Category: Bug of the Week

Bug o’the Week – Wildflower Watch – Daisy Fleabane

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Wildflower Watch Daisy Fleabane

Howdy, BugFans,

Daisy fleabane (Erigeron sp.) is blooming.  If you’re not familiar with it, the name “teeny daisy” – given to it by the BugLady’s then four-year-old, firstborn child – describes it well.

It’s in the Aster/Composite family Asteraceae, so each fleabane “flower” is actually a whole bouquet made up of a mass of tiny, central flowers called disc flowers and an outer rim of ray flowers.  But the Asteraceae like to mix things up – some family members, like dandelions, consist of only ray flowers, while others, like Beggars’ ticks, have very conspicuous disc flowers and inconspicuous ray flowers, and still others, like Blazing stars (Liatris) and thistles, have only disc flowers.

The word “bane” in a plant’s name usually predicts trouble – for someone, anyway.  In this case, flies, gnats, fleas and other bothersome insects were (allegedly) repelled by the smoke when the plant was burned, and the flowers were dried and added to mattress stuffing and tied into brooms. 

Astringent, anti-inflammatory fleabane plants, flowers, and oils were widely used medicinally by both the Native peoples and the European settlers to treat migraines, gout, sore muscles, epilepsy, skin issues, “female problems,” fevers, heart troubles, and more, and the dried flowers were used as a snuff to break up nasal congestion.  The Lakota name for fleabane translates to “sore mouth medicine.”  It was also one of the plants that were smoked in pipes.

Bugs like it, too.  As always, the BugLady found insects and spiders who came to rest, to eat, and to be eaten, and with all that going on, some pollination happens, too.  Today’s episode is a bit moth-heavy because we are approaching National Moth Week. 

BI-COLORED PYRAUSTA MOTH – The BugLady has been seeing these small moths (wingspread just over ½”), but they don’t stick around to have their portraits made – they make a rapid, scrambling flight and then tuck themselves in under a leaf.

A CRAB SPIDER waiting for a little carry-out.

WAVY-LINED EMERALD – If you’re going to feed in plain sight in the daytime, you need a disguise.  This caterpillar makes its own by clipping bits of fresh petals and sticking the pieces to spines on its back https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1038322/bgimage.  When the vegetation dries, the trim makes it hard for birds to spot them.  Here’s what it will look like when it grows up https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2260155/bgimage.

A ROBBER FLY enjoying a meal.

IRIS WEEVIL – The BugLady has seen more Iris weevils on fleabane and ox-eye daisies than she has on irises.  Adults chew into the iris flower’s ovary and oviposit there.  While the adults are feeding on the flowers, pods, and seeds, the larvae within eat seeds and their surrounding tissues.  This doesn’t affect the health of the plant, but the weevils are not welcomed by people who want to harvest iris seeds.

KATYDID – Katydid nymphs are awesome.

RIPIPHORUS BEETLE – One of the “wedge-shaped” beetles in the family Ripiphoridae (which comes from a Greek word meaning fan carrier, a reference to the fancy antennae sported by the male).  Ripiphorus fasciatus is a beetle dressed like a fly, a disguise that undoubtedly allows them to cozy up to other insects on flower tops.  Females oviposit there, and their unusually-energetic larvae stand erect on the flowers, ready to board ground-nesting, solitary bees so that they can be transported back to the bee’s egg chambers.  There, they enter an egg chamber and then enter the larva in the chamber and consume it from the inside.  Look fast – males live for a single day, and females for not much longer.

SYRPHID FLY – Some syrphid/flower/hover flies are chunky bumble bee mimics, but some are delicate and beautifully-patterned, and when they land on your skin (to check out its salt content) your skin feels minutely cool.

ARCTIC SKIPPER BUTTERFLY – Officially the BugLady’s favorite skipper because although it is, like many skippers, brown and orange, you can’t mistake it for any other species.  They have a preference for bluish/purplish flowers, but fleabane works, too.

SPOTTED THYRIS MOTH – This chunky, little moth has a wingspan of just under a half-inch, so it fits easily on the fleabane’s disc flower.  Although they’re a day-flying moth, they’re easily overlooked, because they’re slightly smaller than a honeybee, and so they’re probably more common than we realize.  The Prairie Haven blogger (https://www.prairiehaven.com/?page_id=8920) says that “They looked like tiny crumpled butterflies.”

TACHINID FLY – Lots of tachinids are bulky, bristly, and house-fly-shaped.  Not Cylindromyia.  Tachinid flies are parasitic flies, many of which are considered beneficial biological controls of agricultural pests.  Not Cylindromyia.  This wasp-mimic targets a few species of predatory stink bugs that are, themselves, biological controls, plus some of the giant silk moths (Cecropia, Polyphemus, etc.).  

BLACK AND YELLOW FLOWER BUPRESTID – A.K.A. the Yellow-marked Buprestid, Hairy Yellow-marked Buprestid, Spotted Flower Buprestid, Beautiful Flower Buprestid, and Flat-headed Sapwood Borer.  Buprestids, many of which are tough-looking, bullet-shaped beetles, are known as the Metallic Wood-borers (though this one is dull and hairy rather than shiny).  Adults eat pollen and nectar and are hard to spot on yellow flowers; larvae are wood borers. 

All of the stars of today’s episode have also starred in their own BOTWs, which you can find by typing into the search box “UWM Field Station Arctic Skipper,” or “Iris weevil,” or whatever. (it took the BugLady an embarrassingly long time to figure that out).

