Readers’ wildlife photos

Saved by the bell, I have two or three batches of photos left. Today we have arthropod photos from one of our most regular contributors, Mark Sturtevant. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of arthropods from the previous summer. They were taken from the area where I live: in eastern Michigan.

I regularly check out our “sun garden” in the backyard to see what is going on, and there I commonly find small herds of Boxelder Bugs (Boisea trivittata) as shown with this group of nymphs. Boxelder Bugs feed on the developing seeds of various trees, not just Boxelder trees, and their bright colors are a signal that they are chemically protected. The winged adults will seek shelter for the winter, and this will include peoples’ homes, so during the winter they will turn up in the house along with overwintering stink bugs and ladybird beetles. But I don’t mind buggy visitors during the long winters:

Next up is a Caddisfly. Caddisflies are a sister taxon to Lepidoptera, but their larvae are usually aquatic. They can be hard to identify, and so I can suggest only that this is in the genus Banksiola because it sure does look like it. This won’t be the only time that my IDs’are uncertain here:

The next two pictures show Wooly Aphids, aphids that secrete a waxy floof for protection. I have no idea about their identity, although it would help if I remembered their host plant. The colony picture shows nymphs, winged males, and wingless females. It was rather disgusting:

We come next to a kind of beetle that has become a bit of an obsession. This is one of the species of gold Tortoise Beetles, so-named for its lovely metallic gold color. The particular species here is Deloyala guttata.  There is a similar one that I also find that can be pretty much all gold but when even slightly disturbed it rapidly turns a plain orange color so that it resembles a toxic ladybug.  This picture also marks a first attempt to add some digital brush work and other enhancements to the surroundings during post-processing. I commonly see this sort of thing in the hobby, and I would now like to dabble in this trickery from time to time:

Both of our local species of gold Tortoise Beetle feed on the leaves of Morning Glory plants and related species. As lovely as the beetles can be, their larvae and pupae are decidedly the opposite. Next is a picture of one of the pupae, and the larvae are similar. One of course notes the icky mass that is held over the back. That is a repellant collection of their poo and cast skins, and is called a “fecal shield”. If you want to find golden Tortoise Beetles, look on Morning Glories or on related plants like Bindweed. Swiss-cheese holes in the leaves are a sign of the larvae, and there is a fair chance that a sparkly adult or two is hiding under a leaf. But be quick, as the adults are very shy.

Next up is a tiny weevil, which I believe to be Conotrachelus sp. It just sat there, locked in this pose, while did a focus stack:

The wasp shown in the next picture is a parasitic Ichneumon wasp, Therion sp. I don’t know what hosts are used by this one, but I do know that a related species will parasitize caterpillars:

If I have a special treat, I like to put it in last and so here it comes. Besides tortoise beetles, I have lately become very interested in the little cobweb building comb-footed spiders (family Theridiidae), especially because their habits are greater than what I had supposed. Familiar examples of spiders in this family include what we call House Spiders in the U.S., and then there are the Widows. As you all know, these more familiar species favor dark places where they sit and wait to ensnare prey that encounter their tangled-looking cobwebs (although their webs actually have some clever designs to them). But the family is large, and Theridiids don’t all lurk in dark places, nor do they all simply stay in a web to wait for prey to come to them.

See this little spider? Rather pretty, isn’t it? This is the Candy-striped spider (Enoplognatha ovata). The picture is a staged manual focus stack of a spider that had wandered on its own onto our back porch. The “sky” is really a paint swatch. The 2nd picture shows a male in our sun garden:

Well, this little spider is a notable marauder of diurnal (daytime active) insects, and it uses different strategies to hunt prey. Candy-striped spiders make small tangled webs near the tops of plants in gardens and fields, and there they aggressively go after insects that so much as touch their web. More recently, I got to watch one of these spiders, lurking below a flower, attack a much larger bee that happened to be foraging on the flower above. The bee had no chance as the spider steadily thrusted loop after loop of silk up from between the petals of the flower, pinning the bees’ feet down. I have pictures to show later – they are still in the camera.

It doesn’t stop there, though. According to this beautifully done research paper, and summarized further in this article, the spiders become even more pro-active hunters under the cover of night. Diurnal insects often sleep up on plants at night, and that is when the little spiders can venture out and blindly explore the plants around them in order to murder insects in their sleep and eat them. It is through this active hunting that a high percentage of their prey are bees and wasps, and the size of the insect affords them no protection. The research paper has a fabulous picture that made the journal cover that conveys the carnage rather well. Y’all really should zoom in on that journal picture to appreciate the horror of it.

So now I am regularly examining the foliage around plants, looking for small, innocent-looking cobwebs. Just this morning I found another one of these spiders sitting on top of a daisy in the sun garden, eating a Hemipteran –like flower crab spiders do. Last summer and again this summer, I am finding hints that at least a couple other Theridiid species may use similar sneak-outside-of-their-web strategies. In iNaturalist there are quite a few pictures of brightly colored spiders in this family that are just sitting around in the open, without tangled webs. So what are they up to? And here is this little Theridiid (Theridion frondeum) in a park near Detroit. She was tucked away in a leaf, and no web was nearby. So how did this nearly blind spider bring down this big fly? As always, there are more questions: