The Urban Pantheist

This beautiful youngster is a stinkbug in the family Asopinae.* This family differs from all the others in that it is a predator. Most Asopines attack small soft-bodied creatures like aphids or caterpillars. Others attack their cousins, the plant-sucking stink bugs. Predatory stink bugs have been used for biocontrol in gardens and crops for this reason. This nymph has yet to grow wings, and my photo was sent to the bugguide file "Not Yet Identified Nymphs."


* from the Genus Asopus, from a Greek river god of the same name.

With its wings closed this butterfly is about a half-inch (1cm) across. Its small size explains why it is relatively unknown (by me at least) despite being one of the most common and widespread butterflies in the northern hemisphere. Our field guides call it the "American copper," but "common copper" might be more accurate.
Lycaena phlaeas.

If you are in a place with harsh freezing winters, and you see a yellow jacket in May, you are most likely seeing a queen. She has woken up from her sleep, where she was hiding under bark or under a nice warm rotting log, or--as I suspect in this case--in a crevice or wall void in a building. Queens can sting, apparently, but this one had no interest in doing so. I found her battering against a window, probably trying to get outside to find a place to establish a nest, with whatever energy she had stored from last year.


I got her a little wet, so that she would slow down a bit for the photograph (and this short hygiene video). I have a request in to Bugguide.net to identify her to species.

Some zookeepers were passing through one of their exhibit gates only to discover their skin and clothes stained by some purple substance. There were also a lot of flies and yellow jackets flying around. Finally someone noticed the aphids.


A lot of aphids. The purple staining came from the crushed bodies of hundreds of aphids. Since aphids normally spend nearly their whole lives on their host plant, this behavior is a little strange. My best guess is that they overpopulated their host plant and dispersed out of necessity. Above this gate is one of many Austrees in a row. An Austree is a ornamental willow hybrid developed for use as a windbreak--it grows straight and very fast. Researching willow aphids, I found that they feed on second year growth; there would only be so much of this kind of growth on each tree.


Most aphids are wingless, but some are born with wings, allowing them to fly to new host plants to establish new colonies.

Aphids famously produce a waste material called honeydew, which other insects use as a food source. Ants are usually the ones you think of accompanying aphids, but in my experience yellow jackets are drawn to aphids in the fall, when the yellow jackets are desperate for a source of liquid food. (Yellow jacket adults can't feed on solid food, so they feed their larvae solid food and the larvae regurgitate a liquid the adults can eat. In the fall, the queen stops producing new larvae and the workers must find liquid sugar on their own, thus the misery they cause to late summer soda drinkers and ice cream eaters.)

Looking on bugguide, it's clear that these are genus Pterocomma, large aphids that feed on willow or poplar. They most closely resemble, in appearance and behavior, other aphids on bugguide not identified to species, but named "halloween aphids" by one user. Their coloration plus their sudden appearance in October justifies this common name to me. I hope some aphid expert identifies them to species (and keeps the name "halloween aphid.")

This moth was attracted to the porch light, then slipped past the threshold to the kitchen wall. I caught it up and chucked it outside.

The chances are really good that this is the "dingy cutworm moth," an unkind name for a lovely little animal. The larva is distinguished from its close relatives by being darker and less well-patterned, thus "dingy." The adult looks enough like its close relatives that even the entomosnobs at bugguide declare "Species identification a bit difficult."

There are four lookalikes that are possible visitors to my yard, including the awesomely named "subgothic dart." Alas, I'll let this one go by as Feltia sp., unidentified dart moth, and wait for something to knock my socks off (or at least have a firmer identification) for the penultimate species in my 100 species project.
EDITED TO ADD: I should hold out for a better picture, too. Yeesh.

(Cutworms are caterpillars that eat young plants, cutting them at the soil level, like this one.)

Nursery web spider Pisaurina mira

Alexis came into the house to get me, "the biggest spider I've ever seen around here!" I would say that it's about tied for size with the Argiope yellow-and-black garden spiders and Carolina wolf spiders that are both known from our area (but not yet from our yard). I instantly thought of fishing spiders, but of course we aren't near enough to water for that to be right.
( more thrilling tales of identification plus terrifying close-up )

Two years ago I made a post about a brown lacewing I found in my yard. Earlier today I got a notification from bugguide.net about it. I assumed the message was going to be that the image was substandard and was being discarded (I've received a number of those messages).

Instead it turns out that the animal had been identified to species and the image moved to the proper page: Hemerobius stigma. Hemerobius translates to "day-living" (diurnal) and stigma would refer to a spot or markings on the insect somewhere. The species is "widespread in North America," and "often associated with conifers."