Go outside – check the fleabane.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – And Now for Something a Little Different XIX – American White Pelican

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

And Now for Something a Little Different XIX American White Pelican

Howdy, BugFans,

2026: The BugLady spent the morning watching pelicans; photographing pelicans on the water, on the beach, and, in small squadrons, in the air; and editing pictures of pelicans.  They’re having a moment in her neighborhood at the edge of Lake Michigan.  There are two floating about far offshore right now – brilliant in the sunlight.

Here’s an article she wrote about them two years ago for the newsletter of the Lake Michigan Bird Observatory.

2024: Just before 3:00 PM on October 6, the last new species of the Big Sit! was spotted from the tower – two White Pelicans that were working their way north along the shoreline. A single bird flew south over the tower the next day. 

Wait! – pelicans live where the land touches the oceans, right? Well, yes. And – no. Brown Pelicans are certainly creatures of salt water, and when one shows up in Wisconsin, it’s a big deal, but American White Pelicans are native not only to the coasts but also to the Upper Midwest and to the prairie potholes of the northern Great Plains.

They’ve been present in Wisconsin for a long time, though it’s not known whether the birds reported by Indigenous tribes and early European settlers were breeding or migrating. They made a big target for the early settlers, despite the fact that, as one said “they have an oily flavor, whether alive or dead, which is so disagreeable that it is impossible to eat them.”  Wisconsin’s first modern breeding records occurred in 1995 (Green Bay) and 1997 (Horicon Marsh), and the newcomers probably hailed from North Dakota. For an interesting history of White Pelicans in Wisconsin, see https://swibirds.org/fff/2020/6/19/american-white-pelican.  Here’s a map of their present range https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_White_Pelican/maps-range.

The American White Pelican’s scientific name, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos, means “red-billed pelican.  The German naturalist who named it based his description on the writings of an English ornithologist who called it the Rough-billed Pelican. John James Audubon, waxing poetic, added “American” to its name, saying, “In consequence of this discovery, I have honored it with the name of my beloved country, over the mighty streams of which may this splendid bird wander free and unmolested to the most distant times, as it has already done in the misty ages of unknown antiquity.“

White Pelicans typically feed on minnows, shiners, carp, and suckers, but they’ll eat game fish, tadpoles, crayfish, and salamanders, and sometimes they adopt commercial catfish ponds. Unlike Brown Pelicans, they don’t plummet into the water from the sky; they hunt while swimming on the surface.  White Pelicans often forage alone, but a group may cooperate to encircle a school of small fish, drive it toward shore, and then share the results.  They sometimes steal food from other birds, even from the beaks of other pelicans that are feeding their young. During the breeding season, they often feed at night, locating fish by touch. 

A bird this size has few predators, but foxes and coyotes do damage in breeding colonies, and ravens, gulls, Great Horned Owls, Red-tailed Hawks, and eagles prey on eggs and nestlings.

After a courtship that includes strutting, bowing, head swaying, circling in the air, and jabbing at potential nest spots, pelican pairs settle down in communal nest areas, often on islands for protection. They lay two or three eggs but usually fledge only one young. Competition is stiff – it takes about 150 pounds of food to launch a young bird – and the first chick to hatch may eventually eliminate its nest mates (siblicide). Chicks can crawl by two weeks, walk by the end of three weeks, and fly by 10 weeks. When they’re about three weeks of age, chicks leave their nests and gather with other chicks in a group called a “crèche,” but they return to the area of their old nest to be fed.

FUN FACTS ABOUT WHITE PELICANS

  • The North American bird with the largest wingspread is the California Condor (9.5+ feet). With a nine-foot wingspan, the White Pelican is the second largest, and at almost 30 pounds, is one of the heaviest flying birds.
  • White Pelicans are hardy enough to overwinter in Wisconsin if they can find open water. They can be seen on this bird cam on the Mississippi near LaCrosse very early in spring and into late fall  https://explore.org/livecams/raptor-resource-project/mississippi-river-flyway-cam.
  • Adult White Pelicans have a vocabulary of grunts, but nestlings are more vocal, making loud begging calls. Even pelican embryos get into the act, squawking from inside the egg when they are too hot or too cold. To hear Pelican sounds https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_White_Pelican/sounds.
  • White Pelicans don’t have a brood patch – an area of bare skin where body heat is transmitted to their eggs. Instead, the parents incubate eggs by placing the webs of their feet over them.

DID YOU KNOW – that a pelican’s beak can, indeed, hold more than its belly can? A lunge fills the pelican’s stretchy pouch with a few gallons of water, and hopefully some fish, too. It tilts its head to let the water drain out of the bill, and the fish are swallowed right away. Pelicans need three or four pounds of fish each day.

On another note, June is Wisconsin’s Invasive Species Action Month. For more information see the Southeastern Wisconsin Invasive Species Consortium (SEWISC) https://sewisc.org/, and https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/Invasives?utm_source=newsletter_101&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sewisc-quarterly-newsletter-summer-2026.

Go outside – whack an invasive.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Wetland Homage – Waterlily leaf beetle

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Wetland Homage Waterlily leaf beetle

Greetings, BugFans,

2026: The final installment in National Wetlands Month, though the BugLady would argue that wetlands should be celebrated every month.  The BugLady attempts to photograph this burnished beetle everywhere she sees them – some in aquatic settings as they peruse the flowers of yellow water-lilies, and others on marsh marigolds and skunk cabbage in the adjacent swamps.  They are not huge – most would have to stretch to reach a half-inch – and they often appear to be gold.

2013: The BugLady can hardly pass by a water lily without taking a picture of it, and she confesses that she sometimes “sanitizes” the leaves somewhat during the editing process, Photo-Shopping out some of the mess of frass (Bug poop) and aphid exuviae (shed skins) and holes and discolorations that characterize the leaves of water lilies (especially white water lilies) in mid-summer.  She was reminded recently by BugFan Caitlin that water lily plants are the Center of the Universe for an amazing community of critters that live both above and below the leaf surface.  Someday she will track the colonization of the leaves from the beginning of the season and write a BOTW about it.

