So my wife and I were discussing caterpillars. I mentioned the venomous ones and the hard, dry ones you find on trees and fences. She told me she thought those were Scales. We googled images for a while but could never find a pic of what we were describing.
Basically they look sort of like this one except they appear to have been carved from wood. They don’t move (that I know about) and are usually greyish brown. I saw them growing up in Texas, she in California. Anyone?
And unrelated, but just for gins, check out this crazy thing!
My guess is that what you are describing are actually the pupae, or perhaps rather cocoons, of some insect species. Spider egg sacks are, of course, immobile too; but they tend to have a more spherical shape.
Hold over from childhood. Where I grew up there were venomous flannel moth larvae that we learned to avoid. One of my childhood friends told me that praying mantis egg case was a dead one. I took their word for it and never gave it another thought. So while they are two completely things, in appearance they can look quite similar.
Childhood praying mantis story–once in primary school I took a praying mantis egg case for show and tell. Afterwards I left it lying on the “back dash” (whatever you used to call those deep, shelf-like areas behind the back seat/under the rear window of cars) of my grandmother’s car. The greenhouse warming in the car caused the eggs to hatch prematurely, leaving the back of the car crawling with tiny praying mantii that I had to try to carefully remove from the car.
They were my favorite insect as a child and I still don’t resist playing with them for a while whenever I find one.
Looking at your example photo, I can see how you can think that it looks somewhat like a caterpillar. The egg cases that I’m familiar with aren’t long things deposited on a flat surface, but roundish things deposited on a twig, like this (which look nothing like a caterpillar.)
I’ve never bought praying mantis eggcases online but I did buy a big bag o’ bug-ladies–uh, ladybugs once. Not sure if you can see my Photobucket photos since they’ve gone with their Insane Pricing Scheme, but if you can, on page 4 here you’ll see some of those ladybugs going after aphids on roses.
