lightsinthedistance-modernlife

After enjoying a meal in the park a few weeks ago with my girlfriend, I stopped by a sweet gum tree ( Liquidambar styraciflua ) to check for any insects. The sweet gum is abundant in Ohio and is one of my favorite trees. It reminds me of when I was a kid and would throw the seed balls at my friends. Good times. I noticed an orange bug near the trunk of the tree and stooped down to investigate. Success! I had found Pselliopus barberi , a species I like to refer to as the zebra-striped assassin bug. I kept looking and found another one. Then another. And another....all in all, I counted 29 in total! There were about six pairs which were mating, though I disturbed a few (as you can see in the above photo). It's not every day that you find so many insects in one place. So what was going on? The answer lies in the season. This species overwinters as adults, so when it starts getting colder in the fall, the adults band together to find hiding places under bark and wrinkly crevices on tre...

If you live in Ohio, you would probably agree that this winter has been a strange one. In the southeast, we haven't gotten much snow (much to my own chagrin). While this stops me from sledding down the available hills on campus, the mild weather at least means that you're more likely to encounter insects than you would be under two feet of snow. A few weeks ago, on January 27th, a friend brought me a nice little surprise: This little dude clad in zebra stripes is the assassin bug known as Pselliopus barberi . This species, like other assassins, is predaceous (just check out that beak!) and this one overwinters as an adult, explaining why it was found in January. It's not too large, just about 14 millimeters, but it's quite striking. There are two species in this genus that you're likely to encounter often in Ohio: P. barberi and P. cinctus . P. cinctus is slightly smaller, and is a duller orange color. Before getting this one, I hadn't bothered too much with i...