Although they are sometimes (confusingly) called Long-horned leaf beetles, Waterlily leaf beetles are in the huge Leaf beetle family Chrysomelidae, and not the long-horned beetle family (equally confusingly, there’s another leaf beetle with the same name).  The subfamily Donaciinae (the aquatic leaf beetles) contains five genera and about 55 species (mostly in the genus Donacia, which today’s beetle probably is, too.  You’d need a microscope and a higher pay grade than the BugLady’s to determine the species).  Donacia comes from Donax, which is Greek for “reed,” and they’re called “reed beetles” in Great Britain. 

WLBs can be found in “weedy” ponds and lakes and very slow streams all over North America.  The adults are leggy, up to a half-inch long, often metallic, with antennae about half as long as their body; they are jumpy and can move fast, and they’re a little camera shy.  The layer of silky hairs that covers their undersides repels water in their often-soggy habitats (settle down, there).  Find them on the surface of a variety of emergent and floating-leaved plants.  Some are generalist feeders and others are plant specialists; some are generalists while the leaves of their favorite plant are still submerged, but they make a bee-line for it when it emerges.  Adults enjoy the leaves of water lilies, arrowhead, potamogeton, and water milfoil, some sedges, rushes and reeds, and they may, like this beetle, eat pollen.

When it’s egg-laying time https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2309633/bgimage, females of many species of WLB chew a hole in a lily leaf, insert the end of their abdomen, and glue their eggs to the underside of the leaf in concentric arcs – like a mini-rainbow.  Some other species accomplish the same thing while perched on the edge of the lily leaf, and a few crawl up the plant stem, while still others climb under the leaf and down the plant stem. 

According to a report by Paul S. Welch in the Annals of the American Entomological Society, Vol. 9 (1916), the “aquatic” moth (its caterpillar is aquatic) Nymphula maculalis (the Polymorphic Pondweed moth) (really!) takes advantage of the holes excavated in yellow water lily by the female Donacia.  The moth also arranges her eggs on the leaf’s undersurface in up to six concentric arcs, using the spots around the rim of the hole that are not occupied by beetle eggs.  In his study, the author didn’t find a single mass (clutch?) of moth eggs that was not associated with a Donacia egg hole.

The BugLady has never seen a WLB larva (your typical small, whitish, C-shaped beetle grub), probably because most spend their larval lives plugged into a submerged plant stem, never “coming up for air.”  How do they do that?  The eggs hatch in about 10 days, and the larvae drop down through the water column, typically finding the roots and rhizomes (underground stems) of their host plants in the muck (some also feed on stems and petioles).  In the words of Ann Haven Morgan in her Field Book of Ponds and Streams, “When the stems of aquatic plants are broken beneath the water, a flood of air bubbles comes pouring to the surface from the air spaces within them” [that’s why, BugFans, the leaves of floating-leaved vegetation float instead of getting dragged under water – the stems are buoyed up by pockets of air].  “……MacGillivray and others found stems with dozens of little Donacia larvae hanging to them feeding upon the plant tissues, and all breathing air, though they were three or four feet below the surface of the water.”

Pennak, in the venerable Freshwater Invertebrates of the United States, enlarges on the concept.  Insects typically breathe through paired pores called spiracles that are located on the sides of the abdomen.  In the WLB larva, the only spiracles that are operational are the two at the end of the abdomen, and each of these two pores is associated with a sturdy spine.  The larva uses the spines to excavate holes in plant stems, which taps into their inner air pockets, and the air flows out over the spiracles.  Pennak notes that both ends of a larva will be embedded in plant tissue simultaneously. 

Fast-forward to the day, a few weeks later, when a mature grub is ready to pupate.  Using silk produced by glands in its mouth, the larva creates a waterproof cocoon near where it has been feeding.  How do you build a dry haven when you’re underwater?  You tap into the same air, present in the plant tissues, that has been sustaining you as you feed.  You snug your cocoon up against a stem and cut holes through it and into the plant and you allow air to leak in.  As the final touches are being put on the cocoon, the water has been driven out.  O little engineers! 

Although it develops into an adult fairly quickly, the WLB aestivates inside its cocoon until it emerges at the beginning of the next summer.  In a study of a European Donacia, researcher Christian Otto suggested that this arrangement may help the beetle avoid periods of low dissolved oxygen concentrations or may help the beetle time its appearance with the start of the growing season.  When it’s time to exit, the beetle breaks through the cocoon’s tip, carrying enough air under its elytra (wing covers) and belly hairs to sustain it on its trip to the surface. 

Go outside – find a wetland.  Look at stuff!

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – 6-spotted Fishing Spider

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

6-spotted Fishing Spider

Howdy, BugFans,

2026: Week two of our homage to wetlands.  Why wetlands?  Let me count the whys.  For starters, wetlands are fascinating communities that are full of animals that have devised unique ways to deal with the challenges of life underwater.  Wetlands both filter and sponge – removing chemicals from water systems and soaking up extra water to minimize flooding.  More “whys” next week.

2012: This lovely spider is called the SIX-SPOTTED FISHING SPIDER (Dolomedes triton), and yes, the BugLady is aware that there are more than six spots on the animal’s abdomen, but the number refers to dark spots hidden on its underside.  The BugLady wrote a too-short episode about this critter 4 ½ years ago, but she has re-researched the SSFS and so is re-issuing it.

