Category Archives: Prairie Insects

Photo of the Week – June 24, 2011

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Soldier beetles are often mistaken for lightning bugs but are actually predatory insects.  The spend a lot of time on flowers, and will eat pollen and nectar – and do some inadvertent pollination in the process – but their main food source is other insects, including aphids.

Soldier beetle on wild garlic (Allium canadense). Aurora, Nebraska.

Soldier beetles are a very common species in prairies and in town.  Here in Aurora, we see sometimes them in large numbers when linden trees are blooming.  This one was in my native prairie garden, hanging out on wild garlic (onion) flowers.

Crab Spider and Poppy Mallow

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I have a hard time walking past purple poppy mallow when I’ve got my camera in hand.  I have plenty of photos of the flower already, and I’m not sure there are many angles I haven’t explored (see last week’s post).  But it’s so darn attractive!

This week I began noticing how many of the flowers had crab spiders lurking around on them.  Although some crab spider species can change colors from white to yellow and back, that ability doesn’t do much to help spiders sitting on bright magenta flowers…  Regardless, there they were – maybe one per 10 flowers I looked at. 

Crab spider on purple poppy mallow. Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

The day I photographed this one, the light was a nice bright overcast (light diffuse clouds), but the spider kept moving to the opposite side of the flower every time I got the tripod set up.  (Fortunately, no one besides the bald eagle across the creek was around to watch me.)  Finally, I got the shot by waving my hand around the other side of the flower so the spider would scoot away from my hand (and into the frame of the photo).  I only got a shot or two squeezed off before it figured out my ruse and went INSIDE the flower where I didn’t have any chance of photographing it…

If you’re interested, you can read more about crab spiders in my NEBRASKAland magazine article here: CrabSpider-July2009 and about spiders in general in another article here:Spiders-AugSept2010.