Category: insects and other arthropods

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Stalwart regular and crack arthopod photographer Mark Sturtevant has sent us photos of spiders, lepidopterans, and assorted insects. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken in the field, but a couple were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.

The first is a new species for me. This is the Butterfly Orbweaver, Araneus pegnia. The name comes from the white four-lobed marking on the abdomen. Although very stretched in this gravid female, in thinner individuals it does look like a four-winged butterfly.

Next up is my highly reliable always-there-for-me-in-case-I-need-it jumping spider, usually called the Tan Jumping Spider (Platycryptus undatus). They are common on our shed, but lately they are also turning up on our front and back porches. This is perhaps because I often leave the porch lights on these days to draw in nocturnal insects. This adorable male was photographed as a manual focus stack on the dining room table. You can see the reflection of my home-made flash diffuser in the eyes, along with the black outline of the lens. As usual, I forgot to remove the clamp of the Raynox diopter lens that is used to boost magnification, and so you can see that too in the reflection.

A small obsession with me lately is shown with the next spider. This is the Candy-striped Spider, Enoplognatha ovata, and she has the remains of a small Hemipteran on a daisy flower where she was hanging out. Candy-striped Spiders are in the family of cobweb-weaving spiders (which includes our common house spiders and widows), but this species lives our in the sunshine, and is commonly seen lurking just under the flowers of herbaceous plants. One item of notoriety about them is that they prowl around their plants at night, looking for sleeping insects which then never wake up. So, I regularly scour our gardens to keep track of the known spiders to see what they have been up to. They almost always have prey on hand, and after a good night they may have several insects with them. I call these collections “a little shop of horrors”, inspired by their nocturnal habit of dining out.

The last of the spiders is a Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes costatus. They build untidy hammock-like webs on plants in forests, and they too seem to do quite well. This one got a Long-legged Fly (Dolichopodidae), which are super alert flies with very fast reflexes as any macrophotographer will know:

That will be all for spiders. Next up are Odonates. This little damselfly is the Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis). I really need to get more damselfly pictures since there are so many species that I have never photographed. A long focal length macro lens would help immensely!

The next Odonate is one of my favorites. This is the Calico Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis elisa). Mature males like this one are stunningly colored with deep reds, while the similar females have yellow coloration:

A place that I call the Magic Field has a very dense population of grasshoppers. One of my favorite species commonly seen out there are the Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), But surely everyone in the U.S. and parts of Canada are familiar with them. Adults have boldly contrasting black and yellow hind wings, as shown in the linked picture, but with wings folded at rest they are well camouflaged. The grasshoppers are divided about evenly into two color morphs, and these are shown here as nymphs that were picked up in the Magic Field for staged pictures on the dining room table. The combined picture is a bit of post-processing trickery since they were photographed separately:

The next picture is a katydid that was also found in the Magic Field. This is a nymph of the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid (Scudderia furcate). It was systematically cleaning all 6 feet without any concern about my proximity:

The little planthopper in the next picture was pulled in from the porch lights mentioned above. This is Tylozygus bifidus:

Lets’ wrap this up with Lepidopterans. It is always a special day to find the caterpillars of giant silk moths, but the species that seems almost common are Promethea Moth caterpillars (Callosamia promethea). These grow into beautiful pastel colored caterpillars the size of large pickles, and later into a palm-sized moth like the one shown in the link. But for now, these youngsters were the size of rice grains. The younger caterpillars tend to stay together through their early instars. It was neat that they had even molted together.

The swarm of recently hatched caterpillars in the next picture were found on a swamp milkweed leaf, so they should be Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars (Euchaetes egle). These don’t look like much now, but later they grow into flamboyantly furry caterpillars.

Lastly, we have our largest butterfly, the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes). I was following it for some time, taking pictures, and here it was nicely photo-bombed by a Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens):

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 2, 2026 • 8:30 am

Send in your photos if you got ’em, please!

Today’s photos continue the series taken by reader Ephraim Heller in Namibia. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. Today’s post features Damaraland, a 48,000 km² region in the northwest of the country.

Damaraland is not a formal administrative region, but a geographic and cultural designation. It is a jumble of granite kopjes, basalt plateaus, flat-topped mountains, broad gravel plains, and eroded canyon systems. Like much of Namibia, it is desert. Here is an aerial view, taken from the window of a small airplane:

Life is sparse here. A handful of ephemeral rivers cross Damaraland, cutting westward from the interior highlands to the Skeleton Coast along the Atlantic Ocean. These rivers flow above ground for only a few days per year following significant inland rainfall, but each bed sits atop an alluvial aquifer that retains water from flood events for months to years. This subsurface water sustains a few trees, shrubs, and animals along the riverbeds. Here’s another aerial view showing the path of an ephemeral river:

