Decorated granite moth

Found this little decorated granite moth in the bathroom yesterday morning, very similar to the one I posted a few years ago.  I couldn't quite tell if the coloring of this one is more brown than the other, because there is very little natural light in this bathroom and the bulb makes everything a bit golden.

Praying mantis

I saw this mantis as I was sweeping the driveway this morning -- thought it was a stick my broom had missed and was about to pick it up when it started to walk away!  It was very sluggish and crawled up the leg of this pot instead of flying, but it is a cool and overcast morning, so perhaps the mantis just hasn't warmed up yet.

The mantis is generally a beneficial insect, eating flies, mosquitoes, crickets, aphids, etc., but being a voracious carnivore it will also eat other beneficial insects, including other mantises.

Brown marmorated stink bug

We caught this in the house this afternoon -- identified it as a brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys). Yuck.

Apparently this bug, accidentally imported from Asia in the 1990s, is now a serious pest, with a website with some pretty big names attached to it dedicated to controlling it. More advice from Penn State is found here.  The bugs feed on soft-skinned fruits such as apples, peaches, grapes, etc. disfiguring the crops and making them unsellable, and the stinky secretion they produce when threatened can cause allergic reactions in humans.

Gulf fritillary

I found this butterfly this morning -- it is almost certainly a gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae).

Spider eating a bee

My husband took this photo of a female green lynx spider (Peucetia viridans) eating a bee. He used the camera flash, which is why it is so dark in the background, although it was day at the time.

Black widow spider

We caught this in the house this morning. I had brought in some stonecrop that I haven't potted yet, and the spider had apparently been hiding inside it. It is the western black widow spider (Latrodectus hesperus), native to California and famous for its venomous bite.  This is a female; the males are brown and much smaller, in fact hardly resembling this at all.

It was a bit difficult to get a good photo, as the camera wanted to focus on the glass of the jam jar, not on the spider, but the top photo is what you would ordinarily see, and the bottom photo is of course the distinctive red-orange "hour glass" shape on its abdomen. 

More on black and brown widows from the UC Integrated Pest Management program and the Hastings Natural History Reservation.

Mealybug destroyer larva?

This is probably the larva of a mealybug destroyer, a beneficial insect introduced into California in 1891, and a little later into Florida as well, to help control the mealybugs harmful to citrus trees.  This one was crawling along the trunk of our lime tree; it is head-down in both photographs.  Cryptolaemus montrouzieri is native to Australia, and is a beneficial predator in both the larval and adult stages.  It does not often survive cold winters, and has to be reintroduced annually.

This one looks a little different from other mealybug destroyer larvae in photographs, especially this one at What's That Bug?, because I thought ours looked white all over, where the others look more like a dark roly-poly with weird white tentacles stuck all over it, like some insectal Halloween costume.

The Bugman finds it interesting that the mealybug destroyer larva looks very like the mealybug it preys on.  Mother Nature News has an article on how to tell "good" bugs from "bad" ones, including the mealybug destroyer larva and the mealybug.

It may also be a Scymnus larva, a ladybeetle; this is a beneficial insect as well.  Apparently the two are both members of the ladybeetle family anyway.  The Scymnus larva does not look at all like the more common ladybeetle larvae, which do not have the white "tentacles".  Of the Scymnus, the University of Florida writes with feeling, "Many owners of plants have sprayed the larvae with chemicals in the mistaken belief that they are pests. This misidentification must be overcome by education."  In the interests of such, here are a few pictures from other sources:

Mealybug (this one is Phenacoccus solani). Source: Wikipedia.

Mealybug destroyer in larval and adult stages, with mealybugs for comparison. Source: Cornell University.

A beneficial ladybeetle (Scymnus) larva. Source: UTIA.

An unidentified moth

An unidentified spider

An unidentified spider (rather large), hanging in its web outside my house.

Green lynx spider

We found this spider on the fading blooms of some peacock orchids (Acidanthera) this afternoon. It is a green lynx spider, Peucetia viridans, probably a male as they tend to be more slender than females.  The green lynx, named for its cat-like habit of pouncing on its prey, is a common garden spider in southern California, ranging from coast to coast in the southern United States as well as Mexico and Central America.

According to the Galveston County Master Gardeners, the green lynx spider is known to prey on beneficial insets such as butterflies, honeybees, pollinating flies, wasps, and other nectaring insects, but is of interest in agricultural pest management as an important predator of crop-damaging insects such as harmful caterpillars.

Red admiral

I found this butterfly when I was weeding this morning. It was very sluggish, and had its antennae folded back under its wings for a long time -- perhaps it was newly come from its chrysalis? It kept its wings closed for some minutes, even as I picked off the sprig it was resting on, and carried up to the house, admiring the beautiful mottled black and brown and tan of the underside of its wings, like the cross-section of a sedimentary rock -- then it suddenly dropped its wings open to reveal the orange stripes.

This is a red admiral (Vanessa atalanta). I regret to say that our back yard has quite a lot of stinging nettles -- or had, before this morning -- although apparently the upside is that the red admiral caterpillar is quite fond of them.

(The pictures are a bit blurry ...)

Decorated granite moth?

Possibly Digrammia decorata or decorated granite, although it looks nothing like the one pictured here.  This is a common moth here in Fullerton

Photographed early this morning, in a sheltered spot on the side of my house.