sistawendy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistawendy) wrote2002-10-11 11:11 am
sistawendy) wrote2002-10-11 11:11 am
nostalgia on at least six legs
With the encouragement of heyoka I've written something about...
Bugs I Have Known
Living in north Florida for seventeen years will give you intimate familiarity with many species of arthropods. Some of them you love, some of them you fear, and some of them you just remember.
cockroaches -- What you've heard about Gulf coast roaches is true: they are much larger than the ones further north, and thanks to interbreeding with Asian roaches, they can fly. They always seemed to know exactly how far they had to fly to get just out of broom swat range. I have the utmost respect for them. Want to see how well I dance? Just put a cockroach on my thigh while I'm wearing shorts. Those things tickle. I noticed two distinct kinds of them: the regular, speedy, flying roach and what I heard called a "palmetto bug": a segmented-looking, slow-moving, flightless critter that I observed laying eggs on the grout in cinder block walls. Before you tell me that I've got my taxonomy wrong, my research tells me that nobody agrees on what a palmetto bug is. I've also observed that roaches just adore rotting wood piles. No, they don't just live in ill-kept houses. Oh by the way: cockroaches in the US have evolved quite a bit of pesticide resistance over the years.
lacewings -- Green flies with 1.5 cm bodies and 2 cm wings, not that commonly seen. What's really cool about them, though, are their eggs. They lay them in clusters of a few dozen, each egg on a stalk maybe 5 mm long, on a vertical surface. (I saw them on doors.) Up close, they look like a futuristic city out of the Jetsons or something.
stink bugs -- Bright green, 2 cm long and nearly that wide, slow-moving, and kind of cute. They look like beetles but I believe they're what entomologists call "true bugs". (That term just cracks me up.) Squash them at your own risk.
big grey bugs -- 4 cm (plus legs) grey and black mottled things shaped like elongated stink bugs. They're hideous and wicked-looking, but as far as I know they're harmless. They're not common, thankfully.
love bugs -- About 1 cm with orange heads and black everything else. They can fly, but they can't maneuver in the air that quickly. When they fly around in pairs joined at the abdomen, as they do when they swarm and mate every early spring (and in Florida that means February), they're even less maneuverable. Car washes do a boom business at that time of year. Scrubbing them off one's car by hand takes non-trivial amounts of elbow grease. I confess to spending many happy minutes as a child swatting these things; it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
scorpions -- My parents have a fireplace and a back yard that used to be full of pine trees. We children got to feed the fire. After we discovered our first small, surprisingly-unthreatening-looking scorpion in a log fetched from outdoors, we handled the wood very carefully.
dragonflies -- Green, blue, and the occasional yellow and black one. I loved watching them hover over tall grass. And best of all, they eat the larvae of...
mosquitoes -- Yeah, they're everywhere, but unless you're in Brazil, I bet Florida mosquitoes carry more strains of encephalitis than your mosquitoes. They never bothered my father, much to my irritation.
centipedes and millipedes -- We had 'em. They're neat.
mud daubers -- Mud daubers are a species of wasp that make their nests out of mud, not paper. These nests look like gray ocarinas stuck to the eaves.
no-see-ums -- An insect that I've -- wait for it -- never seen, but lives in sand dunes at beaches. When they bite it hurts like a mofo. These might be midges, but I'm not sure because I've -- you guessed it -- never seen one.
doodle bugs -- Known officially as ant lions. They make conical pits about 2 cm deep in the sand (plentiful in most parts of Florida), and when ants stumble into them, they slip and slide to the bottom, where the doodle bug awaits them with open jaws.
fire ants -- I've been told that there are fire ants in Florida. All I know is that I've been bitten by ants enough times that I always wore sneakers and socks to mow my lawn no matter how hot it was.
banana spiders -- Huge yellow and brown mottled spiders that string webs between pairs of pine trees. Luckily, they're easy to see and usually don't go near houses.
