280 days of Urbpandemonium #109

Oh, hi! This friendly looking insect with fearsome hooklike feet is a grapevine beetle Pelidnota punctata.* It uses those feet to cling and clamber about on grapevines, eating the fruit and leaves in the cover of dark. I have never encountered one on our Concord grapevines Vitis labrusca.** Instead we find them bumbling about our porch light, rattling against the door at night. On one memorable occasion, we hosted a moth night, and caterpillar expert Sam Jaffe attended--he found a grapevine beetle and affixed it to his forehead. The little tarsal claws held on good and tight for a while, bringing painful slapstick to an absurd sight gag.



* Pelidnota from Greek pelidno, livid (dark, inflamed/leaden tinge of the skin) plus nota, the back. Punctata meaning spotted.

** Grapevine, wild grapevine

280 days of Urbpandemonium #110

In a few weeks (if it doesn't end up in the burrow of a golden digger wasp) this little nymph of a common katydid Pterophylla camellifolia* will be a couple inches long. It will still have the shape and color that will allow it to vanish into the summer leaves. It will go through several molts and hopefully regrow that missing rear leg. If it is male it will sing the scratchy song that gives it its name.

* Leaf-wing, "Species name from Greek camelo camel, plus Latin folius (?) a leaf, referring to the shape of the wings, presumably--held over the back to form a camel-like hump(?)"