🐛Bug Positivity🐛

my take on an animal crossing moth villager

the florida bark mantis leers at the world in disgust.

she knows there’s only one good and perfect thing in this garbage fire of a planet, and it’s herself.

(x)

Lets Learn About Bugs: Dolichovespula Maculata!

Seems like the best place to start Bug of the Day is with my absolute favourite, one that I already know a lil bit about, so researching isn’t going to take that much effort. It’s also known as the bald-faced hornet, which is short for piebald, or sometimes the white-faced hornet; I like it better by another one of its names, the blackjacket wasp!

While it isn’t a true hornet, it is a type of wasp, and has the largest colony potential of the entire dolichovespula genus, containing 400 - 700 workers. They’re omnivorous, and incredibly defensive, but like most wasps not a threat if you aren’t near their nests. Unlike most wasps & bees though, the blackjacket can, aside from just biting & stinging, spray venom from its stinger!

We aren’t entirely sure what physical methods they use to identify eachother, but they are capable of identifying between blackjackets of the same vs different nests. Worker relatedness is pretty high in their species, at 0.75, with workers being more related to their offspring than to the offspring of the queen, at 0.5, but the queen still holds a monopoly over production of drones. It’s believed that many nests will kill their queen so that they can reproduce, and though we haven’t directly observed matricide, we’ve found that in 19 nests examined in the reproductive phase, 14 were without a queen.

Northern crab spider (Mecaphesa asperata) on goldenrod

Oct. 1, 2018

Day 7: Roach

Green Banana Roach!

I’m behind on my drawings again because of work :(

Even though I’m behind I’m going to finish this list no matter if it takes longer than a month or not! :)

this is like the original picture of something people were calling a ‘venezuelan poodle moth’ it was taken in 2009 and the guy who photographed it swears its a new species but most experts can’t get enough information from this 1 picture to back up these claims.  the photographer wasnt able to bring back a specimen so like?  its unconfirmed and so ‘venezuelan poodle moth’ isn’t really a real species or anything

A lot of other pictures of the poodle moth include this one:

which isn’t even alive?  it’s a felted doll of a bombyx mori silkmoth

or are photos/videos of bomby mori/china silkmoths (you can see how different this guy is from the original picture up above)

I am in awe at the size of this ichneumon wasp (Enicospilus sp. I believe) that parasitized one of my polyphemus moth caterpillars.

doesn’t really look that big in the pictures, but if you’re familiar with how big this sort of ichneumon normally is she’s frikken huge

here’s the caterpillar, which I was rearing in a sleeve outdoors when I noticed a pulsating dark patch inside its thorax. After it pupated, cutting open its cocoon revealed two ichneumon cocoons. The smaller one hatched earlier into a similar but much smaller wasp, although both are females.

Green sweat bee  (family: Halictidae, tribe: Augochlorini) on New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)

October 23, 2018

A Large Milkweed Bug molts into its adult form.  At bottom left, the same individual is surrounded by an adult and several instars.  At bottom right is another recently molted adult.  They will darken to red and black in an hour or so. 

Large Milkweed Bugs (Oncopeltus fasciatus)

Nov. 8, 2018