The two moths that are featured today, the Walnut Sphinx and the Spotted Thyris, are pretty different from each other—one large, one small; a day flyer and a night-flyer; one from a very large family and one practically an only child; one well-biographied and the other barely known.
The BugLady and her camera have been skulking about the pond edges, feeding the mosquitoes and looking for damselflies, and there are now has many fuzzy damselfly images on the cutting room floor. Damselflies often hang out where it is dark and green and leafy (and protected from predators, which include dragonflies), and generally stay below waist height.
It’s a good thing that the BugLady doesn’t have nearby neighbors (or a Home Owners’ Association) who might be alarmed about someone who turns on the porch light and then creeps around taking pictures of porch critters at midnight.
The Grapevine Epimenis certainly looks like a small butterfly (wingspread about an inch), and it is a daytime flyer in woodlands and edges in the eastern half of the U.S. and into Ontario. Adults nectar on the flowers of a few early-blooming fruit trees like cherries and plums and on sumac, and they like redbud. Grape Leaf Folders get their name from the habit of their caterpillars of folding grape (and Virginia creeper, redbud, and some evening primrose) leaves and webbing them shut. They can become pests in vineyards—high infestations damage leaves, which may lower production, damage fruits, and affect the next crop.
Daphnias are at the lower limit of what the BugLady can accomplish with her macro lens (though she does have a recognizable shot of a Cyclops…). So, back into the water we go and into the realm of the NETI—not the pot, the “ Not-Exactly-True-Insects. ” Daphnias, aka water fleas , are yet another example of great stories coming in small packages.
Salt Marsh Caterpillar Moths like sunny places—wet, dry, and disturbed, and can be found from the Atlantic coast all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. The SMC is a very mobile little critter, moving fast and far looking for edibles. The females lays masses of —from 400 to 1,000 at once—on host plants, and she (not surprisingly) dies a few days later. The eggs hatch in four or five days, and the caterpillars hang out and feed together during their first two instars (more than quintupling their size) before going their separate ways.
To attract Giant Ichneumon Wasp two ingredients are necessary; first, a dead tree, and second, a distant GIW relative, a primitive wasp called a pigeon horntail. GIW larvae are parasitoids. They eat other insects, slowly, starting with non-essential structures and ending with essential organs, so that the host stays alive until the parasitoid is ready to pupate. In this case, the unfortunate victim is the larva of the pigeon horntail that is developing in a chamber in the rotting wood.
Adult Bronze Coppers, especially females, take some nectar. Caterpillars dine only on a few species of the dock (Rumex), especially water dock, and smartweed (Polygonum) in the smartweed family. BCs can be found in low, moist areas on both sides of the border from Maine west to the northern Great Plains and south to mid-country. Here in Wisconsin, they are rarer “up north.” One source suggested that the BC, like other coppers, favors areas where drainage is poor.
Weevils (family Curculionidae) are the largest family in the beetle order, but despite its common names, the Baptisia seed pod weevil (BSPW) (Apion rostrum) is (now) in the family Brentidae, the “primitive” or “straight-snouted” weevils.
Greenstriped Grasshopper are found east of the Rockies from April through the first half of summer. The farther east you go, the more common they are. In the eastern half of their range, they are partial to brome grass, the alien grass that takes over many old fields, but they eat other grasses, too, and the occasional forb. The (flightless) nymphs like wet areas, grassy swales, stream banks and roadside ditches but the (flying) adults may disperse into pretty dry conditions.