280 days of Urbpandemonium #167

[urbpan]

Story time! When I was a wee lad, playing in the grass and dirt, I used to find field crickets Gryllus pennsylvanicus* all the time. They are fairly large, kind of easy to catch, and totally harmless. I would catch them and play with them and then put them back on the ground. One day--a day of tragic mis-indentification--I tried this, but the large black insect on the ground turned out to be a mud-dauber or similar wasp. For that I earned the most painful sting of my young life, right in the meat of my palm below my fingers. It left a mark that lasted years.

But I still will pick up any insects or spiders I find! I'm just more careful and hopefully more knowledgeable now. This fall field cricket (indistinguishable from the spring field cricket but for chronological habitat) is a large female. You can see her huge needle-like ovipositor between her cerci at the back of her body. The ovipositor which is thankfully NOT modified into a venom-delivering stinger as is the case for many wasps, bees, and ants. Field crickets sing the summer into existence and chirp away into autumn--the chirping is a song made by the male with his little brown wings, to bring a female close by. The frost destroys the crickets, but leaves their eggs behind, to hatch into next year's crickets, to sing us a new summer.

*Pennsylvania cricket, sure why not--it could have been named for any state, really--it occurs in all of them except Florida, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Comments

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

That's what you get for behaving in a non-consensual manner with insects.

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

You're the opposite of most people. You pick 'em up just in case.

[arashiss.livejournal.com]

amazing