I bought one and so should you #bugsky

A beautiful beetle from July in Arizona, Pasimachus sp., I'd guess P. viridans. It's a ground beetle, family Carabidae; those in this genus are sometimes called "warrior beetles," I'd guess in honor of the impressive bitey bits. They're fast-running predators of other less-fast bugs. 🐙🌿 #Bugsky

💙 First the Dodgers and now this - I do like blue

A chunk of sun dog just now as I was driving home 🌈🌞🐕

beautiful foggy morning for spider webs, here from my backyard in San Diego. f 2.8, Eriogonum in bg ..

Green Lynx Spider (Peucetia viridans), N Carolina. These spiders are ambush predators that don't catch prey in a web - but look closely and you'll see that she's spun a silk scaffold to help her cling to the leaf (an especially good idea given that she's on a carnivorous pitcher plant). 🐙🌿 #bugsky

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For the last day of #Arachtober, here's a favorite from a few years ago. It's not a posed shot. We'd put a decorative pumpkin by our front door a couple of weeks earlier, and the day before Halloween, I found that a black widow spider had made her home in the hollow space under the pumpkin. 🕷️🎃 🐙🌿

More #Arachtober spider goodness

What a gorgeous spider! #Arachtober 🐺🕷️

Arthropod Photo of the Week: October 29, 2025 Net-casting spider Asianopis sp. Araneae: Deinopidae By Dennis Botterbusch, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany #arthropodPOTW

White-lined Sphinx Moth (Hyles lineata), at night in the Arizona desert. These common, fast, fuzzy-faced, hummingbird-like moths are found all over North and Central America, in many different habitats, and can be seen hovering in front of flowers almost any time of day or night. 🐙🌿 #Bugsky

Aspens, Montana

Arachnid eating another arachnid - this tiny (3 mm.) jumping spider, a female Anasaitis canalis in Costa Rica, is munching on a pseudoscorpion (if you zoom in, you can see one of its claws hanging down). Pseudoscorpions look like super-tiny regular scorpions, but have no tail. 🐙🌿 #Arachtober

Got texts last night from two of my adult children who each, without consulting the other, had created spider costumes for themselves to go to Halloween parties. As a parent, I couldn't be more proud. (This spider is a tiny Tetragnatha sp., I think, posed above Halloween-colored leaves.) 🐙🌿🕷️🕷️

It's not really bug season anymore here in Montana, but bumblebees are among the most cold-tolerant of all insects, so I've spotted several on the very few flowers still to be found. These bees can vibrate their wing muscles and raise their body temperature above the ambient temp. 🐙🌿 #BugSky

Snack time (young mule deer buck, Montana) 📷 🦊🌿

🐙🌿 An interesting find yesterday - I saw this small moth (about pantry-moth size) running quickly on an old aspen. It didn't seem to want to fly away, even if I touched it, but instead preferred to run and then freeze inside dark crevices in the tree bark. A cool detail that I only noticed later--

October sunrise, Montana 📷

Friday Flyday - there aren't many bug restaurants still open this time of year in Montana, but I found this small (a third the size of a housefly), long-beaked pollinator still eking out a living. 🐙🌿🪰🌼

An interesting point of view of a slow river yesterday; at first it seems to be a deep pool with a rock at the very bottom, but in fact the whole image is at the same shallow water depth of only a couple of feet; I was standing high on a steep bank, looking almost straight down. (Montana) 📷

I found a decapitated mummy head! Okay, it's just an empty bald-faced hornet nest. Having a nest by your front door could be concerning (although not as concerning as a mummy head), but this was in the woods. These wasps are incredible architects and important predators of other insects. #bugsky 🐙🌿

Fallen Aspen Leaf, Montana. Shot with a 1964 50mm lens, aperture wide open at f/1.4, and mounted with an adapter to my digital camera. This old lens has no coatings to reduce flare, so you get all kinds of cool and weird reflections, especially shooting almost directly at the sun like this. 📷

🍊Video's up! Here's 15 minutes of Paraphidippus aurantius footage, thoughts, and questions: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRByaUcKSgU featuring courtship behavior, silk production, possible mate-guarding, cannibalism and more! #arachtober

In which our intrepid photographer narrowly escaped being murdered by driver ants in Kibale Forest, Uganda.

Arthropod Photo of the Week: October 22, 2025 Jagged ambush bug Phymata sp. Hemiptera: Reduviidae By Tom Astle (@tjalamont.bsky.social), Montana, USA #arthropodPOTW

🦂 Scorpions? Not quite. Take a closer look into #NHMLA's Entomology collection and learn more about false scorpions with resident Assistant Curator of Entomology, Rodrigo Ruedas!