Fishing Spiders are in the genus Dolomedes, in the Nursery web spider family, Pisauridae.  One source said that Dolomedes comes from a Greek word meaning wily or contriving.  Triton was the son of Poseidon.  There are 100-plus members of the genus worldwide, and because of their habitat choices, they’re also called wharf spiders, dock spiders, and raft spiders.  North America has nine of those species – four live in still water; four in streams, and one is found in trees. They are often mistaken for wolf spiders, to whom they are not-so-distantly related. 

SSFSs are found in wetlands, especially wetlands bordered by lots of vegetation, and they’ve developed multiple ways to get around within their habitats.  Although they do not spin webs to snare prey – non-web-spinners are often called “wandering” spiders – SSFSs do make silk for several other purposes. 

They are “opportunistic” carnivores that will eat just about anything that comes along. 

Hungry for fish?  An SSFS can dive underwater (as deep as seven inches) and can easily take a tiny fish; in fact, its strong legs allow it to capture prey that is larger than the spider itself (including small goldfish).  It’s able to walk on submerged vegetation, and it may retreat underwater when alarmed. 

A fishing spider has “book lungs,” alternating layers of air pockets and a blood-like substance.  Its body is covered with short, water-repellant hairs that hold an additional layer of silvery air against its body when the spider submerges.  With this “air tank,” it can stay submerged for more than thirty minutes, but all that air may make it so buoyant that it has to grab a plant or rock to keep from floating to the surface.

It frequently hunts at the water’s surface, where its eight eyes allow it to locate nearby prey visually and where it may stay motionless for several hours waiting for food to appear.  Like a water strider, an SSFS uses the sense of touch in its front legs to detect the struggles of insects that have swooped too low and become trapped in the water’s sticky surface film, or that have emerged from their underwater larval stage and have floated to the surface.  It walks out to its prey, grabs it with hooked front feet, subdues it with venom, and eats it.  It eats the competition, too – other surface-feeders, especially water striders.  Some sources claim that an SSFS can distinguish between the vibration of a trapped leaf and that of an insect or of a lunging frog; others said they cannot.

Besides walking, an SSFS can run across the water, row across it using several pairs of legs like oars; or glide, pushed by the wind like an iceboat. 

An SSFS is equally at home on dry ground – hunting along its shoreline, on leaves of shoreline plants, and on floating leaves in the water. 

Spiders in the air?  These spiders have been observed jumping up off the water’s surface to snag prey (or to avoid becoming the prey of birds, fish, frogs, snakes, and dragonflies), and they can disperse by ballooning https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/spider-flight-rerun/.   

SSFSs, like many spiders, are sexually dimorphic; he is half her size.  When a young male’s fancy turns to love, he proceeds with caution, because he is prey-sized and she needs protein to produce yolk for her eggs.  The signals are chemical, vibratory, and tactile.  He may follow her pheromone-laced silk dragline across the water, actually pulling himself along it (her scent is on the water, even without the dragline).  When he finds her, he waves his legs and jerks, and then expresses his further ardor by leg-tapping.  These vibrations produce ripples that spread and reach her.  If she is receptive, she waves, drums her palps (structures near her mouth), and then they spar for a while.  His actions defuse her prey drive – somewhat.  If she does cannibalize him, it increases the chances that her egg sac will hatch.

Experiments have been done to discover why she eats her mate.  Is it merely nutritional (called adaptive foraging – and she may eat him before he becomes a sperm donor) or is it the heat of the moment (aggressive spillover or misplaced aggression)? The results are inconclusive.

Her eggs are placed in a silken case that she totes around with her.  A Wolf spider attaches her egg case to spinnerets at the rear of her body; the SSFS carries them in the front, with her palps.  Nursery web spiders got their name because when her eggs are about to hatch, she builds a silken “nursery web” for the sac, and the spiderlings hatch out within its shelter.  She stays with them for a week or so until they leave the nursery.   It takes young SSFSs two winters to mature enough to perform their risky dance on the water. according to strict Jewish dietary laws, making unfiltered tap water off limits to observant Jews.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Wetland Homage – Cyclops

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Wetland Homage Cyclops

Salutations, BugFans,

May 1st kicks off American Wetlands Month! While we love wetlands year-round, May is a particularly great time to celebrate them as we enjoy the re-awakening of wetlands and all their glorious sights, sounds, and smells.  Let’s kick the month off with the story, from 2013, of a tiny, but very numerous and very important, wetland critter.

The ephemeral pond is humming these days, and the BugLady has been giving her 50mm macro lens a workout, channeling her inner photomicroscopist (a person who takes pictures through a microscope).  A reminder to newer BugFans – the BOTW definition of “bug” is the one that your average first grader uses.

The CYCLOPS is an aquatic non-insect whose name is taken from a character in Classical Greek Mythology (the BugLady trusts that BugFans will dust off the tattered Edith Hamilton Mythology paperbacks they’ve been carting around since high school and will look up the story of Cyclops).  The BugLady has always viewed cyclops as tiny, benign critters that twitch through their watery lives at the very limits of her vision, but it turns out that they have a Dark Side. 

These pear-shaped critters are related to fairy shrimp, daphnia, scuds, sowbugs, and water sowbugs – all of previous BOTW fame.  As crustaceans, they number shrimp, crayfish and lobsters among their distant relatives, too.  The subphylum Crustacea is in the huge Phylum Arthropoda; Arthropoda also includes insects and spiders, and the phylum may account for 80% of known, living species of animals.  Within the Crustacea, cyclops (which is both singular and plural) are in the class Maxillopoda and in the subclass Copepoda (a diverse group comprised of about 13,000 species). 

Cyclops and the rest of their copepod brethren are everywhere on the globe, mainly in calm waters, cold or warm, from the water traps of bromeliads to roadside ditches to underground caves to oceans.  They migrate passively, caught up in the feathers of waterfowl, stuck to aquatic insects that move from pond to pond, or in dust clouds that blow encysted larvae across the landscape from a dried-up pond.  They are among the most numerous of multi-celled animals in any body of water. 

