The walking stick - named for obvious reasons - can be very difficult to spot out in the woods. This one is fairly obvious on the side of a building. I have an entomologist friend who was in my lab in grad school who studies Phasmatodea digestive systems. In the museum we both worked in there were several walking stick colonies, including some very interesting species.
Here's a pretty blue damselfly resting by the side of a lake. Damselflies and dragonflies belong to the order Odonata.
Orthoptera includes grasshoppers and crickets.
This cryptic (camouflaged) Atlanticus sp. shieldback is a female. You can tell by the large sword-like ovipositor which she uses to lay eggs.
This little grasshopper is a nymph, which means it has several more instars, or growth phases, to go through before it is an adult. After hemimetabolous insects hatch from an egg, they look much like a mini adult. Nymphs do not have wings and cannot reproduce, those things come to it after the final molt into an adult. All the insects on this page are hemimetabolous, as are the Hemiptera (bugs) I posted about a few days ago. The other kind of development is holometablous, which includes insects such as butterflies and beetles. These insects go through a complete metamorphosis, where the young insect is a larva and does not look like the adult. In the final stage before adulthood the holometabolous insect pupates to make the dramatic change, and emerges as an adult.
No comments:
Post a Comment