Here's an awesome critter for #Arachtober, a harvestman/harvester/daddy longlegs (order Opiliones). It's an arachnid that's not a spider; they don't produce venom or silk, and unlike most arachnids, can swallow chunks of solid food. This gorgeous burgundy individual was in Costa Rica. 🐙🌿 #Bugsky

Queen of the Night cactus flower. I hadn’t noticed how much it’s grown - I need to trellis the plant more so the flowers don’t open on the ground.

It’s always nice to pick up new followers, but recently many have been 0-follower accounts with no posts and often no bio. I assume most of these are bots? I use a few block lists, but wish there were one for this issue. Blocking each one individually is more time consuming than it’s worth.

Here is your Sunday Spider, I think a Psecas chapoda jumping spider. From what I've read, they have a mutualistic relationship with a bromeliad, Bromelia balansae. The spiders live exclusively among the plant's spiny rosettes; in turn their debris/droppings feed the plant. #Arachtober #Bugsky 🌿🐙

A wee native bee tiptoeing on a lupine flower last spring in Montana. Excellent pollen pants. 🐙🌿 #Bugsky

I mean, Ohtani ⚾️

White-jawed Jumping spider hanging out on a goldenrod bud. This fuzzy friend is native to eastern North America. (Hentzia mitrata) #Arachtober

WE GOT COCKROACHES. Learn to love them -- I promise -- with #Blattodeologist Dr. Dominic Evangelista. STUNNING emerald green ones, glowing roaches, teeny ones that ride flying ants, clean-up helpers, and medical mysteries. They just want love & garbage. 🖤 www.alieward.com/ologies/blat...

🧵🐙🌿 Happy #Arachtober - here's an amazing arachnid (this one was in Montana) often called a camel spider or wind scorpion. It's not a spider or a scorpion - it's in its own order, Solifugae. They don't produce venom or silk. They are super interesting. Want a closer look? Sure you do. First, all--

The Morphos are common here at @casabentbill.bsky.social #CostaRica, as I see them flitting through the garden every day. But they rarely cooperate for photos. So this was a rare treat this morning as this beauty spent a few minutes soaking up the early sun. #Butterflies #lepidoptera #nature

And now, for something completely different (day after a mid-May snowstorm, Montana) 📷

Here is your Wednesday Weevil, Watching Warily. Seen at night in a Costa Rican rainforest. Love the giant eyes on this little nugget of a beetle. 🐙🌿 🕶️

Velvet Ants are not ants, but solitary wasps. Only males fly; females like this one are wingless. They run almost nonstop, looking for burrows of other ground-nesting wasps and bees, which they parasitize. They can sting but are not aggressive. She was small, under 1 cm. Pryor Mountains, Montana 🐙🌿

For Indigenous People's Day, here's a spear/arrow point from the Mojave Desert. The kind of photography I do means I spend a lot of time staring at the ground, so a stone that didn't quite match stood out. You can see where it's been knapped; the people who lived here historically were the Nuwä.

Do any fungi folks know what these little gumdrop-looking globes are? Each one was under a millimeter in diameter. I found them on the underside of a fallen, decaying Joshua tree branch in the Mojave Desert. 🍄

For #Arachtober, here is a spider that's not a spider. It's Petrophila jaliscalis, a jumping-spider-mimicking moth - see the face-on spider pattern, with orange legs and sparkly dark eyes? I love finding these - I think they breed in my small goldfish pond, because the caterpillars are aquatic. 🌿🐙

an amazing Habronattus jumping spider known only from a single spring in the bottom of an impossibly isolated and lonely desert valley

A phone pic of Ms Mantis this morning in my garden. She’s still catching bugs, but you can see by the necrotic black area on her foreleg that her season is winding down. I’m sure she’s laid an egg case or two, and hopefully she’ll have time to lay at least one more. 🐙🌿

Here is your Saturday Spider, a fluffy Aphonopelma sp. tarantula in southeastern Arizona. They're usually on the ground, but this one climbed about a foot up into a spindly dry shrub. I thought B&W suited this portrait. #Arachtober 🌿🐙🕷️

🧵1/10 @sophiesaurus98.bsky.social posted a great thread the other day about a beloved childhood dinosaur book and her young ideas about it. I thought I'd chime in with my own. I got this book for my 5th birthday in 1965(!) It was written by Jane Werner Watson (author of a zillion Golden Books) and--

Big fan of this weevil's color scheme, pointy snoot, and huge feet! www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Throwback pic from October '21 of a female Golden Orb Weaver (Trichonephila clavipes) at Green Swamp Preserve, NC. The background shows a hint of the habitat, longleaf pine savanna. I love this shot because it reminds me of a gorgeous day; I saw only one other person in six hours. #Arachtober 🌿🐙📷