This half-inch black fly with half-black, half-transparent wings is a bee fly (family Bombyllidae), which, of course, mimics a bee. Some members of this family look even more like bees, with striped orange and black fuzzy abdomens; many seem to have followed this theme of black and/or silver “fur” instead. You can tell this is…
Category: Insects
Scaphytopius Elegans
A beautiful little leafhopper with, alas, no common name, Scaphytopius elegans can be found all over the southern US, from Californa to Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. Adults are pale reddish brown with a wide cream or yellow midline stripe, striped eyes, a pale transverse stripe with black borders crossing the “nose” and going through…
Black-Winged Dahana
The black-winged dahana, Dahana atripennis, is an inch-long, primarily black moth with a red abdomen, orange head, iridescent blue thorax, and two yellow stripes on its black wings. As far as I can tell from photos on bugguide.net, both sexes have those long, attractive, black feathered antennae (or all photos on bigguide.net are of males!)….
Green Trig Cricket
This tiny beast, about 3mm long without, and 8mm long with, the antennae, is a nymph of a green trig cricket or green sword-tailed cricket, a member of the genus Cyrtoxipha. Cyrtoxipha means “curved sword”, and refers to the females’ ovipositor. “Trig” comes from the subfamily name for sword-tailed crickets, Trigonidiinae. This is either C….
Green-Striped Grasshopper
This is a nymph of the green-striped grasshopper, Chortophaga viridifasciata. The adults are…well, let’s say they’re variable in color, so this little one may be brown when it grows up, or green, or possibly a shade of neon pink with bright green wings (there are multiple subspecies, or possibly not, involved, and it’s all very…
Acanalonia Servillei
This charming little planthopper nymph is in the process of destroying the leaf of this succulent by sucking all the useful stuff out of the stem. As adults, Acanalonia servillei are charming little bright green wedges with a yellow dorsal stripe and red eyes; the nymphs are white, and look like they have brown eyeshadow….
Salvinia Stem-Borer
A small (1cm) white and brown mottled moth with an astonishingly close resemblance to its cousin, S. ecclesialis, the Salvinia stem-borer feeds on many types of aquatic plants, including water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) and, of course, Salvinia rotundfolia, a water fern. Since its caterpillars can do a lot of damage to those plants, even to…
Diaprepes Root Weevil
The gloriously iridescent diaprepes root weevil (Diaprepes abbreviatus) is, of course, an invasive species (native to the Caribbean) that infests crops — citrus, to be precise — and is therefore a pest, etc., etc. (I get so tired of reading that under every insect description! It’s not the weevil’s fault that it likes all the…
Three Spotted Skipper
Who knew? — searching for “small brown butterfly” is just as frustrating as searching for “small brown moth”. This particular small brown butterfly happens to be a three-spotted skipper, Cymaenes tripunctus, a grass skipper in the butterfly family Hesperiidae. It lives all over the Caribbean, and of course Florida because everything lives here. “Skipper” type…
Spiderling Plume Moth
Oh, how I love these little guys! This plume moth looks almost completely different from the other plume moth I recently posted — the ends of the forewings, the little poofs on the joints of the hind legs, the pattern on the abdomen — and yet they are both plume moths in the family Pterophoridae….
Belfrage’s Plume Moth
Plume moths (family Pterophoridae, which includes several genera) share this striking resting position, where the forewings are extended laterally and tightly closed up. (Open, the forewings have several bedraggled, feathery bristles beneath.) Various Pterophorids are pests of crops like artichokes and of ornamental plants; some are used for biological control of invasive plant species. These…
Florida Giant Katydid
I love insects with definitive identifications. When I type “big green katydid” into Google, this bad boy pops right up (along with suggestions that I search for “Florida giant grasshopper”, “Florida giant centipede”, and “Florida giant mosquito”, making me wonder why I moved to this state). And it’s exactly like it says on the tin…
Graceful Twig Ant
I’d been sitting on the above photo for a while, because the insect in it was winged; I seriously thought it was a wasp, but couldn’t find an exact match for species no matter how hard I tried. There was always something just not quite right. A couple days later, I was looking up some…
Rugosana Querci
Another no-common-name, no description on Wikipedia, nothing beyond “It’s a leafhopper”. I understand the problems involved with trying to do field research on an animal 1/4″ long, but it just seems sad that just about all I can say about this striking little insect is “It’s a leafhopper”. Bugguide.net tells me it’s probably a second…
Hawaiian Dancing Moth
This molecular moth was only about 3mm long. I wouldn’t have even known it was alive if it hadn’t actually flown up and perched right in front of my camera. I managed two shots, wondering what on earth it was, before it flew off. Just sitting on a surface, it looks like a tiny fleck…
Mango Seed Weevil
A mysterious, 3mm sphere stuck to my front door turned out to be a mango seed weevil, Sternochetus mangiferae. I’m afraid I had to bother him to figure out what he was — his distinctive, weevil-ular “snout” is hidden under his body, making him difficult to identify. Apparently that’s standard for his subfamily, Cryptorhynchinae, the…