The morning after our latest haboob I found an expiring Sphinx moth, battered by the winds and on its last legs.  It was a big one, not as colorful as some, but marked like bark in black and white, with three orange spots on its abdomen.  It’s a fairly large animal: about three inches long, with an abdomen like my little finger, except segmented and furry.  I’ve identified it as  Manduca rustica, the Rustic Sphinx (if you know different, please let me know), which as an adult moth feeds on deep-throated nectar flowers such as Petunias and Tecoma.

<< Manduca rustica (photos A.Shock, click to enlarge)

Although it’s probable that this individual was done in by the wind, it may also have been at the end of its life span anyway.  I carried it to the outdoor table, and took a few macro shots with my cell-phone macro lens.  That I got any results worth sharing is a bit amazing, since the lens, which is designed for a different cell phone than the one I own, has to be scotch-taped to the device.  (Seriously, scotch-taped to the device, not exaggerating.)

Anyway, here’s the sphinx’s face, with its big night-seeing eye, its furry head, and its coiled, straw-like proboscis, plenty long for reaching down the throats of flowers for the good stuff.

Doesn’t it look like a Jeep?

Those dark “headlights” are eyes, which jumping spiders, unlike most spiders, rely on to hunt.  I can count three pairs: two on the front (big and little) and one on the side (little).  See ’em?  There may be more…

We photographed this tiny jumping spider before relocating it outside, since the sofa was not a safe location for it.

So that you can fully comprehend its tininess, know that it’s sitting on my cell phone stylus, which is slightly smaller in diameter than a typical pencil.  Officially: dinkose.  It’s a Dinky Dude of the Desert, arachnid-style.

I don’t know enough about jumping spiders to know its common name, if it has one, or even its genus.  Anyone?  For more info, including technical identification keys and species accounts, click on jumping-spiders.com.  The photos running on the masthead are worth checking it out for.

(Photo by E, edited by A Shock)

Here’s a slightly arty image of an un-opened Potter Wasp nest on the front wall of our house, with a drawing pencil for scale.  Click here for more info on what these tiny clay pots are, and why the wasps build them.  One of these days, I hope to be in the right place in the right time, and see the new wasp break out and fly away.

(Photo A.Shock)

…of convergent evolution.

(photo A.Shock)

For those like me who need facts and a story, this is a Palo Verde Root Borer Beetle (Derobrachus geminatus, adult, fully 3″ long), posing for what I thought were post-mortem portraits this morning after I fished her out of the pool.  However, she was clearly heard to state “I’m not dead yet!” when she threatened me with her pliers-like mandibles.  She’s out there now, trundling around, still drying out I s’pose.  I didn’t have the heart to do her in, although her grubby children do not play well with others, and insist on voraciously damaging the roots of trees.  Get a load of the spiky thorax!

Updated with possible bug ID, see bottom of post:

E sent me a photo he took of this brightly colored centimeter-long bug marching up the stone steps of the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, China. Since there’s not much going on at home here in AZ, except ongoing wrestling with both the machinery and chemistry of a swimming pool that’s picked a very bad time to become unswimmable, I thought I’d shamelessly post vicariously from China instead.

The shape of the bug’s carapace, coloration and pattern reminded me of something — something Chinese — and, when my brain churned up what it was, I inset an image of it into E‘s bug photo.  And, no, “Chinese opera mask bug” is not the insect’s real name.  I have no idea about insects, so this guy’s identity is a mystery to me.  Any ideas?  It’s probably not poisonous — maybe — but it really wants you to think it is!  And, it’s on the go: note the blurred-with-lightning-fast-action right-hand mid-leg!

And, speaking of poisonous, here’s a sight E caught in a public place in Wuhan: 50 gallon drums of Chloroform rusting under a staircase.  For when you really, really, need to make sure something’s asleep…

(Both photos E.Shock)

Update:

With the help of Google (I searched “red black white hemipteran china”) and the What’s this bug website, I think this guy is the immature form of Lycorma delicatula, which is a Fulgorid leafhopper.  They are native to southern China, but have invaded the Korean peninsula, apparently at least in part through lumber imports, where they are considered a pest (see fun Korean video here).

Though the lady bug life cycle has been covered here before, I can’t resist posting this photo of a brand new Lady Bird Beetle and its recently exited pupal casing.

>> the bug and the box it came in. Click to enlarge, it’s a nice big file (photo A.Shock).

Just a couple of days ago, I’d noticed the pupa on an artichoke leaf in the veggie garden. It was practically the first evidence I’d seen of the spring lady bug generation’s progress since finding the eggs on the cilantro earlier this month. Later, I’d only managed to find one active larva, so I was pleased to locate this pupa. Sunday morning I went to show it to E, and there it was — split open now, while its erstwhile occupant, having backed out of the crack in the posterior of the casing, pumped its new flight wings full of hemolymph in the bright morning sun. The unripe-tomato-y quality of the elytra at this stage is perfect, starting out transluscent waxy-yellow and slowly deepening to the familiar cherry-tomato red. The spots appear and darken gradually like darkroom images, gaining contrast and intensity as the carapace dries and hardens.

This time of year the world is pregnant with nests full of eggs, tiny cottontails hopping and hiding in the yard, fledgling birds following their parents food-begging insistently, new yellow-green leaves and catkins on the mesquite trees, and glorious cactus blooms.