termites -- A source of heartbreak and profound annoyance throughout the US, we have them in abundance down south. For a few years they marched out of the baseboards of my parents house every spring. An exterminator told us they were subterranean termites, as opposed to the dry wood variety, which means that while it's impossible to kill the queen because she lives underground, they typically do much less damage than the dry wood species. Also, tenting the house and fumigating is both unnecessary and futile for the subterranean ones. I knew people who got dry wood termites. They had to pack up all their dishes and anything else they didn't want gassed, move somewhere else for a few days, and then move back in.
caterpillars in "gum" trees -- There's a common kind of tree called a gum tree in my part of Florida. Note that these aren't the trees native to Australia with the aromatic nuts; they had maple-ish looking leaves and dropped seeds in spiky balls. Some years these trees would be infested with basketball-sized, cobwebby nests of caterpillars. One day my mother asked me to knock them out of the trees. I told her I had a better plan. I then spent one of the happiest hours of my life with a lighter and a can of WD-40 torching the little bastards -- without, I should add, starting a forest fire. The best part: when my biggest sister stormed out of the house in freakout mode, I got to tell her that I had Mom's permission.
fat green caterpillars with pink spikes on them -- Do Not Touch.
cicadas -- Some places in the northern US have cicadas that swarm every eleven years, or seventeen years, or some other odd number. Where I lived we had about the same (large) number every year. Just picture dozens of miniature chainsaws running every afternoon during the summer, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what their noise is like. They're not all bad, though: they like to park on the trunks of pine trees when they molt, and they leave their old skins well within the reach of small children. I used to collect them and (try to) give them to people as presents. One Christmas when I was home from college, I was washing glassware in my dad's laboratory. In one small room I found a gallon jar full of cicada skins. I'm ashamed to say I recoiled for a second; my school was up north and I'd grown unused to our little jointed friends. Then I dredged up a dim, fifteen-year-old memory of my father asking me to collect "bug skins" for him. He used them as a substrate for some experiments.
Bugs I Have Known
Living in north Florida for seventeen years will give you intimate familiarity with many species of arthropods. Some of them you love, some of them you fear, and some of them you just remember.
cockroaches -- What you've heard about Gulf coast roaches is true: they are much larger than the ones further north, and thanks to interbreeding with Asian roaches, they can fly. They always seemed to know exactly how far they had to fly to get just out of broom swat range. I have the utmost respect for them. Want to see how well I dance? Just put a cockroach on my thigh while I'm wearing shorts. Those things tickle. I noticed two distinct kinds of them: the regular, speedy, flying roach and what I heard called a "palmetto bug": a segmented-looking, slow-moving, flightless critter that I observed laying eggs on the grout in cinder block walls. Before you tell me that I've got my taxonomy wrong, my research tells me that nobody agrees on what a palmetto bug is. I've also observed that roaches just adore rotting wood piles. No, they don't just live in ill-kept houses. Oh by the way: cockroaches in the US have evolved quite a bit of pesticide resistance over the years.
lacewings -- Green flies with 1.5 cm bodies and 2 cm wings, not that commonly seen. What's really cool about them, though, are their eggs. They lay them in clusters of a few dozen, each egg on a stalk maybe 5 mm long, on a vertical surface. (I saw them on doors.) Up close, they look like a futuristic city out of the Jetsons or something.
stink bugs -- Bright green, 2 cm long and nearly that wide, slow-moving, and kind of cute. They look like beetles but I believe they're what entomologists call "true bugs". (That term just cracks me up.) Squash them at your own risk.
big grey bugs -- 4 cm (plus legs) grey and black mottled things shaped like elongated stink bugs. They're hideous and wicked-looking, but as far as I know they're harmless. They're not common, thankfully.
love bugs -- About 1 cm with orange heads and black everything else. They can fly, but they can't maneuver in the air that quickly. When they fly around in pairs joined at the abdomen, as they do when they swarm and mate every early spring (and in Florida that means February), they're even less maneuverable. Car washes do a boom business at that time of year. Scrubbing them off one's car by hand takes non-trivial amounts of elbow grease. I confess to spending many happy minutes as a child swatting these things; it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
scorpions -- My parents have a fireplace and a back yard that used to be full of pine trees. We children got to feed the fire. After we discovered our first small, surprisingly-unthreatening-looking scorpion in a log fetched from outdoors, we handled the wood very carefully.
