northeast-flora-and-fauna

I probably should have made this the Valentine's Day post, as love was in the air last spring for the Red Milkweed Beetles [1]. And yes, they're doing what you think they're doing. And what better place for milkweed longhorn beetles to meet than on leaves of milkweed? Though not true bugs , they (and other beetles ) almost certainly qualify as colloquial bugs. June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 300991569, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 300991584, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] In truth, I can't be sure this is love, though I'm fairly confident they were enjoying each other's company.

I saw quite a few Spotted Lanternflies last year, but I'm definitely seeing more of them this year. (On Monday I actually had two get stuck going inside my shirt - not sure what those guys were thinking.) This invasive insect, spreading like crazy in NJ, hurts many of our plants (including some agriculturally important one) by sucking sap from them. It also excretes a honeydew onto our plants that attracts mold that can damage plant fruits/seeds/leaves. Because of this, Spotted Lanternflies can even damage plants that it does eat if those plants are underneath a plant it does eat; the forest understory could be indirectly damaged by these guys. These guys are true bugs , not flies like their name suggests. Aphids and cicadas are other true bugs, though they're not close relatives to the Spotted Lanternflies. Though I think there's too many of these guys to squish our way out of an infestation, the official advice is to kill them if you find them. Here are pictures of Spot...

They're back! Here's a periodical cicada I met last week at the Sourland Mountain Preserve in Hillsborough. These red-eyed bugs (and they are true bugs ) have been living underground for 17 years, giving them one of the most interesting lifecycles around. Don't call them locusts though, since that term refers to grasshoppers, a very different kind of insect. Though we and other parts of the world have annual cicadas , the periodicals are a North American exclusive; nobody else has cicadas with the 17 year and 13 year lifecycles of the periodical cicadas. The periodical cicadas emerge in broods that generally occur every 13 or 17 years with the intention of flooding an area with so many cicadas that even if many get eaten by predators, there will still be ample cicadas around to breed and thus continue the species. And while their predators will probably thrive in the year the cicadas emerge, their predator numbers will presumably have returned to normal by the next time t...

Here's a Citrus Flatid Planthopper . Planthoppers are an intfaorder (higher than a family) of true bugs . Though planthoppers do occasionally jump (approximately as well as grasshoppers), they generally prefer a slow, under-the-radar walk to get around. This is a native insect here in North America (where it generally does no environmental damage), though apparently it's an invasive insect in Europe (where it can be a bad actor). Like many insects that can be invasive, they are not picky eaters. (It's hard to establish yourself in another environment if you're heavily dependent on species that you've left behind.) August 12, 2020 at Sunny Slope Road

Here's a False Milkweed Bug . I previously mentioned these guys when I talked about the Large Milkweed Bug. Notice that this bug is not on a milkweed or a dogbane plant; this (combined with an insect that looks like the Large or Small Milkweed Bug ) is always a strong clue that this is a False Milkweed Bug. (It sounds like the Large and Small Milkweed Bugs will occasionally use non-milkweed and non-dogbane plants as a host when their preferred plants are scarce, but I haven't actually observed that happening.) These guys are taxonomically true and false. Though not a true milkweed bug, the False milkweed bug is a true bug , just like the Large and Small Milkweed Bugs. Regarding the False Milkweed Bug's similarity to the Large and Small Milkweed Bugs, I had always assumed they were a case of Batesian mimicry , where a harmless species has evolved to look similar to poisonous species. It sounds, however, that we haven't ruled out that the False Milkweed Bug might have evo...