Entry tags:
Urban wildlife mystery maybe

This was one of maybe a dozen winged insects, of different sizes and apparent stages of development, adhered to a rock in Babbling Brook (the stream that leaves Ward's Pond and becomes the Muddy River). I thought maybe they were very slowly emerging imagos (adult insects) and pupae. I sent this picture to an insect id community and mostly they were stumped too. The best explanation I got was that these were female caddisflies which had died shortly after laying eggs in the water. The white growth (someone supposed) was a fungus consuming the dead insects' bodies. It seems plausible to me.
I tried to figure out if this was a normal part of the caddisfly life cycle, but I couldn't tell. Interestingly, there's a lot of information about caddisflies online from the perspective of people who make pretend insects with which to catch fish. They had some good things to say, but I didn't get my questions answered. The log cabin caddsfly entry I did for the 365 project (click above link) included pictures of caddisfly larvae collected a short distance downstream from the mystery insects.
Anyone else have any bright ideas?
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For our larval entomology class many of his pictures for the trich section came from troutnut dot com which is all about fly fishing, as I'm sure you can imagine. I found that kind of weird and fascinating.
FROM ptosis @ Hubpages
(Anonymous) 2010-08-12 03:37 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
I'm a caddisfly biologists/ecologist who studies their life cycles. The fungus is likely most saprolegnia.
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