Yes, they are small – the average cyclops needs to stand on tiptoes to reach 2mm.  Though they can scarcely be seen in a basin of pond water, cyclops are instantly recognizable because of their jerky movements and because the female is almost always toting around an egg sac or two. 

They come in a variety of neutral colors, plus transparent (and according to Elsie B. Klots in The New Field Book of Freshwater Life, some species that dwell at pond edges may be bright pink, green or blue in spring).  Like other copepods they have five pairs of legs attached to the thorax, and their heads have mouthparts and two pairs of antennae.  Cyclops have a single black or red eye that distinguishes light from dark (see: Mythology, Cyclops, above).  The antennae are sensory organs, and the first pair is also used in locomotion.  The forked tail is adorned with spines, bristles and hairs that aid in locomotion, balance, feeding, and in sensing the nuances of their environment.  They exchange gases through their body surface and are tolerant of low oxygen concentrations. 

The actions of a number of appendages combine to cause their characteristic gait.  When they begin to row with their five pairs of legs (copepod means “paddle foot”), the antennae are tucked against the body at the start of the leg stroke but are extended at the end of the stroke, which acts to put on the brakes but also helps to keep the tiny critter from sinking (all this in less than 1/12 of a second).  They use the abdomen as a rudder.

About those egg sacs.  While mating, he passes one or more sperm packets to her, enough to fertilize several broods.  Five to 40 eggs hatch inside the egg sacs and the young exit within five days.  The used egg sac is immediately replaced by a new one that fills with new eggs.  The young that hatch from the eggs go through five stages in a form called a nauplius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nauplius_larva_of_a_cyclops_copepod.jpg before assuming a more cyclops-like larval form called a cyclopoid.  Some species pop out little nauplii all summer; some breed just once.  Other kinds of copepods can produce “summer eggs” and then form special thick-walled winter eggs that can withstand harsh environments like the annual drying of an ephemeral pond.  Cyclops don’t have “winter eggs,” but they can aestivate (rest in suspended animation) in drought-resistant cysts or cocoons in one of the pre-adult, cyclopoid stages. 

What fuels cyclops?  Depending on the species, they are powered by plankton and other organic matter, algae or detritus, or by eating animals even tinier than themselves.  Some are parasites.  They form a link in the food chain between the even-tinier algae and bacteria that they consume and the larger plankton predators that are eaten by fish.  One of cyclops’ predators is a plant – carnivorous Bladderworts catch and digest them in underwater bladders that open up when a mini-critter bumps into a trigger hair.  Cyclops are sometimes introduced into aquaria to provide food for fish, but they may reproduce faster than the fish can eat and overrun the tank. 

Bladderwort

And the Dark Side?  Cyclops can be an intermediate host to some pretty nasty parasites including the Guinea worm in Africa and Asia, a fish tapeworm that makes eating sushi and ceviche a potentially risky business, and a roundworm in Asian countries that can infect humans with a condition with the awesome name of gnathostomiasis (the Asian swamp eel that is the main host for this nematode has found its way to the Americas, so the stage is set).  There’s a link between copepods and cholera in some tropical countries – the cholera germ hitches a ride on the tiny, swimming critters.

Interesting cyclops fact – Cyclops are present in the water supply of some large American cities, where routine treatment renders them harmless (dead) but does not filter them from the system.  As crustaceans, they are not kosher according to strict Jewish dietary laws, making unfiltered tap water off limits to observant Jews.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – European WoolCarder Bee

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

European WoolCarder Bee

Howdy, BugFans,

Today’s bug is a world traveler, and the pictures shared by BugFan Freda were taken far from our shores.  Thanks, Freda!

So, no guesswork about the geographical origin of the European Wool Carder Bee (Anthidium manicatum) (in the Old World, it’s also found in Western Asia and Africa).  The EWCB was first recorded in North America in 1963, near Ithaca, NY (three years before the BugLady got there), was seen in California in 2007, and is now established in a large chunk of the US and Canada.  Its nesting habits make it eminently portable, and it has also made its way to parts of South America, New Zealand (2006), and more https://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20m?kind=Anthidium+manicatum.

Look for it in grasslands, road edges, and gardens, where it often visits flowers of European origin, especially if they’re blue.

EWCBs are in the family Megachilidae, the Leafcutter, Resin, Mortar, Sharptail, Mason, and Woolcarder bees.  Not all woolcarder bees come from elsewhere – there are a total of 170 WCB species in the genus Anthidium worldwide, including 29 in North America.  “Carder?”  Females harvest hairs (trichomes) from fuzzy plants to use in the construction of egg chambers – more about that in a sec.   

These are chunky, hairy, honey bee-sized bees that are colored like yellowjackets and that can hover like Syrphid/flower/hover flies.  Males are larger than females, and the last two segments of the males’ abdomen have a spine on each side, plus a fifth spine at the very tip.  Like other members of the family, their pollen-carrying hairs (scopae) are under their abdomen rather than on their legs https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1099969/bgimage.  Much of the face is yellow, and there are variable yellow bands on the abdomen, a few yellow spots around the edges of the thorax, and yellow patches on the legs.   

One source said that most bees can’t be ID’d on flower tops at a glance, but this one can.  The moral of that story is, as always, that the BugLady needs to pay way more attention to the bees she sees.   

They feed on pollen from a wide variety of often blue, often hairy, often “long-throated,” often sun-loving, and often non-native flowers (the BugLady is trying to picture the Venn diagram).  In New Zealand, non-native flowers are their top choices.  Their generalist feeding habits explain their success in establishing themselves around the world.

