insects
-
Butterflies
American Copper, Lycaena phlaeas. Another name for them is Flame Copper. They are small and vivid.Common buckeye, Junonia coenia. This one kept leaping ahead of us on the path and required some very careful stalking. From F. Schuyler Mathews, Field Book of American Wild Flowers: Being a Short Description of Their Character and Habits, A…
-
Island Bugs
Ah, summer, season of buzzing and flying and biting! The insects are out in force. OK, there’s really not that much biting, per se. Seen last week on Nantucket: One of the green metallic bees, genus Agapostemon, also known as sweat bees, on chicory flower. Note the big bundles of pollen around the legs. A…
-
City Habitat
Now that the dog-day cicadas have started to emerge from their years underground, their enemy, the cicada wasps, emerge as well. And since our street trees have roots, which is what the cicadas live on while during their nymph stage, so too do our streets have these wasps.Yesterday, walking in Brooklyn Heights, I found a…
-
Cicadas Emerging
I was away from the city for a week, so the cicada I heard on Henry Street this morning was my first of the year. It’s the quintessential sound of summer. Previous cicada-themed posts: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
-
Systems of change
“[…] it is often not easy to assign insects to precise categories because there are so many species and their morphological, behavioral, and genetic differences frequently tend to overlap or intergrade. Often the best we can do is estimate degrees of relationship and/or distinctness and assign them to hypothetical groups as information becomes available. As…
-
Back 40 Grasshopper
Less than half an inch long, this little grasshopper leapt out of the Back 40 greenery when I started to water and clung to the plastic (yeech!) fence.
-
Ladybugs
NSFW? Variegated ladybugs, Hippodamia variegata, making more beetles. Photo taken on Bond Street by the Gowanus Canal. Quite a bit of action, so to speak, on these leaves. Note the eggs below, the aphid (?) on the left, and the remains of something by the female beetle’s front right.
-
Dragonfly Exuviae
Dragonflies seen at Brooklyn Bridge Park these days include the twelve-spotted skimmer, blue dasher, painted skimmer, and variegated meadowhawk. These long exuviae, the shed exoskeleton of dragonfly larvae, belong to one of these, or perhaps another, species. In their larval stage, dragonflies are aquatic, and voracious predators. When ready to make the leap to the…
-
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Painted skimmer, Libellula semifascianata. (Oh, come now, much more than just semi fascianata!)A ladybug larva demolishing aphids. Perhaps the seven spotted, Coccinella septempunctata. Twice or more as big as the insects below, and a little more lumbering, hence the best shot of the post! This is an Eastern carpenter bee, Xylocopa virginica, working the swamp…
-
The Monarchs Are Here
A male monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, in the Battery Bosque yesterdy. You can see some examples of monarch caterpillars in my post from last August. (And you can tell this is a male, even this blurry, because of the small spots in the hindwing veins.) The Bosque, named after the trees that tower over it,…
Backyard and Beyond 