A Buggy Betrayal

Late season dogwood with rolled leaves.
The leaves look old, worn, and well-used by the wildlife,
but they are not done with it yet.

Peering into a rolled leaf, I found new life.

An unidentified moth caterpillar was inside.

September 2 was the day that Jody and I had a bug hunt here at the house (and found the bear scat). I had found this larva inside a rolled dogwood leaf and thought it was a sawfly. Well, the little buggers confuse me still. It was a moth caterpillar. It could be one of two dogwood moths, both of whose caterpillars look just like this.

When you have identical caterpillars of different species, the only way you can tell which species it is is by isolating it until they pupate into a moth. (Sometimes it is the other way around and identical moths can only be identified, without dissection, by their caterpillars.)

Two days later, Lucy and I went out to sleeve dogwood branches with rolled leaves. The plan is I will regularly check on the creature's growth, hopefully find a newly eclosed moth inside the sleeve, and then be able to identify it.

A sleeved dogwood branch with rolled leaves inside.

I buy the sleeves at scientific supply places online. They can breath, drain water, and do not overheat. They keep predators and parasites out and give the animals inside the sleeve relative freedom and safety to feed. Unless you sleeved a predator in the sleeve with your larvae.

Since I really enjoyed spying the larva inside the leaf, I looked inside another rolled leaf before I sleeved the branch and found this . . . 

I couldn't even understand what I saw.

So I flipped the photo in the computer.

After I turned the photo in the computer, I still did not know what I was looking at. It was sort of like a grasshopper, but those beefy legs hinted at this being a bug that caught and ate other bugs, much like assassin bugs and ambush bugs. Grasshoppers that I know here do not have spotted legs, either. This guy also has a beak, used to pierce the exoskeleton of other insects.

I turned to Jody, who suggested damsel bug (Genus Nabis). I looked it up, and it looks like one to me. No one at iNaturalist has offered any assistance yet, though. It could be winter until I learn what it is. When you have good weather, like we have had, no entomologist, professional or amateur, will be inside the house IDing photos. 

If it is a damsel bug, it preys on small caterpillars. And what better place to find them then in their hiding place—a rolled up leaf?

I was sort of pissed off that somebody was out there eating my little caterpillars. Hopefully no predators were on the branch or inside the rolls of my sleeved branch. I have never successfully sleeved a plant until insect maturation. It involves tricky timing and a perfect, predator-free world. We'll see.

_/\_/\_

From Bug Hunt to Restaurant

Jody's mating mosaic darners

Jody decided to close up her law office for a long weekend and spent Friday at Crystal Lake State Park. I picked her up after school and we came back to my house (one mile away) for more bug hunting. She got some magnificent photos on that iPhone of hers. She found these dragonflies hanging together under a branch of a pine tree. They allowed her to carry them down to where I was inspecting a leafroller larva. And as soon as Jody got to me, they flew away still coupled together. It was a memorable sight.

The darners in the tree.

I was not as fortunate yesterday. I found my leafroller larva, some type of moth, and unrolled it. When touched with a piece of grass, it wriggled very violently. I thought I had a video of that action but I didn't press the right button. I have found more of these larvae and will be sleeving the dogwood branch where they are maturing. 

The tiny caterpillar inside the leaf that it had rolled up.

Outside of the leaf.

Other creatures that we found:

Another Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetle (Labidomera clivicollis)

Tricolored Bumble Bee (Bombus ternarius)

Everyone's favorite crane fly: Eastern Phantom Crane Fly (Bittacomorpha clavipes)

Banded Garden Spider (Argiope trifasciata)
Its zig-zag web is barely visible at the bottom.

Banded Tussock Moth (Halysidota  tessellaris)

Genus Stictocephala
(A buffalo treehopper)

A robber fly for your nightmares:
A Hanging-Thief (Genus Diogmites)

Everyone's favorite caterpillar:
Brown-hooded Owlet (Cucullia convexipennis)

Revisiting our jagged ambush bugs at the end of the season.

They wear different colors now.
Here, the male has the brown face and the female has a yellow face.

But then . . .

😱😱😱 

Jody found bear scat full of cherry pits not 20 feet from my back door. Lucy was calm so we knew that the bear was not close by, but our wanderings were now at an end. Bears scarf down so many cherries it is totally ridiculous. And at this time of year, it seems that all my trees are cherries. They are everywhere. In fact, I have read that my Black cherry trees (Prunus serotina) are the most populous tree in New England forests. Cherry picking time is when Jody and I stay out of the woods.

We retired to Orleans to a restaurant for supper and swapped photos and stories of our day. It was a wonderful day.

_/\_/\_