Males are territorial and aggressive, staking out patches of flowers and defending them against other WCBs and just about any flying insects, including bumble bees – plus hummingbirds and even humans.  With rival bees they take the direct approach, flying up to them and trying to knock them off the flower.  The encounter may escalate, with the territorial male chasing the intruder, biting it, and even using the spines on his abdomen to get the message across.  Although they are equipped to do damage to rival males, competitions generally end with the territory owner routing the intruder, not harming it.  One source wrote that males may have 70 hostile encounters in an hour; thus, they’ve earned the name “Bossy/Bully bee.”   

The system selects for larger males – larger males tend to hold territories and to win territorial disputes, and females prefer them.  Itinerant males tend to be smaller.

If a female enters his territory to forage, she is expected to mate with him if she wants access to pollen (convenience polyandry).  As a result, both males and females mate multiple times.

These are solitary rather than colonial bees.  Females locate a preexisting, above-ground cavity to house their nest – a crack in a wall or foundation, rotting wood, a knothole, a plant stem, a bee hotel (which can be great fun, but strict hygiene must be maintained).  Then they visit fuzzy plants https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1696859/bgimage, scrape hairs off of leaves or stems with their toothed mandibles, and form it into balls.  They carry it under their bodies to the nest, where they use the hairs to fashion the walls and partitions of brood cells https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/421614/bgref.  

Some of the hairs she collects are “hydrophobic” – that is, they resist water, which helps keep the chambers (and their inhabitants) dry and microbe-resistant.  Some trichomes are glandular, and as she collects the plant hairs, her legs are exposed to their secretions.  These she rubs onto the cells as she builds (but the BugLady was unable to discover the benefits of doing so).  She may also incorporate mud, leaves, or resin.    

Each egg cell contains pollen and nectar (usually from mints like Salvia and Stachys), and the female lays an egg on the food pile in each cell before she seals it.  When she has made enough cells in a cavity, she closes it with a plug.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae consume the food Mom has left, pupate, and emerge later in summer.  If there are two generations per year, the second generation overwinters as dormant larvae in the cell, to resume growth and emerge in late spring.

A plant that’s mentioned frequently with EWCBs is Lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina), a common flower garden plant.  Researchers found that, like many plants, Lamb’s ear releases volatile organic compounds (VOCs) when its vegetation is disturbed – in this case, when its trichomes are harvested, and these VOCs are different than the VOC bouquet emitted by the intact leaves.  The bees sense the VOCs, but instead of avoiding plants where hairs had already been harvested, the VOCs attracted them to trim more.  It was suggested that these VOCs acted to help EWCBs to identify target plants more easily.

Opinions are mixed about their impact on native bees, and some people list them as invasive.  Yes, EWCBs are great pollinators, but they use the same nest sites as native bees, and they’re competing aggressively with them for the same flowers.  And they may be pollinating the “wrong” plants. 

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Whitebanded Crab Spider

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Whitebanded Crab Spider

Greetings, BugFans,

The BugLady loves crab spiders, so she’s been thrilled to find two, new (to her) species in the last few years.  One, the Whitebanded crab spider, is in the family Thomisidae, a family of, well, crab-shaped spiders, many of whom make their living on flower tops, and many of whom, in the genera Misumena, Misumenoides, and Misumenops (Mecaphesa), can be tricky to ID.  We’ll meet the other one next week.

Whitebanded crab spiders (Misumenoides formosipes) (formosipes is from the Latin for “beautiful leg/foot”) are named for a white band that crosses their face, right below the level of the eyes https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1295835/bgimage (depending, of course, on whether the spider is right-side-up or up-side-down).  But there’s a catch.  Like the very common Goldenrod crab spider (Misumena viata), female WBCSs can change colors depending on where they’re sitting – from white to yellow and back – by secreting or excreting yellow pigment from their normally-white outer cell layer (cuticle).  Turning yellow takes longer – up to three weeks – than does reverting to white.  In its yellow form, it could be called the Yellow-banded crab spider https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2058436/bgimage.  Other common names include Red banded crab spider and Ridge-faced flower spider.

They’re widespread, found in Ontario and much of the US, excepting the Northwest quadrant.   

WBCSs have eight eyes – four are arranged in a straight line, two are above that, and the other two are around the edges.  As is common in spiders, females are much larger than males https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/89420, and they have dark markings on their legs, which separates them from some of the other genera of flower crab spiders.  Females come in a variety of colors https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/35697, https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/6516, and https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/327244.  Males typically have a red/orange/gold abdomen, and their four front legs are dark https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/577576/bgimage, but they can’t switch colors.

WBCSs don’t make trap webs; they’re ambush predators that hang out on flowers and attempt to grab any visitor to the flower that looks toothsome, even if it’s slightly larger than they are.  They are frequently collected by various mud dauber wasps – stung, paralyzed, and used to provision the wasp’s egg chambers – food for eventual wasp larvae.  Spider eggs and spiderlings provide food for lots of predators. 

Males, especially when they are actively hunting for a mate, are nectivores, feeding on pollen and nectar, especially on Queen Anne’s lace.  Searching for a mate takes up a good deal of a male’s time, so he employs a “Bird in the Hand” strategy.  He locates a female before she becomes fully mature (unmated penultimate female), and he guards her until she is old enough to reproduce.  He lives on her inflorescence and takes on rival males, but despite his devotion – and energy investment – whichever male is closest after she undergoes her final molt will likely be the lucky spider, although the resident male does have the home-field advantage. 

Female WBCSs like Black-eyed Susans, and males search for likely flowers by their smells.   His small size and light weight allow him to jump from one flower head to another or to loose a line of web into the wind and to tightrope across it after it sticks to the next flower.

