A bug!
In the middle of January! I’m so desperate for insect photography that I actually got excited about finding this stinkbug in our house yesterday.
And this is indeed a true bug. Most people refer to insects in general as “bugs” but only members of the order Hemiptera are actually bugs. Hemipterans include waterbugs, backswimmers, stinkbugs, water striders, bedbugs and assassin bugs.
Here are some cool bugs I’ve encountered in the past. Probably the most spectacular, the wildly colored clown stinkbug that I found in Japan:
A stinkbug from Australia. I took this photo at the San Diego Natural History Museum using a Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens:
A reduviid from Japan. Don’t ever pick one of these up:
Another reduviid. These things aren’t called “assassin bugs” just because it sounds bad-ass. Look how it’s sucking the juice out of that beetle:
Here’s another stinkbug from Japan. The Japanese name for this bug is “ushi-kamemushi,” which means “cow bug” or “ox bug.”
A green stinkbug from Valle Vista, California:
and one nasty mofo, a water bug, also known as a “toe biter” that I caught in a pitfall trap on our Lake Hemet expedition two years ago:
January 14th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Eastern Toe Biters are mean, fearless and fascinating. I hope you didn’t pick up the one in the forceps with your hand at any point.
January 15th, 2010 at 7:40 am
Paul, I never picked one up. As a kid they were just too big and freaky for me to touch one. Have you?