Readers’ wildlife photos

Mark Sturtevant, perhaps our most regular regular, gives us a lovely batch of arthropod photos. Mark’s text is indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

During the previous summer I sought new insect hunting grounds by spending a few days in Ohio. This is the first installment of my pictures from this trip. They include a mixture of species I’ve seen before, plus some that are new to me.

First up are a mating pair of Robber Flies. I don’t know the ID since there are so many species that look like this:

I am always happy to find a Mantidfly, since they are rather strange on a variety of levels. This one is Climaciella brunnea. I have shown them here several times, but remind you that Mantidflies are in the same order as more familiar insects like lacewings and antlions. They resemble praying mantids, and are thus a case of convergent evolution although they are not at all closely related.

Mantidfly larvae grow by invading a spider egg sac and feeding on the eggs while the mamma spider stands guard over her brood and is none the wiser. And finally, this species is a very exacting mimic of native paper wasps in the genus Polistes, although they of course mantidflies have no stinger. The link above is to a video of the same species, although its colors seem different.

The paper wasps they mimic come in a range of colors that range from mostly yellow to nearly black, and based on pictures I’ve seen, the Mantidfly does a pretty good job matching the different wasps. A few manually stacked pictures were taken of this one, and then it flew away:

Next up is one of the large Flat-backed Millipedes, probably Euryurus leachii. They were abundant under rotten logs in Ohio, and were new to me. Many species of millipedes from this group produce a hydrogen cyanide chemical defense, and that probably explains the bright warning colors:

Here is Walking Stick nymph, probably a young Diapheromera femorata. It was right next to a very cool spider that I will show next time:

Instead, here is Nursery Web Spider, Pisaurina mira, followed by a Triangle Orbweaver, Verrucosa arenata. The latter spider is new to me. Most of them are this color, although there is a variant that is bright yellow:

And finally for this installment, here are pictures of a beast that I had long wanted to see again since I first saw one as a kid. This is a Wheel Bug.  (Arilus cristatus), which is our largest assassin bug. At 33mm they are pretty impressive, and their bite is described as being rather painful (though some have disputed that, and I wonder who’d want to test it). I managed to find a couple nymphs (it being too early for adults), and brought one home for pictures. I kept it for a time, and it even made a meal of a caterpillar. After some weeks, it finally molted to the large adult seen in the final pictures. From the side you can see why they are called Wheel Bugs: