The Dogwood Tree Borer’s name is a study in confusion. Despite its common name, its larvae have catholic tastes and are at home on a variety of woody plants including plum, viburnum, willow, mulberry, elm, laurel, dogwood, fruit trees, and blueberry. It can be found from the Atlantic through Kansas and the Dakotas.
Mantises rely on camouflage and stealth to ambush their prey. They are visual hunters and therefore daytime feeders, but males may fly at night, tracking female pheromones. A single ear, located on the thorax, helps them detect bats.
Viceroy butterflies enjoy shrubby and open fields and wet meadows throughout the U.S. They’re less common in the Great Plains, north into Canada and south into central Mexico.
Cerambycids can be remarkably long-lived—some exist as larvae for a decade and as adults for a few additional years. While their elders feed on flowers, fungi, sap, and leaves, the larvae of many species bore into dead and dying trees—they’re great for decomposition, because their tunnels are doorways for water, bacteria, and fungi.
Sawfly larvae are fussy eaters, with many species tied to just a few host plants, and some larvae are considered pests. Larval defense strategies include communal feeding (potential predators have trouble figuring out where one larva stops and the next one starts) and spitting vile liquids from their mouths.
Everywhere you look, you see adult insects, young insects, and the kinds of activity that will result in them. Here are some sights from the BugLady’s walks in southeastern Wisconsin.
Thick-headed flies nectar on flowers, but Ms. Myopa has an ulterior motive for being there—she’s looking for hosts for her offspring. When she spies a potential host, she flies up, intercepts the incoming bee in flight, grabs it, and inserts a single egg between two of its abdominal segments.
Horsemint tortoise beetles (Physonota unipunctata) are horsemint specialists. That name is a bit deceiving, because there are several species of horsemints (genus Monarda) . The Horsemint tortoise beetle is tied to a mint that isn’t generally called Wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa).
It’s National Moth Week! Right now (July 23rd – 31st)! Moths are diverse, successful, showy, drab, cryptic, abundant, huge (a few have wingspreads close to 12”), micro, tasty, toxic objects of our admiration, confusion, superstition, and reverence.
Arrow Clubtails (Stylurus spiniceps) are fairly-common/widespread-but-not-abundant inhabitants of the northeast quadrant of the U.S. They prefer good-sized rivers with muddy/sandy bottoms and with trees along the edges. Unlike the Pond clubtails, the Arrow clubtail is a Hanging clubtail, one of 11 North American species in the genus Stylurus.