What insect starts life like a butterfly or moth, but emerges from its cocoon looking like a wasp? If you’re like me a few months ago, maybe you’ve never heard of them before, but the mystery morpher is a sawfly.
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Crane flies are the gawky, spindly creatures that sometimes flap awkwardly around your ceiling. While many of the 15,000 species are brown or tan, a few Oregon varieties have orange and yellow markings…
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Many insect species have such subtle differences that it takes an expert with a microscope to tell them apart. The Western Ash Borer ( Neoclytus conjunctus) didn’t get that memo.
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Insects in the true bug class, Hemiptera, are a wildly diverse group. It’s hard to imagine that cicadas, water striders, tree hoppers and this column’s subject: lace bugs are as related to each other as butterflies and moths, but they are. What ties them together is a juice-sucking bodily straw, or rostrum, which usually folds under their thorax.
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March is a great time to observe the incredible insects inside ponds and pools. Even temporary puddles are host to some really cool characters. I found predaceous diving beetles (PDB’s) in a couple different places around Mount Pisgah recently, and they sport some flashy features like tail-breathing and larvae with 14 eyes!
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