Invertebrates appear

Following a period of warm weather, and with some favourite food plants flowering, insects are beginning to appear.

Of course having mentioned food plants my first example is from an Order - Mantodea - which feed on other insects!  In this first image the prey is clearly visible (and the prey was feeding on a plant).
 I have included this extra image because if has a less busy background and looking at the full size version I could see a row of spines along the outside of the fore tibia.  This gets it to the Family Mantidae.  The commonest mantis is Orthodera ministralis which this resembles, but i cannot see the diagnostic blue spot on the foreleg: I suspect it is a nymph.
This is a beetle.  Having the head and thorax not visible doesn't help with identification furrther than that!
 The first Fiddle beetles (Eupoecila australasiae) appeared on the daisies.
 The presence of a rostrum puts this as a weevil.  I had thought the lumps on the elytra would make it easy to identify but not so.  Having straight antennae seems to rule it out of the true weevil family!  It was feeding on a Red-hot poker.
 This one was easy: a Botany Bay Weevil, Chrysolopus spectabilis.  It was feeding in a grass tussock out in a paddock.
A fly!  Mainly included as the proboscis is clearly visible.
An ant: one of many slurping the nectar from the Red-hot pokers.
A few days later some different beasties were found.  Ants were common tending the lerp on some eucalypt.
The first flower chafer (Polystigma punctata) has turned up on the daisies.  Obviously closely related to the Fiddle Beetles.
 This comes under the general heading of "what the heck ....?"  My suspicion - from Googling "nymph spiny black yellow"  - is that it is some form of ladybird nymph.  (Quite how a lot of the images that I looked at were linked to that search term is a matter for wonderment.)
With that prospect as a hint I consulted Brisbane insects and came up with a pretty fair match.  Pursuing the matter it seems that the Common Spotted Ladybird Harmonia conformis is the solution.  Note that the yellow on the head and thorax is almost certainly daisy pollen.

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