By far the coolest critter I found was the longleg armoured corncricket (Acanthoplus longipes), which has superpowers. It is a large, flightless katydid brandishing big, spiny legs and a heavily armored (American spelling) pronotum. When attacked, individuals autohaemorrhage, shooting a jet of toxic hemolymph from the leg joints toward attackers. I wish I had a superpower like that:

Naturally, any creature with such a magnificent superpower fluoresces under UV light:

Frankly, the rest of this post is anticlimactic. What could possibly beat a longleg armoured corncricket? Not a pretty brush jewel beetle (Julodis humeralis):

A Namib rock agama (Agama planiceps) doesn’t beat a longleg armoured corncricket, not even when it is chowing down on a bug:

One night I went on a walk to see what would fluoresce under my UV light. I found this gecko. Sure, fluorescence is cool and I wish I could do it, but does this gecko autohaemorrhage? No, it does not. The folks at iNaturalist couldn’t identify it – apparently one needs the visible spectrum to make a positive ID:

This is tentatively identified as an orange lesser-thicktail scorpion (Uroplectes planimanus), another critter with the minor UV-fluorescence superpower. Interestingly, researchers do not know why scorpions evolved fluorescence.

Now for the birds. Sadly, they have no superpowers at all. Our lodge had a water feature that was the only surface water for miles around. I spent hours watching the birds bathe and drink.

A violet-backed starling (Cinnyricinclus leucogaster). The color is produced not by pigment but by thin-film interference: stacks of hollow melanosomes in the feather barbules refract light at specific wavelengths. The male can modulate its apparent coloration through posture:

A black-fronted bulbul (Pycnonotus nigricans):

A Namaqua dove (Oena capensis):

A red-headed finch (Amadina erythrocephala):

The southern masked weaver (Ploceus velatus). Egg color varies among females, allegedly as a defense against brood parasitism by the Diederik cuckoo. Because the cuckoo cannot know egg color before entering the nest, color polymorphism in the weaver population raises the probability of parasite detection and egg ejection. Not a superpower, but cool nonetheless. I just like the bokeh in this photo:

Finally, the requisite Namibian desert night sky photos:

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 29, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos from Jan Malik taken at Cape May, New Jersey emphasizing the bizarre horseshoe crabs, which are not crustaceans but chelicerates, more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to real crabs.  Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

People visit Cape May, NJ, in spring, mostly to see the migrating birds, but what makes the high density of animal migrants and residents possible in that area is in large part hidden in the water. Delaware Bay is home to a large population of the Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) which spawn around the time the migrating birds pass through. Horseshoe crabs’ eggs, along with crabs themselves, are an important link in the food chain that fuels the spring migration.

Early morning visitors to the Delaware Bay side of Cape May are welcomed by the ruckus made by Laughing Gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla). These birds nest locally but also depend on the crabs as a major food source:

Walking onto the beach in the morning after a high tide, a visitor will see these animals stranded helplessly on their backs, flipped by the waves:

Here is a larger female with a male still attached. All three parts of a crab are visible: the main body (prosoma) with mouth and legs, an abdomen (opisthosoma) with book gills and a tail (telson). What can be also seen here are male’s pincers, modified forelegs used to grasp the carapace of the female:

The crabs are not blind thanks to their pair of compound eyes. They also have 8 other simple eyes and ocelli distributed on top of their carapace and additional photosensors underneath and on the telson. These organs are sensitive to UV and visible light and are used to detect phases of the lunar cycle and determine when to come out of water onto the sand to mate and lay eggs:

The primary function of a telson is to help the animal steer and to right itself in water. On dry land, however, it is of little help and a flipped crab, if left on its own, usually succumbs to desiccation or is preyed upon by other animals:

 A human visitor to the beach has to decide whether to save the crab or leave it to die and let birds have their fill. In my case I usually flip them back on, giving them a chance to live another day. They are used by the medical industry to develop a test for the presence of bacteria in medical devices, which involves catching them, drawing about a quarter of their blood and then releasing them, but such a crab is then greatly weakened and mortality is high:

A Sanderling (Calidris alba) eating a horseshoe crab egg. For some evolutionary reason, these marine arthropods must leave the water in order to lay eggs. They prefer to do the laying at high tide, hence the lunar phase detection. The eggs may be then uncovered by waves and spread far and wide on the beach:

The waves may also uncover a whole cluster of eggs which is then found by shorebirds patrolling the ecotone between the sea and the land:

This is what the washed up eggs look like; eggs are 1.5 mm to 2 mm in diameter and they grow as the embryos inside them grow. This is the main fuel for the thousands of plovers, sanderlings, turnstones, red knots and others on their way toward the Arctic:

Using a macro lens, one can make out an embryo inside, complete with legs, telson and tiny eyes:

