Second invertebrate post for March

The first post started with spot the spider.  This one begins with a slightly extended game of "spot the grasshopper".  That should be enough of a warning for acridophobes to avoid the page.  (I was astonished to find that googling for 'fear of grasshoppers' got 6740 results!  Some people must get very alarmed driving through a locust swarm!)

These were all spotted while in the vegetable garden on 14 March.  Some of them were quite camouflaged, others less so.  I will present them in order of challenge:
 If you are brown and want to hide, a trombacini leaf is not a good idea.
A bit of green and a bit of brown on old grass stalks isn't bad ....
... but all green on fresh grass is very difficult to spot.  Until the beast jumps when it becomes quite easy to spot.  Since this isn't an interactive site I suggest click to enlarge and then peer closely!

Moving back to bugs I scored an image of a 4th instar nymph (how convoluted is that?) of the Gum Tree Shield Bug (Theseus modestus).  I would query this since I found the beast on a Buddleia not a gum tree but the following image matches very closely that on the Brisbane insects site  So I am making a call.
 
I have finally found a ladybird. This is a Transverse Ladybird (Coccinella transversalism) - thank you Chew family!  Given the number of aphids on our Fuschias we could do with a lot more of them. The two shots show it climbing a grass them and then, after being dislodged by a klutz, scurrying along the ground.


A great big dragonfly was found posing on some grass stems.  It was only when looking at the image that I noticed the beautiful patterning on the side of the abdomen.
I also found some ants busy attending to a pupa (and possibly some nearby lerps: if anyone reckons they can work out what ants are up to  ....).  Only one ant hung around long enough to get its photo taken!
Let us revert to caterpillars.  First up a green jobbie found munching on some Vietnamese Mint.  The amount of hairs suggests it isn't a cabbage white that has got misplaced.
The next image was taken at London Bridge rather than Carwoola but is worth showing due to the hairiness and the size (about 10cm) of this caterpillar marching up a Brittle Gum (Eucalyptus mannifera).
Proving that this blog is not leg-ist. here is a snap of a centipede (only one pair of legs per segment so not a millipede).  This was found on the road leading in to London Bridge.



.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more