Females create silk sacs holding 80 to 180 eggs, attach them to leaves, and guard them until she eventually freezes.  The spiderlings exit the egg sac in spring. 

Yes – they do eat pollinators, and everyone loves pollinators.  But these are native spiders feeding on native pollinators, and they worked all that out a long time ago – their food habits don’t upset the Balance of Nature, and they supply protein for larger critters.  Some apologists point to the fact that the presence of predators improves the defenses of prey species over time. 

Go outside, look for bugs!  The BugLady visited a wetland on a warm day recently and saw some Common Green Darners messing around in a stand of last year’s cattails.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Pussy willow Pollinators

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Pussy willow Pollinators

Salutations, BugFans,

2026: The pussy willows near the BugLady’s lakeshore home are in bloom.  Here’s a BOTW about pussy willows from late March of 2012 – a few new words and pictures.


2012: People get excited when pussy willows whisper the spring.  The BugLady loves skulking among them when they’re blooming, ogling the diversity of insects that come to visit when very few other flowers are out.  Willows are dioecious (separate house), bearing their male and female flowers on separate plants.  The gray, fuzzy buds are future male flowers that will morph into catkins bearing long, slender filaments (pollen-producing stamens).  The thicker, “caterpillar-like” flowers – fleshier stalks with what looks like a tiny flower at the tip, are future female catkins and seeds.  Pussy willow (Salix discolor), which is a prodigious pollen producer, is almost finished blooming, but other willow species are still in bud.

Remember that pollination is an accidental service performed by animals that visit the pussy willows for another purpose altogether – to perch, to set up housekeeping, to browse an important, early food source (the male flowers produce a little nectar and a lot of pollen, and female flowers supply nectar), or to browse the browsers.  Mining bees and syrphid flies made up the majority of the insects that the BugLady saw, with flies (blow, flesh, and house) next.  The BugLady also saw a spring azure butterfly checking out the willow flowers. 

For all their attractiveness and importance to these early pollinators, pussy willows are largely wind-pollinated.  Wind-pollinated flowers produce massive amounts of pollen because wind pollination is pretty random.  

The BugLady found:

ANTS – Ants become active when the spring sun warms the soil they nest in.  If you put all of the people on the globe at one end of a teeter totter and all the ants on the other, our feet would be dangling.  There are many kinds of ants with many lifestyles and many diets. 

ASCLERA RUFICOLLIS – Adult Red-necked false blister beetles feed on early spring flowers in woods and wood edges; their larvae dwell in rotting logs.  Apparently, despite its name, a crushed false blister beetle produces highly irritating chemicals that will make a (false?) blister.  

BROWN STINKBUG – Some species of brown stinkbug are vegetarians, but the BugLady thinks that this is one of the predatory stinkbugs.  The BugLady wonders if the heavy dusting of willow pollen works as an inadvertent disguise.

CAROPHILUS BEETLE – A sap beetle – although most sap beetles are consumers of rotting fruits and vegetables and fungi, some are found on flowers.

DISONYCHA BEETLE – The very spiffy Striped willow leaf beetle is in the huge leaf beetle family Chrysomelidae.  Members of the small genus Disonycha (according to one source) mostly eat “weeds.”  This one eats willow-parts.

GREENBOTTLE FLY – These members of the Blow fly family are listed as carrion feeders.  Apparently, this fly was cleansing its palette.

CYNOMA CADAVERINA – Another member of the Blow fly family, with a decidedly un-wholesome name, stared at the BugLady from a willow branch. The BugLady moved on down the trail.

HONEYBEE – an important – and imported – pollinator, honeybees are on the landscape starting in late winter and early spring.  Bees foraging for pollen near wetlands may warm up within the insulated comfort of a skunk cabbage spathe, which may be 30 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature.

MINING BEE – Mining bees are a mainly solitary bunch of bees; females stock brood cells with pollen and nectar for their emerging young.  They are important early, native pollinators. 

SWEAT BEE – Sweat bees collect prodigious loads of pollen and transport it to their underground nests. Most are solitary; a few are marginally social.”

SYRPHID FLY – Syrphid/Hover/Flower flies are bee mimics that feed on nectar and pollen.

SPOOKY TACHINID (probably) – Tachinid flies have an ulterior motive.  They lay eggs, or sometimes live young, on flowers so that their young may board another insect and become a parasitoid.  The BugLady thought this ghost-colored tachinid was a bit creepy-looking.

NOMADA WASP – The BugLady is amazed at the antennae on this Nomada wasp.

EUROPEAN PAPER WASP – Negotiating the thicket of flower parts on the male flower must be a challenge.

Go outside and watch the willows!

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Brush-tipped Emerald

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Brush-tipped Emerald

Greetings, BugFans,

Dragonflies!  But not soon enough!

Quick and dirty dragonfly phenology (phenology – the study of Mother Nature’s calendar.  Cliff notes version – things appear/bloom/disappear/migrate in pretty much the same order every year, we just can’t predict the start date).  Common Green Darners lead the parade, their arrival from the south governed by temperature and by the same weather fronts that bring migratory birds north (coinciding, hopefully, with the emergence of some insect prey for both).  Migrating Variegated Meadowhawks show up in early May – or they don’t.  The next tier, usually airborne by mid-May, includes Common Baskettails, Common Whitetails, Chalk-fronted Corporals, Four-spotted Skimmers, and the aptly-named Springtime Darners.


Brush-tipped Emeralds (Somatochlora walshii) are summer dragonflies. 

