Wildlife Viewing - With Your Child - Meet Interesting Creepy Crawlers

drawing of family With Your Child

Tour Your Own Yard to Meet Interesting Creepy Crawlers

When you send children outside on a mission to find something that creeps and crawls, they rarely return empty-handed. As adults, we sometimes rue their keen eyes and may have to hide some degree of fear or revulsion to muster up the appropriate excitement about the purse-like egg case of the cockroach, for example. Or the wriggling mosquito larvae scooped from the bucket of rainwater. What the kids find, of course, varies with the seasons. During the late summer and early fall, grab a magnifying glass and head out into your backyard to look for spiders, spittlebugs and sphinx moth caterpillars. Feel free to handle all but the spiders; they can bite and need to be left undisturbed in their carefully crafted webs, to await their next meal, while keeping the insect population in check.

You may find two large species of spiders that spin their webs across paths (about head height, unfortunately), or in gardens. These webs are designed to capture butterflies or other flying insects. The golden-silk spider (or banana spider) and the black-and-yellow argiope both have brightly colored, hefty-sized females, with bodies up to an 1 ½ inch long, and legs that extend beyond that. Males of these two species, sometimes seen on the periphery of the web, are much smaller and less colorful. Their webs are distinctive; the black-and-yellow argiope often builds a white, ladder-like structure in the web's center, while the silk of the golden-silk spider really is golden. It's also very strong - apply gentle pressure to one of the silken strands.

picture of golden-silk spider
Golden-silk Spider

photo of spittlebug
Spittlebug

Spittlebugs. Just the name is enough to pique the interest of any child; if you should find the pea-sized ball of white spittle-like froth, you've definitely engaged your audience.

As you walk across the lawn (grass is one favorite food of this insect) or run a butterfly net over the surface, you will probably find the adult two-lined spittlebug. It is less than half an inch long and is named for the two read bands on its brown-back wings. The adults are easily persuaded to jump and fly. They lay their eggs on the leaf stem near the ground. The eggs hatch into plain-looking nymphs that drink the plant sap, mix it with glandular fluid and whip it up into a froth.

The sticky bubbles offer protection from spiders and insect parasites. Scrape the bubbles away and observe the immature spittlebug. It will go through several molts and then emerge as an adult. If you can't find any in your yard, be thankful. A large population can damage your lawn. If you're concerned, call your County Extension Office.

Creatures such as sphinx moth caterpillars have no protection from insect parasites. These bright green larval moths can grow to be four inches long. Most have a prominent, but harmless hornlike projection protruding from the end of their abdomens. Their coloration ordinarily acts as an effective camouflage, but you may find some that appear to be carrying a conspicuous load of white cylinders. They turn out to be tiny cocoons made by wasps. Look at them with a hand lens and consider this: wasps' eggs were laid on the caterpillar's back. The grubs that hatched fed on the fleshy parts of the caterpillar. They bored out through the skin and spun silken cocoons which they attached to the caterpillar’s back. Needless to say, the caterpillars usually die.

Later, these wasps will cut a little lid in their silken cells and come out in the world to search for more caterpillars. Mother nature provides a myriad of ecological strategies to construct a complex food web!