or if you have any suggestions for other ways to make this blog easier to use.
Thank you for your continued support!
We see these little, mostly black insects every year on the snapdragon flowers and buds.
They look like a cross between a mosquito and an assassin bug, with long legs, a slender body and long slender antennae.
Can you see the spikes on the thorax?
The stripy legs resemble certain mosquitoes, but they don’t act like mosquitoes. They simply walk to the other side of the plant when approached, rather than fly away.
This photograph show some of the characteristics used to identify it. Under its head is a yellowish beak or proboscis, which means it is a true bug. It could have been a thread-legged assassin bug, but its antennae are made up of four segments with the end segment swollen (like a butterfly antenna). That makes it a stilt bug, family Berytidae.
These particular stilt bugs are plant feeders, but other members of the family may be predators.
Those long “stilt” legs probably help them avoid the sticky protective hairs of the snapdragon plant.
Do you see any evidence in this photograph that another insect might be sharing the snapdragon flowers soon?
For more information, see Roberta Gibson Writes.
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