Heavy-duty caterpillaring

A fine group of intellectually curious people convened in Adams County, Ohio over the weekend - our 6th annual get-together, ostensibly to search for caterpillars. And that we do, but as always the foray becomes a natural history free-for-all, and we find lots of other STUFF. Our base camp is John and Tina Howard's Ohio Star Retreat Center. Most of the group stays here, and we all converge on the place to have meals, and photograph temporarily detained caterpillar livestock. It's a great place to stay of you're in Adams County, especially if you are in pursuit of the region's abundant natural history.

The group changes form a bit each year, and we always have one or a few new people, but most of the caterpillar-hunters in this image have been to a few or all of these strange outings. It's a blast, with lots of nocturnal field work. The group is, from back row (L to R): Tom Patt, Sue Zacharias, Chris Zacharias, Ann Geise, Sally Miller, Frances Ganance, Chelsea Gottfried, John Howard, Randy Lakes (peeking over John's right shoulder), and Jason Larson. Front row (L to R): Kyle Bailey, Kim Banks, Colleen Sharkey, Gina Patt, your narrator, Molly Kenney, and Dan Kenney. Not pictured is Judy Ganance, who kindly took the photo. Laura Hughes, Mary Ann Barnett, and Kathy and Ned Keller also joined in for part of the excursion, but weren't there when we took this photo. Sorry if I'm missing anyone else.

I took a boatload of photos, but haven't processed many caterpillar images yet. More of those will hopefully follow, in a future post. This is a saddleback caterpillar, Acharia stimulea, always a crowd-pleaser. Fun to look at, less amusing to the touch. This caterpillar packs a punch, possessing one of the most painful stings of any North American caterpillar.

This is the architecturally ornate larva of the comma butterfly, Polygonia comma. Our official larval scribe, Judy Ganance, recorded nearly 50 species of caterpillars seen by the group.

Now this is a treehopper we can all get behind! It's the keeled treehopper, Entylia carinata, an amazing thorn mimic.

This is a pretty cool little fly, if you ask me. It's a dusky-winged hoverfly, Ocyptamus fuscipennis. The larvae are predators of aphids.

Thanks to Laura Hughes for showing us this amazing spider on Friday night. It is the difoliate orbweaver, Acacesia hamata. This is the only member of the genus north of Mexico - apparently there are five or so species south of the U.S.

The handsomely marked female difoliate orbweaver creates an incredible web. The circular strands of the outer web are incredibly close together and there are a great many of them. Probably 75 strands can be seen in just this snippet of the web, which was much larger.

A jumping spider with a handsome trig, freshly seized. The little eight-legged tough wasn't about to give his cricket up, and squared off with me and my camera.

I would say this one is "cute", as spiders go. It's a bolas spider, Mastophora yeargani. Laura Hughes showed it to our group last Saturday night. She made a great find; this is the first confirmed state record. I think this species was only described in 2003, and its basic life history is not well understood. The spider is resting below a twig and staring at the camera; nearby is her egg case.

More photos and stories from this expedition may follow...