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7 October 2013
Monday macrobug: Female walking stick
Here’s a big plump female walking stick (“stick insect”) I saw last week… These bugs are all over the place right now. I frequently find them in flagrante delicto, with the smaller male mounted on the female’s back, and the tips of their abdomens pressed together.
23 September 2013
Monday macrobug: a lovely new caterpillar
Liquid jewels separated by green rubber bands – that’s what it looks like to me.
16 September 2013
Monday macrobug: Garden spider
Found this lovely garden spider while working in the yard on the last day of August… It’s a big beastie; here’s a pencil tip for scale: I induced her to briefly face upward: …but she definitely preferred to be oriented head-down: I then crouched lower, and aimed the camera up, resulting in a different exposure and a different color “feel”… Then she got sick of me and my camera, and …
9 September 2013
Monday macrobug: pine sawfly larvae
These “caterpillars” are the larvae of the pine sawfly, Neodiprion sp. They were grazing on a small pine in my front yard. Sawflies are relatives of bees, wasps, and ants – they’re members of the Hymenoptera. But their larvae look so much like the larvae of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and flies (Diptera), don’t they? Beetles, too (Coleoptera) have “grubby” larval morphology. They’re wormy things, long bags of hungry guts …
7 September 2013
Monday macrobug: Colonial spiders at the Fort Valley Library
I volunteer on Wednesdays at the Fort Valley Public Library. We have some bushes out front, and in the past month, I’ve noticed something about the bush closest to the library door… It’s having some trouble, and the trouble seems to be coming from… (( brace yourself )) … a colony of spiders! You’re seeing a single giant dense web there, occupied by many many individual spiders, and full of …
2 September 2013
Monday macrobug: Antlion pits
In areas of soil protected from the rain, we find antlion pits in our yard… These are traps, dug and maintained and occupied by the larvae of the family Myrmeleontidae. When a passing insect stumbles in, the antlion will throw sand grains and cause the hapless bug to tumble down, where the antlion snags it with a monstrous pair of jaws, and eats it. The adults look like your standard …
26 August 2013
Monday macrobug: spiky caterpillar
I’m pretty sure this guy is advertising himself as inedible…
19 August 2013
Monday macrobug: Saddleback caterpillars
My neighbor, the artist Diane Artz Furlong, photographed these extraordinary caterpillars in her garden last week. With her permission, I’m reposting the photos here… Diane writes that, Just when I thought I was done with the Japanese beetle onslaught (not!) I find these guys on my rose bush. I would never have found them, though, had I not brushed my hand up against them. They sting! Quite painfully, too. They …
12 August 2013
Monday macrobug: Huge honkin’ horsefly
Horseflies have such lovely eyes… …but man, they sure can open up a welt.
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.