Please define “cool” or “regular basis” however you want. I only ask that we don’t get too pedantic and challenge someone if theirs is a spider or something else that isn’t a true bug.
For me, it’s fire flies (or lightning bugs). I’ve seen them in the evenings lately by the hundreds. I’m not sure what the atmospheric conditions are that made this year a banner year but they are all over our neighborhood. We always have some but this year’s crop is off the charts.
Got me wondering what exactly is the definition of ‘bug’, since I typically use it loosely and colloquially to refer to any critter that has an exoskeleton and more than 4 legs (and yes, that would include shrimp and lobsters, which are delicious bugs).
Turns out the term ‘bug’ is not a vague, slangy one after all, but a precise term that means a specific type of insect. I found it interesting, anyway.
This is not intended to try to shape the thread or hijack it, just sharing some knowledge I just learned. Please continue to define “bug” any which way.
My personal coolest bug would be the praying mantis. I don’t see them as often as I used to, but when I was a kid I’d find them everywhere. I’d put them on my shoulder and ride my bike around the neighborhood until I found a girl I could freak out.
Once I offered a grasshopper to a praying mantis and it immediately grabbed it in its vice-like arms and started chomping on it like an ear of corn. Kid me thought it was very gross and cool.
Good one. There’s a species of lightning bug in the Smoky Mountains that blinks in unison for about a 2 week period right around this time of year. I’d love to see that. But it’s difficult to plan a trip for because the 2-week window doesn’t happen exactly the same time of year.
Not a bug, but the most impressive small creature I sometimes see is the Five-lined Skink, a type of lizard, which features an iridescent blue tail.
When I was a kid I raised and/or collected all sorts of insects, especially praying mantises. They were hella more numerous back then. Their life cycle is fascinating, especially some of their more gorey habits.
For a while I was keeping praying mantis egg cases in my bedroom. Until one of the cases hatched and several hundred tiny mantises spread out in search of food. My mom was not too pleased with this.
In 8th grade science class, we had to catch and mount an insect collection. I brought in about a dozen cases, just a fraction of my collection, and they put it into the main display case by the school’s entrance. For about a month I was the star of the school.
Oh, and yes, there are “true bugs”. But the term has come to represent any little creepy crawly thing.
My favorite “bug” (not an insect) since I was a kid is the Pill Bug/Wood Louse/Roly Poly:
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It’s like a living, breathing techno-inspired piece of art. Bonus points for not biting or stinging.
I believe they also used it as inspiration for the ‘Reaver’ in Starcraft:
Roly polies are probably second on my list. I saw some yesterday while doing some weeding in the flower bed. I’m still fascinated by them and their defense mechanism.
Were they? I figured I just don’t notice them as much as when I was a kid, because I no longer have that kid natural curiosity and don’t poke around looking for them anymore.
Haha, I can imagine. She was probably finding praying mantises (manti?) in the house for months afterward.
I don’t get too many interesting insects here. I’ve always loved any big beetle and used to see stags and rhinoceros beetles when I was younger. I do get June bugs occasionally. And true bugs like stink bugs. Every summer I see a tiger swallowtail or two.
The coolest insect I ever found was a pair of eyed elaters. I knew instantly what they were but I always assumed they were the size of other click beetles. The eyed elater is huge! I kept them in a jar in my office for a day to show people then put them back on their rotten log home.
We have house centipedes (or, as my wife calls them, “walking eyebrows”) in our house. I usually let them be, because (a) they eat bugs and spiders, and (b) they’re pretty cool-looking. We’ll often find one stuck at the bottom of the bathroom sink, having headed in there for water, but unable to make it back up the slipppery side of the sink basin, so we help them get out.
I’m a bug-lover who used to draw the line at house centipedes, but they’ve grown on me. I think I was just so shocked the first time I saw one, because they are freaky-lookin’.
Another vote for the roly poly. I used to collect them in buckets as a child.
I was once taking a scientific survey about regional dialects that asked what I called that little fellow. The options were pill bug, roly poly, etc. I was amused that when I clicked on the image link it was titled “roly poly.gif.” Hope it didn’t skew the research results.
Big showy butterflies, of course, like this guy:
And hawk-moths (this one is a clearwing hummingbird moth):
I like Lovebugs because they’re always having sex. Though they make a mess of your car.
Dragonflies. We’re close enough to a pond to get them flying by once in a while.
Roly polies are the second.
Don’t see fireflies enough to remember that they exist. 
When I went to see the Spring Temple Buddha, which is gold plated, there were many green, iridescent beetles around. Like this. I have no idea whether they are attracted to the gold statue, deliberately seeded there or, of course, just a coincidence.
ETA: Guess this doesn’t count as “regular basis”. I’m going to leave it though, as I have seen those beetles at least a couple times since.
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As weird as it sounds, I have to say I still think tiger mosquitoes look cool. Despite all the bites, including a skin infection, that they’ve given me over the years.
I just saw a couple of swallowtail butterflies in the yard yesterday. We don’t get many of those.
I get a kick out of annual cicadas. It’s fun to see them midway out of their shell. Sometimes, I’ll find a bunch of shells on a yardwaste bag that weren’t there the day before.
Speaking of, cicada killer wasps are incredible animals. They haven’t been around the last few years but there was a 4 or 5 year stretch I had some every summer. Terrifying looking bugs but harmless to people. The burrows they dig are impressive.
Toward the end of the summer, I often get a neat orb weaver spider. The webs are really big and it’s cool to get a flashlight and watch it getting built in the evening. The spider itself is black & white with a bright yellow zigzag. And they’re pretty big.
My beloved granddaughter’s favorite bug. She attends a lab preschool at our land grant university agricultural campus and they spend a big portion of their day outside in their outdoor classroom. Inevitably every day she comes home with a pocketful of pine cones and stories of ‘her bugs’.
I also have not seen cicada killer wasps lately, but they had a burrow under our front porch about 5-10 years ago. Our computer room/office looks out over our front porch, and while I was sitting at the computer I would frequently hear something hitting against the window glass. When I started keeping an eye out, I realized it was cicada killer wasps bumping into the window. They look terrifying! At first I was worried we might have hornets, until I looked them up, found out what they were, and discovered they are mostly harmless.
Once I was doing yardwork out front and caught something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see a cicada killer wasp, gripping a cicada, doing a sort of controlled glide from our oak tree down to the ground and into a hole in the dirt under the porch. That was pretty cool.
Same except mine was a pine. 'Matter of fact, that was how I finally identified the bug. I’d made some halfhearted attempts to search the internet but there are a lot of scary looking bugs and the killers are hard to get a good look at in flight. Adding ‘cicada’ to the search terms quickly cracked the case.
We get one or two of these every summer - the kind that have the golden silk. Sometimes they’ll make a web that starts at the end of a tree branch and attaches to either the deck or plants on the ground. They’re pretty in the right light, but if you don’t see it and walk through it - yech.
