I have been following this thread all day- I had no idea that so many people thought that bugs were not just for stompin’.
I have never met anyone IRL who didn’t run screaming from creepies and crawlies or own stock in Monsanto. You guys are cool.
Thanks, Mangetout, for starting the thread.
twickster, praying mantis look at you like they know, don’t they?
Quercus, live, red, pin, or white?
freckafree, sometimes sowbugs get dropped into my fishtank. They get extra points for sinking, turning over, then walking across the bottom of the tank as if it is a normal turn of events for them. That is… before the puffers spot them.
Master Wang-Ka, I will answer that.
Appearance: dragonfly. Love iridescence in nature.
Ecological value: Praying mantis. (gardener)
Flavor: as I understand it, I eat several teaspoons of insect parts in each box of cereral. So… I guess weevils are my favorite flavored insect. 'Cause they taste like cereal.
I’ll echo the ladybug-love of several earlier posters. They’re just CUTE.
Anecdote: I work from home, and only seldom am asked to come into my company’s office. Once, two summers ago, I was summoned in, and while plugging in my computer, which I had brought from home, I saw a ladybug on the floor. “Oh, a ladybug,” I commented. My temporary cubicle-mate immediately squashed it. “I’m so sick of them,” he said. “Last week, the office was overrun with these things; the windows were covered so deep, we could only see red.”
I imagine they must have been a nuisance, but I can’t help but chuckle at the idea of a mass ladybug attack. It sounds like being carpet-bombed with teddy bears.
Excellent:
Ladybugs: cute little guys. Ladybug haters, you hate rainbows, too?
Butterflies: even better than ladybugs. Ethereal beauty and grace in one tiny package.
Arachids: awesome, especially the super-power-granting ones. Spiders are truly our friends. Points against: Ms. Malienation hates them.
Walking Stick: fascinating little freak shows.
Dragonflies: compelling to watch due to spectacular maneuverability (ever try to catch one?) and beautiful wings. Bonus points: menacing appearance scares little kids shitless.
Ewww:
Cicadas: was right in the middle of things during the last 17-year cicada explosion. They’re ugly. They’re slow, awkward fliers. They’re dumb, too, even by insect standards; you could walk right up to them and they didn’t have the sense to move. What’s to like?
I love the story of the 15cm (6") Lord Howe Island stick insect (Phasmid), once so common they were used as bait but thought to be extinct since rats invaded the island in the 1920s … but in 2001 they discovered 20 individuals living in one bush, on a rock sticking out of the ocean (20km from LHI) called Balls’ Pyramid. I urge you to click on both links. Simply amazing.
I lived with a gang of ladybugs once. They start getting pushy, and they really love sugar. If you open a soda you have to drink it right away, or some ladybugs will trundle over and park themselves on the lip of the can and start drinking. I tried pouring some coke into a little saucer for them but you know, give an inch, take a mile. What starts out as a cute little bug wandering across your homework papers becomes a bunch of annoying freeloaders trying to share your tupperware full of ravioli.
Dude. That’s totally the site of my future evil supervillain lair.
There aren’t any fireflies here, so I miss them. Ladybugs, beetles in general, dragonflies and damselflies, butterflies, luna moths, yeah, yeah.
I have a fondness for the 17-year cicadas. They buzz like mad and the cats would go insane! I remember being a kid and riding my bike over all those crunchy exoskeletons.
Cluricaun already mentioned hellgrammites, which are cool, but the first time I saw what they become, the dobsonfly, I thought I was hallucinating. Cool bug!
I’ll second tomndebb’s arachnid choice. Jumping spiders are the puppy dogs of the bug world: fuzzy, saucer-eyed, hyper-aware and quite animated. I’d scratch them behind their ears, if they had any.
Fireflies, bell crickets, tree crickets, red spotted purple butterflies, and some kind of shiny, metallic blue beetle I can’t find the name of. I tried Googling up some pictures, and there are some that look somewhat similar, but aren’t the right kind. Back home in NB, we used to get these small (maybe 3-4cm in length) black beetles, with a single, horizontal tan stripe across the back. My mother called them “wood bugs”. I have never seen even one out here in Seattle in the 2.5 years I’ve been here, so they must be an eastern bug. Anyway, there was a type of beetle that was the same shape and size as these “wood bugs”, but they were a shiny, metallic, iridescent green/yellow, or blue/silver. The blue/silver ones were harder to come by. I loved those.
If anyone knows what the name of that beetle is, that would be very cool. I saw them, even the green ones, less and less during my later years at home, and saw them much more often when I was a toddler on up into my teenage years. That was about 15 years ago or so. However, perhaps their population didn’t thin out; I’m willing to concede that perhaps I just wasn’t staring at the ground as much as I got older, looking for cool bugs.
Ditto . I have one living in my back yard . As it has been there for three years I doubt it is the same one but more likely the offspring . Amazing to watch it hunt. Very meticulous.
Welcome here, Beaucarnea, I could’ve written your first post myownself. I really adore cicadas and Luna moths, but like most all insects. In addition to all the swell ones listed, here’s my favorite surprise find; the hickory horned devil caterpillar, which turns into Citheronia regalis,the Royal Walnut Moth.
“Intelligent Design” people are always talking about how the bombardier beetle doesn’t blow itself up. My favorite insect is one particular species of ant in Brunei that does. They have oversized acid glands in their heads. When threatened, the workers will kamikaze into predators and rupture the membranes that separate these glands, which then detonate and spray acid all over the place. I like its spirit of defiance.
Thank you! That fellow is gorgeous, where is he from?
Caterpillar hunts were one of my favorite fall hobbies when I was a kid. I still grow parsley and dill expressly for the black swallowtail larvae. (And I still give them a gentle poke just to see them do this.)
My cat (who has no personal evidence of Intelligent Design) never believes a bombardier is armed. It will poke at one until it gets a snootfull of *stink n’burn * then hide under the bed.
Ants are highly underrated. My favorites are of the genus Azteca because of their symbiotic relationship with the cecropia tree.
Quick n’ dirty version: The cecropia tree grows modified hollow thorns that house the ants; in return for the free shelter the ant colony will defend the tree from all other insect predators. Viciously.
There is another more complex symbiotic/ mutual relationship betweens trees and ants that I cannot find a link to: the tree forms hollow elbow like structures; the ants live inside and store their waste products in a certain chamber- the tree then extends a sort of root system into the waste chamber and benefits from the auxillary nourishment. Can any of you bug people find this one?
Dang. So many of my choices already claimed-luna moth, mantis, hop-spiders. In reading this article, I compared politicians to fire ants, and the phorid fly to lobbyists, owing to the ‘eating the contents of their head’ behavior. If only politician’s heads would fall off once they’re empty.
[QUOTE=Beaucarnea]
Thank you! That fellow is gorgeous, where is he from?
I found him under a chair in Mississippi, and relocated him to a better food source.
And, Hon, you just gotta register here: I was just shy of time on posting how much I like to **occasionally **poke parsely swallowtail cats to show their WOW orange stinky head defense…wish I had that talent! Good to see you here.
