Nature Nearby: The *I [Saw] It on The Grape Vine* Edition

Today there were even stranger things than the Mailbox Mantid hanging out on our grape vine!

This appears to be a spider making an egg case:



And these weird things, which are new to us, appear to be Grape Tube Gallmaker (Cecidomyia viticola), which you can check out here and here.

Arthropod Safaris

Who knew that when I suggested that we study insects and spiders to get my very sensitive then three year old Mikro over a crippling fear of anything with more than four legs, that it would spark a tremendous passion for all things arthropod? We cannot take a walk without it turning into a critter safari!

Here are some of the things we've seen lately:

Arthropod Adventures

The insect and arachnid safaris continue...

Critter Safari After Dark

Have you ever taken a night time critter safari with your kids? We did, and Mikro had so much fun. We saw some ants, beetles, crickets and an immature katydid.





And, of course, lots of spiders!



This one was busy dining on prey caught in his web:




(Those are my husband's fingers, to give you a sense of the size of this spider.)

And this one (who was much bigger than the previous one) had a hideout made of leaves stuck together with silk, where she retreated when we tried to get a photo of her:







What a fun way to spend a summer evening! And the lid from my iced coffee came in handy as an improvised diffuser for my flash! Without it, the critters just whited out.