I think it was only at the beginning of this century that the significance of these “crabs” (which have a common ancestor with spiders and scorpions) for migrating birds was properly recognized and some harvesting bans were put in place in NJ and Delaware. Before, they would be harvested in excess as crab bait or just for fertilizer. This picture shows how they can be a host to barnacles and limpets:

Even though they can and do come onshore during daytime, they prefer nighttime at high tide, at new or full moon. In the Delaware Bay, many thousands of them come out then, males crowding around the females to claim the best spot and be first to fertilize eggs. They must have been doing similar things for many millions of years – earliest fossils with similar body plans date back to Paleozoic era, 450 mya, which was well before the dinosaurs. Fossils quite similar to the Atlantic crab date back 200 mya. There were many species but now only four are left, this site presents a neat diagram illustrating their evolutionary history:

Just to give a sense of scale, here is a “scrum” of crabs around human feet:

Spring migration attracts many visitors to Cape May, benefiting local businesses. I think it is just to also count humans as dependent on these “crabs”, to an extent. Note that the forefront crab has a tag from the US Fish and Wildlife Services, allowing it to track the animal:

 

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 11, 2026 • 8:15 am

Mark Sturtevant has been kind enough to send the last batch of photos I have, some lovely ones of arthropods. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken outdoors where I found them, but a few were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.

First up is a species of Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes sp. These make a small but densely tangled web across leaves and branches in the woods.

Next is an Orchard Orbweaver spider (Leucauge venusta). This is as I found her along a forest trail, but usually they are in their web at an angle where it’s awkward to photograph them. I don’t know what the growths are on the leaf:

The next two pictures are staged focus stacks from the ‘ol dining room table. First is a male Long-jawed Orbweaver (Tetragnatha sp), followed by a slightly older picture of a female for comparison. I favor staged settings for these spiders since they are extremely flighty, and I just don’t have the inclination to lay down in the tick-infested grass near water where they are abundant. What I always say about these very elongate spiders is that their startling appearance is simply because they use their long chelicerae and fangs as delicate chopsticks for handling prey, and they are as harmless to you as a piece of Dandelion fluff. The extra gnarly chelicerae on the male are further modified for mating. During that dangerous time, the pair will grapple face to face with their fangs, and the male uses those upward spurs to hold open the fangs of the female. His very long pedipalps are meanwhile needed to transfer sperm to her genital openings which are waaaay back on her abdomen. This can be seen in the linked picture:

Moving on to insects, next up is an Ichneumon wasp. With the help of iNaturalist, I am inclined to identify this parasitic wasp as Coelichneumon navus:

The common woodland fly in the next picture is possibly a wasp mimic, but it is certainly a predator. It is a species of Robber Fly belonging to the “Laphria canis complex” of very similar species:

The moth shown in the next picture is in the Tiger Moth family (Arctiidae). This is the Isabella Tiger Moth Pyrrharctia isabella, but possibly everyone knows the caterpillar, which is the famous Wooly Bear. The moth came to the porch light one night:

I can’t identify everything, even with the considerable help of AI. All I got for the caterpillar in this picture is that it is some species of “inchworm”, family Geometridae, but I already knew that. The dark puncture mark on the body may mean that it has been parasitized, and if so then it is doomed:

The next picture is a first for me. This is a Pennsylvania Ambush Bug nymph (Phymata pennsylvanica). I have seen high hundreds of adults, which are sit-and-wait predators on flowers and decorated to resemble flower parts. But like my failure to ever see a live Cornish hen (has anyone?), I have never seen a juvenile Ambush bug! I believe that the youngsters stay down low in the foliage:

The insects in the next two pictures are commonly called Red-banded Leafhoppers (Graphocephala coccinea). This species is polymorphic in that some are green and red, and others are a lovely blue and red, as shown with the mating pair. That picture is about 10 years old, but I’ve brought it back for comparison. The picture was taken with my olde camera that had a simple 50mm lens converted to a macro lens with extension tubes. If anyone wants to try out macrophotography, you really don’t need a true macro lens. At least not right away:

The final picture is a species of planthopper that I have not seen for a long time. I call this the “White Derbid”, after its color and its family name Derbidae. The species is Otiocerus coquebertii, and like the other odd -looking members of its family, it may be found by slowly walking along forest trails and peering under the leaves of tree:

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 4, 2026 • 8:15 am

Reader Mark Joseph, inspired by my post on leucistic Australian ducks, went in an example and some other photos. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Your post this morning coincidentally arrived as did this photo from a person in our birdwatching group; it’s a leucistic house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

And, to give you a small set instead of a singleton, here are a couple of my feeble efforts, all taken with an iPhone in suburban southwestern Michigan. Hopefully, you can use them. I know even less about flowers and insects than I do about birds, so all identifications are courtesy of Gemini.

