What was the mystery?
It's a unique-headed bug in the enigmatic family Enicocephalidae. These soil-dwelling insects are predators of other arthropods. They are of phylogenetic interest as a potential sister lineage to the remaining Heteroptera, the true bugs.
Enicocephalids aren't terribly common- I can count on one hand the times I've seen them in the field- and I was most surprised to find one scurrying about under a stone in my small urban front yard.
Five points to James Trager, who first picked the order. And five more to Kojun, who got the family.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
What was that inexplicable bit of chitin hiding away in a hole in a twig?
This photo should help:
It's the heavily sclerotized head shield of a Cephalotes varians turtle ant. Ants in this mostly Neotropical genus inhabit pre-existing cavities in trees and branches, a limiting resource that spurs…
We have been dancing near record low temperatures in these parts. It's not quite as cold as the dark side of the moon, but it is cold enough that the water in the garden hoses is frozen in the morning and there's frost on the ground. (Also, cold enough that ice needs scraping off the windshield…
tags: Wheel Bug, Arilus cristatus, Image of the Day
Wheel Bug, Arilus cristatus, a late-instar nymph.
[Here are a couple pictures of] the Wheel Bug, also taken in the last week. The critter (a member of the Assassin Bug family, Reduviidae) is named for the gear-wheel structure on its thorax;…
I wrote this post in 2008, which was one of my worst gardening years ever - I made the insane mistake of setting the deadline for _A Nation of Farmers_ for June 1, which meant I spent most of the planting season in front of my computer. But I knew I wasn't the only one, and I've come to worry a…
Ha! I run into these occasionally and always thought they were young of some sort of reduviid. Taxonomy fail on my part!