dragonflies -- Green, blue, and the occasional yellow and black one. I loved watching them hover over tall grass. And best of all, they eat the larvae of...
mosquitoes -- Yeah, they're everywhere, but unless you're in Brazil, I bet Florida mosquitoes carry more strains of encephalitis than your mosquitoes. They never bothered my father, much to my irritation.
centipedes and millipedes -- We had 'em. They're neat.
mud daubers -- Mud daubers are a species of wasp that make their nests out of mud, not paper. These nests look like gray ocarinas stuck to the eaves.
no-see-ums -- An insect that I've -- wait for it -- never seen, but lives in sand dunes at beaches. When they bite it hurts like a mofo. These might be midges, but I'm not sure because I've -- you guessed it -- never seen one.
doodle bugs -- Known officially as ant lions. They make conical pits about 2 cm deep in the sand (plentiful in most parts of Florida), and when ants stumble into them, they slip and slide to the bottom, where the doodle bug awaits them with open jaws.
fire ants -- I've been told that there are fire ants in Florida. All I know is that I've been bitten by ants enough times that I always wore sneakers and socks to mow my lawn no matter how hot it was.
banana spiders -- Huge yellow and brown mottled spiders that string webs between pairs of pine trees. Luckily, they're easy to see and usually don't go near houses.
termites -- A source of heartbreak and profound annoyance throughout the US, we have them in abundance down south. For a few years they marched out of the baseboards of my parents house every spring. An exterminator told us they were subterranean termites, as opposed to the dry wood variety, which means that while it's impossible to kill the queen because she lives underground, they typically do much less damage than the dry wood species. Also, tenting the house and fumigating is both unnecessary and futile for the subterranean ones. I knew people who got dry wood termites. They had to pack up all their dishes and anything else they didn't want gassed, move somewhere else for a few days, and then move back in.
caterpillars in "gum" trees -- There's a common kind of tree called a gum tree in my part of Florida. Note that these aren't the trees native to Australia with the aromatic nuts; they had maple-ish looking leaves and dropped seeds in spiky balls. Some years these trees would be infested with basketball-sized, cobwebby nests of caterpillars. One day my mother asked me to knock them out of the trees. I told her I had a better plan. I then spent one of the happiest hours of my life with a lighter and a can of WD-40 torching the little bastards -- without, I should add, starting a forest fire. The best part: when my biggest sister stormed out of the house in freakout mode, I got to tell her that I had Mom's permission.
fat green caterpillars with pink spikes on them -- Do Not Touch.
cicadas -- Some places in the northern US have cicadas that swarm every eleven years, or seventeen years, or some other odd number. Where I lived we had about the same (large) number every year. Just picture dozens of miniature chainsaws running every afternoon during the summer, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what their noise is like. They're not all bad, though: they like to park on the trunks of pine trees when they molt, and they leave their old skins well within the reach of small children. I used to collect them and (try to) give them to people as presents. One Christmas when I was home from college, I was washing glassware in my dad's laboratory. In one small room I found a gallon jar full of cicada skins. I'm ashamed to say I recoiled for a second; my school was up north and I'd grown unused to our little jointed friends. Then I dredged up a dim, fifteen-year-old memory of my father asking me to collect "bug skins" for him. He used them as a substrate for some experiments.
no subject
I would add to the list: lightning bugs (or fireflies) and chiggers.
Lightning bugs I miss, chiggers not at all, those little bastards itch. I have actually had people in WA refuse to believe they existed, or believe that roaches could fly. As if I have nothing better to do with my spare time than make up stories about flying roaches and microscopic skin burrowing bugs.
(no subject)
no subject
Luckily, I wasn't here, then, and I won't be.
no subject
And the gum trees with spikey balls were probably sweetgums, aka Liquidumbar styraciflua, which also grow around here.
no subject
Re:
no subject
We don't have many around here, although oddly I've been noticing the occasional lightningbug. The one I hate worst is a fuzzy millipede. Imagine crossing a caterpillar with a millipede. They have lots and lots of long spidery legs and move *fast* and when you smack one it smashes into little pieces that all twitch and jerk as it dies. I *hate* those things.