Readers’ wildlife photos

Mark Sturtevant is back with some arthropod photos for us. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today we have another set of pictures of arthropods from my area in eastern Michigan. Some of these were taken in the field and others were in a staged setting on the faithful dining room table.

During recent summers, I have been using cheap black lights on the front and back porch to attract more insects, and many new species have arrived as a result. One was this floofy moth that is clearly in the tiger moth (Arctiidae) family, but it was new to me. I believe this to be Spilosoma latipennis. If so, it should have hot pink legs, as shown in the link, but I did not know at the time to check for that:

Another arrival was this species of chafer beetle. This is an Oriental Beetle (Anomala orientalis). It is an invasive species from Asia that is becoming a minor pest here on turf grasses and other plants:

Moving on to spiders, here is a new species of spider called the Western Lynx Spider (Oxyopes scalaris). Lynx spiders can be easily recognized by their form, and especially by those prominent leg spines. They are sit-and-wait predators on plants. This male was missing one of its pedipalps, so I used editing tricks to replace it:

Next up is a lovely Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta), which had built its web across a seldom-used path in the woods. I had to stand on tippy-toes to get several partial focus stacks, and this final picture was grafted together by hand, piece by piece from those pictures. I really like their iridescent abdomens that look like antique porcelain, and those beautiful green legs. She was eating an unidentified Syrphid fly:

The next two pictures show a flashy jumping spider that I have only seen a few times. This is the Thin-spined Jumping Spider (Tutelina elegans), but to me it will always be called ‘the purple jumper’. The pictures were both taken in a staged setting, where the first is a focus stack, again needing much assembly, and the second was a “lucky shot” single frame. Lucky because she never once stood still, and she was always waving her front legs. I wonder if these spiders are trying to be ant mimics:

Back to insects. Folks here will have seen this one many times now, but it is still special. This is the Wasp Mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea). I won’t repeat again the improbable life cycle it has as a parasitoid on spider egg sacs. You can clearly see that it shows convergent evolution on praying mantids, and at the same time it is a wasp mimic. More specifically, it mimics various species and regional color variations of paper wasps (Polistes sp.). A detail about that which I think is really neat are its two-toned pigmented wings, which is an ersatz way to get its wings to resemble the wings of its models.

I show our local model wasp (P. fuscatus) in the next picture for comparison. Paper wasps have an extra crease that folds their wings length-wise, so the wings are dark and narrow. The mantidfly does not have the crease, so it fakes it with pigment:

Speaking of mantids, I finish with an amusing story about the next picture. This is a Chinese Praying Mantis (Tenodera sinensis), in hand, and the picture was taken with the Opteka 15mm wide angle macro lens. This fully manual lens is the most difficult lens that I own since to get the depth of focus that is much of the point for this kind of photography, one has to stop down the aperture to about f/32. As a result you are taking pictures with a pinhole camera, and focusing is done by guesstimation. Meanwhile, the working distances are extremely short so an insect subject is practically touching the lens. Anyway, she wasn’t having any of it, and quite honestly I was having a hard time keeping this big girl under control. So I made a short movie about the struggle, and attached an appropriate sound track to it. For those who have handled one of these insects, you know they will do what they want to do, and what they want to do is climb:

Sound up for the movie!