Click Beetles (family Elateridae), a.k.a snapping beetles or skipjacks. About a tenth of the world’s 9,300 species live in North America, occupying most habitats except very cold and very wet ones, and deserts.
Most Emerald Dragonflies are dark with long, slender abdomens, metallic iridescence, a somewhat hairy thorax, and big, green eyes that meet at the top of the head. They are strong fliers that patrol tirelessly at the edge of woods and wetlands; and they often form feeding swarms as high as 30 feet off the ground.
Stoneflies are a primitive group of insects that’s been around for more than 300 million years. Stonefly naiads are aquatic and are found under rocks on rocky shores or clinging to rocks/gravel/branches/tree roots/debris/plants in the beds of flowing, well-oxygenated waters. In the far north, they are also found in cold lakes.
Silvery Checkerspots are in the brushfoot family Nymphalidae, which is the biggest butterfly family with about 6,000 species (209 in North America. As the common name Streamside Checkerspot suggests, this species likes damp meadows, marshes, roadsides, open woods and stream edges, but it also likes areas of disturbed, poor, or sandy soil.
The BugLady is pretty sure that this is a Forage Looper (Caenurgina erechtea) instead of the very similar Clover Looper (C. crassiuscula). Both occur across North America and southern Canada (not so much in the Great Plains), right up to the southern edge of the boreal forest. The GL likes moist, well-vegetated, open fields, edges, and disturbed vegetation.
There are 20 or so Aeshna darners in North America. The Green-striped Darner (Aeshna verticalis) is a Northeastern darner, found from Minnesota/northern Iowa/southern Canada to Nova Scotia to New Jersey; it is rarely found south of Ohio. Its life story is similar to that of other mosaics.
Curved-Toothed Geometer, Large Maple Spanworm, and Yellow Slant-Line moths are featured in this week Bug of the Week. The three members are in the Family Geometridae, with with 35,000 species worldwide (1,400-plus in North America).
Ostracods are tiny, aquatic critters, critters that you would never expect to contribute significantly to the fossil record, in fact managed to produce the most numerous fossils of all arthropods. Of all arthropods—that’s insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, and crustaceans. There are 8,000 to 13,000 total living species, 2,000 of which are non-marine (non-salt water), with 420 of those non-marine species being found in North America.
Time to celebrate three more unsung bugs—bugs about whom little is written and whose internet presence is mostly limited to species/collection/biodiversity lists, and to whom we will give their 15 minutes of fame. Remember—there are more than 100,000 species of insects on this continent north of the Rio Grande, many that are difficult to distinguish from their close relatives and that are lacking both common names and biographies.
Wisconsin has two common species of dark swallowtails—the Black Swallowtail and the dark morph female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail—and we host two dark species that are uncommon strays, the Pipevine and the Spicebush Swallowtail. The latter two are drifters whose caterpillar food plants are not native to Wisconsin. The natural habitats for this lovely wanderer include fields, parks, gardens, dappled woods, and edges from Central America through the southern U.S.