<< Praying mantis egg-case on a Palo Verde twig (photo E.Shock). >> close-up of a mesquite catkin (photo A.Shock)

But as this acceleration of generation increases, we see another side of abundance: broken eggs on the ground, young birds not experienced enough to stay out of the street, small mammals learning the hard way about the swimming pool, an adult gopher snake swallowing a tiny cottontail.

Spring is a scavenger’s prime-time. We’ve been watching an Inca Dove carcass decompose under the tangerine tree. In the dry desert, this isn’t a grisly thing: if not enjoyed by raccoons, foxes, or feral cats, the soft parts are quickly consumed by the local scuttling scavengers, usually ants or dermestid beetles and the like. Inca Doves are small, anyway — there’s not much to them, and small bodies don’t have time to bloat, liquefy, or smell very much.

>> Inca dove skeleton (photo A.Shock)

Decomposition is short and if not sweet, at least efficient. What was an intact dove carcass lying in the leaf litter a couple of days ago was, by yesterday, an articulated partial skeleton. The head was gone, but the ribs were still festooned with a few feathers, and the pelvis dangled two femurs and a foot. The ants’ tidy de-fleshing revealed a possible cause of death invisible to us before: egg-binding. Look below the rib-cage under the vertebrae and pelvis, and you can see an intact egg, cracked but still heavy with its contents, in place in the abdominal cavity.

<< Here’s a side-view. The large blade-shaped bone on the right is the little dove’s keel, or breast-bone; the egg sits snugly — perhaps a little too snugly — under the tiny pelvis.

I don’t have my own photo of an Inca Dove — although they’re common in our yard, they’re camera-shy, at least in my experience. But if you need the reassurance of a living image, or more info about Inca Doves, click here, for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology entry on the species.

And just to sweeten the pot because after all it is the holiday season, here’s a photo I posted last spring, of two terribly tiny bunnies snuggled into the form their mother scraped out for them. Go ahead; click to enlarge to see their tiny fluffy details. It was either this or one of the gopher snake eating a baby cottontail, but I think I’ll save that for next Easter.

>> two infant cottontails stashed in a form (photo A.Shock)

Last fall our herb garden hosted a successful crop of parsley, cilantro, and Lady bird beetles (AKA Lady bugs).  But we only noticed the bounty of bugs when we found roving hordes of hungry beetle larvæ voraciously devouring hapless aphids.  Pictures of the process of larval metamorphosis were captured  and posted here, but all the eggs had already hatched, leaving the beginning of the adventure undocumented. Now the cycle has begun again, and happily this time we caught it from the start.

>>Here are lovely saffron-colored lady bug eggs on our bolting parsley, awaiting transition into fearsome predatory eating machines. (Thanks to E for the photo.)

We’ll have to be careful when we harvest for tabbouleh!

…but it’s not from the bottom of the sea.  If you had a hard time with the centipede or the solpugid, you may wish to look away.  Or not…

This is one of my favorite desert arthropods ever, in kind of an oscillating horrified/fascinated can’t look away from photos of the train wreck kind of way.

It’s a Tailless Whip Scorpion, or an Amblypygid.  Let me just say at the outset that it is completely harmless to humans, and has neither stinger nor venom nor powerful jaws like its “cousins” scorpions, spiders, or solpugids.  Like them, it’s an arachnid, but it has its own Order, Amblypygi.  It’s got narrow pincer-like pedipalps to capture and hold its small pray items which it detects with the long sensory appendages. The other six legs (as an arachnid, it’s got 8 altogether) are used for scuttling about.

>>A live “Rock lobster” on our front cinderblock wall; note that I do not have my hand nearby for scale. Also note that the entire creature is not in the photo: at least another two-inches of “feeler-leg” is out of frame in the upper right.  (Photo E. Shock)

But, it’s really big.  A few years back, I found one in the garage, all folded up with its legs held close to its flat, broad, segmented body.  Hoping to liberate it back to whence it came (the wash in our yard), I approached it with a glass jar and a postcard.  It saw me and moved a few feet away, very quickly and sideways like a crab.  Then it extended its long front pair of legs and suddenly my Bonne Maman jam jar seemed totally inadequate.  I had to get a plastic Trader Joe’s ginger cookie container and a 9×12″ manila envelope to cap it off with, so as not to crush the lil dude’s end leg segments.  Capturing the fast-moving skitterer involved two of us, a fair amount of herding and chasing, and some undignified screeching as feelers encountered fingers.  An odd sensory relic of this capture is that, having just bought new tires for the Honda, the whole garage smelled strongly of new rubber: the whipscorpion’s shiny black exoskeleton looked like a plausible rubbery source of this odor, and every time I’ve seen one since, my mind’s nose smells new tires.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the “Rock Lobster” — we’re due for a sighting, and this is the perfect time of year to find them abroad on warm Monsoon nights.

Here’s a pleasant fact about tailless whip scorpions, courtesy Wikipedia:

Amblypygids, particularly the species Phrynus marginemaculatus and Damon diadema, are thought to be one of the few species of arachnids that show signs of social behavior. Research conducted at Cornell University by entomologists suggests that mother amblypygids communicate with their young by caressing the offspring with her anteniform front legs. Further, in an experiment where two or more siblings were placed in an unfamiliar environment, such as a cage, they would seek each other out and gather back in a group.

Is that not adorable?