Carolina Locusts belong to the Band-winged Grasshoppers subfamily. Grasses, herbaceous plants, sometimes beans are their preferred diet. Carolina locusts come in tans through rusty browns. As a group, Band-winged grasshoppers are conspicuous in flight due to their color-banded flying wings, but they are awesomely camouflaged at rest.
Silverfish are spindle/carrot-shaped, flat and gray with a metallic “finish.” Your common, household silverfish, lives in cool, damp places, feeding on house dust, bits of dried vegetation, small insect body parts that get restaurants in trouble, sawdust, and starch, which it gleans from wallpaper paste and from the glues used in book-binding. The female lays her eggs in cracks and crevices. If she picks a hospitable microclimate, her eggs will hatch looking like mini adults and grow slowly. Silverfish live several years and molt more than a dozen times.
Fairy Shrimp are translucent; their color ranges from whitish through blue and green to orange and red, and color can vary within a species based on age and diet and the bacterial content of the water. They avoid becoming fish food because the vernal pools they inhabit are generally fish-free, and their populations peak before migrating birds can make a meal of them. Their relatives, the brine shrimp, are not so lucky and are eaten by flamingos and have been consumed by humans.
Horsehair Worms live in damp-to-wet habitats from the tropics to the cold-temperate regions. The adults do not eat. Mom lays more than a million (!!!) eggs in a gelatinous string, maybe 8” long. The string breaks down into smaller pieces and disperses. When they hatch, the larvae soon attach to vegetation along the shoreline and form a protective cyst on the plant. Once consumed, the cyst dissolves and Junior burrows into its host and begins dissolving and digesting the nearby tissue.
In today’s episode—Tettigoniidae Two—we meet three long-horned grasshoppers, the Meadow Katydid, the Shieldbacked Katydid, and the Coneheaded Katydid, that were struck from different molds.
Predaceous Diving Beetles (PDB) are in the largest family of aquatic beetles. Typically, they live in the shallow, still waters of lakes and ponds or in the pool areas of streams. Although some are pretty small, our typical PDBs are an inch to an inch-and-a-half long, oval, with slender antennae and with dark with buffy/green edging on the elytra. Eggs are laid on/in plants above the waterline in early spring. When they hatch, the larvae drop into the water. Mature larvae crawl out of the water to pupate in damp chambers on the shoreline. They emerge as adults to reenter the water
Carrion Beetles and Burying beetles are scavengers. Medium to largish in size, they are good flyers with strong legs that are tipped with spines and adapted for digging. And dig they do. CBs bury small carcasses so that their larvae (grubs) can feed on them
Caddisflies are famous for the cases built for protection by their soft-bodied larvae (the only natural “armor” they possess is located on their head, thorax and legs) and for the larvae’s ability to produce silk thread via a silk gland in their lower lip. They use silk to “glue” materials together to construct the case, to net some food, and to modify the case before they pupate.
Backswimmers are piercer-predators that kill and suck the bodily fluids out of any prey they can subdue—invertebrate and vertebrate—including tiny fish fry and tadpoles. In their choice of food, they compete with small fish. Water Boatmen swim head down along the bottom in search of food. Lacking the standard piercing beak issued to other aquatic true bugs, they ingest living material—diatoms, algae, protozoa, and nematodes.
This episode features two beetles, the Flower Longhorns and the Spotted Flower Buprestid, that are found on flowers. Though noticeably different in shape, both have the yellow and black coloration of wasp/bee mimics, and both have larvae that love wood. Other than being fellow beetles in the order Coleoptera, they are not related.