Aster Treehopper

Aster treehoppers (Publilia concava) are found in the eastern half of North America. The BugLady usually sees them on goldenrods, but they can also be found on several other species in the Aster family, and the (winged) adults may move to woody plants.

Summer Survey 2019

The BugLady hopes that you’ve been getting out on the trail and drinking in the lushness of the summer. Subjects of this summer’s survey include wasps, aphids, syrphids, and katydids.

Water Boatmen and Backswimmers Rerun

Life is busy, and besides, May is National Wetland Month, so here’s a rerun from ten years ago.  A few new words and pictures.  The BugLady will visit these guys together because even though they are, in a sense, photo-negatives of each other, they are often mistaken for one another.

Stories, not Atoms

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The BugLady sees lots of tableaux unfolding as she ambles across the landscape. Because she was taught, at an impressionable age, by a professor who said “Don’t just tell them what it is, tell them ‘what about it,’” she tries to read the stories and understand the “what-about-its”

Giant Water Bugs Revisited

Not long ago, an email correspondent reported seeing a giant water bug in a parking lot, so the BugLady decided to refresh a BOTW episode from 2009 with some new content and lots of cool links. Giant Water Bugs are “true bugs” in the Order Hemiptera and the family Belostomatidae. It’s not a huge family – about 160 species worldwide, 19 of them in North America.

Pygmy Backswimmer (Family Pleidae)

Pygmy backswimmers are true bugs, the aquatic bugs, along with water boatmen, giant water bugs, backswimmers, and water scorpions. They are in the family Pleidae, a family with maybe 40 species worldwide, five of those in North America. They occur globally except for the Poles and some distant oceanic islands, and almost all dally in clear, still, weedy waters. Though they may inhabit ephemeral ponds and can dry out for a while when the pond does, they generally live in permanent waters.

Ephemeral Pond Critters Revisited

The wonder of ephemeral pools is that they are populated by animals that take this annual disappearing act in stride—animals that are prepared to dry up with the pond or to get out of Dodge (timing is everything), and therein lie many tales. An astonishing array of animals use ephemeral ponds as a place to drink, hunt, and breed, but an ephemeral pond is a challenging place to call home. The still, shallow water warms quickly (which encourages speedy metamorphoses) but contains little oxygen.

Brown Stink Bug (Family Pentatomidae)

Brown Stink Bugs feed on leaves, stems, flowers, seeds, nuts, and fruits of a variety of plants, both wild and domestic. In fruit crops, their injected saliva may cause chemical damage, and their piercing may cause mechanical damage (holes) or cosmetic issues (scars on fruit). Brown stink bugs develop by simple/gradual metamorphosis, going from an egg, to a nymph that looks pretty much like an adult and that adds adult body parts as it grows, to an adult.

A Couple of Stinkbugs (Family Pentatomidae)

Stink Bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts in the form of a tube that is inserted into their food source, through which digestive juices are injected, and through which the resultant pre-digested tissue is extracted. The family contains herbivores, including a number of agricultural pests; carnivores, some of which are used as biological controls on other insects; and a few that start their lives as plant feeders but switch to animals.

Milkweed Bugs, Large and Small (Family Lygaedidae)

Milkweed Bugs of one kind or another are found on milkweeds across the U.S. and into southern Canada, and they’re most common in the Southeast. MBs are reported to sip nectar and to feed on non-milkweed species when milkweeds are scarce; SMBs are known to eat insects that they find on milkweeds, including the occasional monarch caterpillar (there’s that caveat).