A zinnia (This specific variety is likely a Zinnia elegans, such as the ‘Canary Bird’ or ‘Benary’s Giant Yellow’ cultivar”) with a bumblebee (“specifically consistent with the Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens). I have enjoyed taking photos of flowers and insects together:

Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stoebe, sometimes classified as Centaurea maculosa). Unfortunately, it is invasive:

A crabapple tree and a closeup.  This closeup helps narrow it down to a Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata).

Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata):

This is a Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) or a Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus).These two species look nearly identical from a distance and are the two most common bats found roosting on residential brick walls across North America.

Brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys).When we first moved here and I decided to take some pictures, I got all excited because I was able to get a really good picture. Then I found out it was a stink bug, and invasive to boot. So, not a new species of peacock. But, it’s one of the things evolution has produced. Order Hemiptera, the “true bugs.”

A Shaggy Inkcap (Coprinus comatus), commonly known as a Shaggy Mane or Lawyer’s Wig. The next day the cap is just black goo, and the day after, nothing is left but the stem:

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 11, 2026 • 8:15 am

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!

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 15, 2026 • 8:30 am

Mark Sturtevant has returned with some excellent arthropod photos. Mark’s caption and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note that his stacking method is time-consuming; the third picture, he says, took “weeks,” and he’s still not finished.

Here is another set of local insect pictures, all manual focus stacks from either a staged setting from where I live in eastern Michigan, or at a local park.

The first was a visitor at the porch light. This beetle is a female stag beetle (Dorcus parallelus), and I was surprised about the ID because it was barely an inch long. Males of this species have mandibles only slightly larger than those in females:

The next picture is a Longhorn Beetle, Astyleiopus variegatus:

Next is a scene of symbiotic interactions between aphids and ants, where the aphids bribe the ants into protecting them by producing sugary secretions. The ants appear to be New York Carpenter Ants (Camponotus novaeboracensis), and I don’t know why they are called that since the species has a very wide range in the U.S. They are here tending aphids of an unknown species on a thistle plant. This picture is in a way impossible since an extreme macro picture like this cannot have much depth of focus, and it is also impossible to extend focus by conventional focus stacking since ants never sit still. So I’ve been spending weeks extending the depth of this picture from bits and pieces of several pictures. I am still not done doing this, but Mark needs a break so out it goes, into the public:

Dragonflies are next. These too are quick manual focus stacks but with a telephoto lens. Probably my favorite field for photographing dragons is a two hour drive away, but it is worth it because there is a field that is swarming with many species, including species that I don’t see elsewhere.

The first of these is a Common Green Darner Anax junius, which is a common species but what was exciting for me was that this is a male. Females land. Females are so easy to photograph that I usually don’t even bother. But males? No. Males fly pretty much all day, and I seldom get a chance with them:

But the best reason to visit the “dragonfly field” are its Clubtail dragonflies (Family Gomphidae). The main flight season for Clubtails is June, so that is when I make a point to visit the dragonfly field where there are ten documented species from this family. I have photographed all but two from there. Clubtail dragonflies tend to be marked in yellow and black, and they have a thickened end on their abdomen. But not all species have this color scheme, and some are more ‘club-tailed’ than others. A couple things to like about them as a group are the many species, and their reliability for perching on or near the ground. This is in stark contrast to certain other dragonflies (i.e., male Green Darners!)

The first of these are some of the ‘big-club’ Clubtails, and we start with a Midland Clubtail (Gomphurus fraternus):

The next is the impressively clubbed Cobra Clubtail (Gomphurus vastus):

And here is another one, the Skillet Clubtail (Gomphurus ventricosus), which is perched on Poison Ivy. Just to make things interesting, much of the ground cover in the dragonfly field is Poison Ivy. You should not even touch this stuff:

Do you see the differences in the above three species? Me neither! But upon close comparison, there are small differences in their markings that can be discerned. Most of the time when I am out there, I don’t know what big club species I am photographing.

Not all Gomphids are like the above. Here is a Lancet Clubtail (Phanogomphus exilis), which is probably the most common Gomphid in this park:

And here is an example of a very different dragonfly in the clubtail family, the Rusty Snaketail (Ophiogomphus rupinsulensis). There is another species of snaketail in the field, but it is rare and I have yet to see it. Just another reason to make the drive every June:

Now all of the above species of dragonflies are under 2” in length, so considerably shorter than your little finger. But dragonfly field hosts the largest Clubtail in the U.S. called the Dragonhunter (Hagenius brevistylus), which is about 3.5” long — the length of your index finger.

Does that still seem small? I promise if you see one you will stop and stare. Everyone does, because in the field they look big. The Dragonhunter is not even the largest of our dragonflies but they are probably the heaviest. Dragonhunters get their common name from their habit of eating other dragonflies. Admittedly, most dragonflies do that, but Dragonhunters seem to have a reputation for it. Even though I have seen many dozens by now, they always get my undivided attention when one goes cruising by: