Spring round-up

Photos taken:
Late May to mid June
[ CW: spiders ]

Spring is over! Normally I wait until the end of the month to make these wrap-up posts, but it's the last day of the season as I'm writing this so here's a bunch of bugs from right at the end of spring.

Found this moth sitting right by the stem of a strange and mysterious plant that has been growing in the grass. It has thick, rubbery leaves and seems to keep growing back every time it gets mowed, so I'm going to let it grow for now and see what it does.

Anyway this moth is nice! I can't properly identify it, but this is probably a species of underwing moth. They have a duller-coloured pattern on their forewings and hidden underneath them are two brightly coloured hindwings. I didn't get to see the hindwings of course but I'm glad the camera was able to capture the individual scales on the forewings (plus the little feets! cute!)

Close up of a small orange and brown moth sitting on a plant. Its wings are made up of tiny oval shaped scales.

I usually try to keep my webpages under 1MB but this next moth has pushed way past that limit, so apologies to those of you with bad internet connections (it's me, I'm the one with the bad internet connection).

Image of a dark brown and orange coloured moth resting on a door. The camera is focused on its head, showing its large eyes.

It's a cool moth! The wing pattern initially made me think there was lichen growing on the shed door; it's kinda got a calico pattern to it I guess.

Image of the previous moth's wing. It is patterned with large patches of brown, white, and orange, and has fine hairs running around the edges.

Took this fly photo with my macro lens! I don't have much to say about it other than it looks cool and the iridescent wings reminds me of that one underground room in Ocarina of Time, y'know the one with the strange rainbow texture that doesn't appear anywhere else in the game? I love that room, and I love this fly too.

Oh look, it's a bumblebee! Just a completely normal bumblebee, definitely nothing suspicious going on here.

If you take a closer look at its eyes and antennae — and also count the number of wings — you'll see this bumblebee is actually a fly! This mimic is probably a Narcissus Bulb Fly (Merodon equestris) which has done an incredible job of disguising itself.

The only thing about it that wasn't very bumblebee-like was it's speed and skill at flying; real bumblebees are super clumsy, and have an innate inability to fly in a straight line.

A fly that closely resembles a bumblebee sitting on a white flower head. Its eyes are large and curve around the head in a dome-like shape.

Another mimic! This hoverfly was pretending to be a wasp and doing a pretty good job of it, they got the buzzing sound right and everything. They really seemed to enjoy sitting on the compost bag, probably due to the bright colours.

A large hoverfly sitting on a bag of compost. The pattern on its abdomen makes it look like a common yellow and black wasp.

We're slightly breaking convention with our last bug; most of the insects I photograph are from the garden but this spider was crawling around inside, having gotten stuck in the bathtub. After relocating them to a nearby plant pot, they stayed around for about half an hour which allowed me to get these nice clear macro shots.

They might be a wolf spider, probably a juvenile based on their size, but I'm not 100% sure. I still need to get better at spider identification. Regardless of what they are, they have very nice colours and I appear to have photographed the spinnerets at the back of their abdomen!

An orange and black spider sitting on the edge of a ceramic pot. It has two pairs of large eyes on the front and sides of its head and a row of four small eyes underneath. The top of its body has an orange line running down the middle and its abdomen has six white dots on it. On the very end of the abdomen are two small nubs which are the spinnerets.

It would have been nice to observe them more but this guy kept making threat displays whenever I was nearby. You can tell a spider is being defensive because they'll rear back on their hind legs and lift up their front legs to appear larger. This might be the first time I've ever actually seen a spider threat display in person — most spiders will just run away from me once I put them down, but this tiny spider was being very brave.

[EDIT: I've since learnt that this isn't necessarily a threat display! Spiders have lots of sensitive hairs on the undersides of their legs, so lifting them up like this gives the spider a ton of information about their surroundings. This spider was more likely just investigating the large smelly creature standing in front of them and pointing a camera lens in their face. I still maintain that the spider was being very brave though.]