They’re in the Emerald family (Corduliidae), represented in Wisconsin by the baskettails, shadowdragons, boghaunters, a couple of smaller emeralds (Racket-tailed and American), and thirteen members of the genus Somatochlora, the Striped or Green-eyed Emeralds (https://wiatri.net/inventory/odonata/).  Somatochlora comes from the Greek for “green body.”  Emeralds are called emeralds because in many species, the adults, especially the adult males, have emerald-green eyes.  The BugLady can testify that when you’re walking down the trail with the sun at your back and you encounter an emerald that’s flying toward you, the glow of those eyes is a religious experience https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/680153/bgimage!  The most famous emerald here in God’s Country is the Federally Endangered Hine’s Emerald https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/hines-emerald-dragonfly-the-backstory/ .

The Striped emeralds are, as the Wisconsin Odonata Survey website points out “uncommonly seen, but this may be largely due to their secretive nature.”  It goes on to say that “the medium-sized, dark brown striped emeralds have some pale markings on the thorax and abdomen, black legs, clear wings and brilliant green eyes. The thorax has a metallic bronze-green sheen and the abdomen is dark metallic black-green.”  While some species live in the South, many are dragonflies of the North country, even living above the treeline. 

Look for Brush-tipped Emeralds near bogs, fens, marshes, and lake outlets, near slow streams, and over meadows and at the edges of coniferous woods in Canada and across the northern tier of the US (though small populations are found at higher elevations in the Appalachians). 

Emerald species are hard to tell apart in flight, but male Brush-tipped Emeralds have, well, a brushy tip https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/185242/bgimage that can be imagined as it flies by – as Kurt Mead says in Dragonflies of the North Woods, “the whiskered tips of the male Brush-tipped’s abdominal appendages are unlike those of any other North American species” of Somatochlora “ (though the appendages of other species are not hairless).  If they sit still long enough, you can see that the metallic-green abdomen has pale yellow spots https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1566444/bgimage that can help narrow down the identification.  Adult Brush-tipped Emeralds are about two inches long; males have short abdomens and females have proportionately longer abdomens than males.  

Males are strong flyers, patrolling territories by flying low (less than three feet off the ground) along the edges of cool-water wetlands, abdomen arched, putting on aerial displays, chasing rivals, and looking for females.  Females lack the kind of ovipositor that would allow them to insert eggs into a plant stem, so they locate an area with lots of floating-leaved and submerged aquatic plants and they fly slowly, close to the water’s surface, dipping into or tapping it with the tip of their abdomen to release eggs (200 to 500 in all).  When the eggs hatch, the naiads hide in the vegetation.  They sometimes oviposit into muck or wet moss. 

The BugLady got some Hail Mary shots of a female Brush-tipped Emerald (probably) who was considering a small lake inlet for ovipositing.

Adults hawk small, soft-bodied, easy-to-eat insects from the air (including mosquitoes) and consume them in flight.  Females fly above small woody clearings and along roads and trails.  They may forage for food away from water, but they remain attached to their natal wetland.  The naiads ambush any aquatic critters they can, including tiny tadpoles and fish, and they’re preyed on by bigger aquatic insects, fish, and frogs.  Spiders and birds catch the adults. 

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Bug o’the Week – Monarch Butterflies – Spring, 2026

Bug o’the Week
by Kate Redmond

Monarch Butterflies Spring 2026

Howdy, BugFans,

THEY’RE COMING!!!

It’s barely spring, officially – way too early to be thinking about butterflies, right?  Nope.  The first butterflies of the year have already been reported on the Wisconsin Butterflies website (https://wisconsinbutterflies.org/butterfly) (which also serves your Tiger beetle and Robber fly needs).


Our first butterflies are usually the anglewings (commas and Question Marks https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/anglewings/) and the Mourning Cloaks https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/mourning-cloak-revisited/.  Why?  Because they go through the winter as adults, tucked up into a sheltered spot (called a hibernaculum).  These are the species that are seen by people tapping maple trees in the Sugarbush during the warm days of late winter.  When the cold returns – and it always does, except in the bizarre spring of 2012 – they seek shelter again.  They are able to be abroad in early spring, before the wildflowers bloom, because they feed on sap from sap drips, juice from rotting fruits, and minerals from animal droppings.

The other early butterflies are species that overwintered as a chrysalis and emerged in spring – Cabbage Butterflies https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/cabbage-whites-and-sulphurs-redux/ and a couple of “blue” butterflies, the Eastern Tailed-Blue and the “Spring” Spring Azure https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/small-blue-butterflies-2/.  In very warm years, early individuals of these species have been recorded in late March.  Our first Monarch sightings usually come in May.

Back to the Monarchs.  A year ago, winter censuses of the eastern and western populations, Monarch Butterfly showed that numbers were down https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/the-monarch-butterfly-problem/.  This year’s census found eastern Monarchs occupying 64% more territory in Mexico’s oyamel fir forests than last year.  Not a home run, but reason for optimism https://wimonarchs.org/late-mar-2026-update-what-do-the-numbers-in-mexico-mean/.

Monarchs are on the way!  Check the Journey North interactive map – https://maps.journeynorth.org/map/?map=monarch-adult-first&year=2026&season=spring.  For more information, see https://wimonarchs.org/.  

Mike Reese has built a wonderful community of butterfly-lovers who make reports to the Wisconsin Butterflies website; and while it is more anonymous, the Wisconsin Odonata Survey website (https://wiatri.net/inventory/odonata/) contains a treasure trove of information.  Where do all those reports come from?  Us – they are two examples of Citizen/Community Science projects here in Wisconsin!  Register with the site, keep track of the butterflies and/or dragonflies/damselflies you see on your walks or in your back yard (you need to take a nose count of the butterflies but not of the dragonflies), and then log on to record what you’ve seen.  Both sites accept pictures.   

The Journey North organization offers another Community Science project called the monarch larva monitoring project https://mlmp.org/.

Go outside – look for butterflies!

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

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