Creepy crawlies

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Beetle Preparing for Flight

Beetles have two sets of wings, front wings and hind wings. Beetles use only their hind wings to fly. The front wings, called elytra, cover and protect the delicate hinds wings. As a beetle prepares to fly, it opens its front wings to reveal its hind wings.

June Bug June bugs, also called June beetles, appear in the United States during May and June. This striped June bug is common in California.

Scorpion Scorpions are arachnids with poisonous stingers. They are mostly found in warm, dry climates such as the southwestern United States. The scorpion hunts at night and likes to eat spiders and insects.

Tick Ticks are arachnids that live on the skin of humans and other warm-blooded animals. They live by sucking the blood of animals and can transmit diseases.

Dust Mite Mites are tiny arachnids that live throughout the world. There are over 30,000 species (kinds) of mites. The dust mite, shown here, feeds on the dust produced by human and animal skin. Cricket

Crickets are insects known for leaping and chirping. To attract females, male crickets chirp by rubbing their front wings together.

Sweat Bee The sweat bee got its name because it is attracted to the salt in human sweat. It is one of the most common bees in North America.

Carpenter Bee Carpenter bees got their name because they tunnel through wood to make their nests. The chewing sounds these bees make can be heard several feet away!

Spiders Hatching A female spider wraps her eggs in a silk cocoon. The female may then abandon the cocoon or guard it from predators. Some females carry the cocoon with them until the eggs hatch

Weevil This beetle is a weevil. Weevils use their long, slender snouts to feed on plants. Weevils are destructive pests that attack many farm crops, such as cotton, wheat, and rice.

Funnel web spider The funnelweb spider makes a large funnel-shaped web. The spider usually sits at the back end of the web, lying in wait until a passing insect gets stuck in the sticky silk.

African Wolf Spider

The wolf spider belongs to a group of spiders called ground spiders, which hunt without using a web. Ground spiders live in burrows and lie in wait for prey to wander by—so that they can jump on them!

Worm (animal)

Many worms occur only in the sea. The acorn worm has features that suggest a relationship to the chordate lineage. The arrowworm is a peculiar creature that feeds on small animals in the open water and is often abundant. The peanut worm is a distant cousin of the earthworm, and the ribbon worm is related to flatworms. Tube worms belong to various groups and often feed with tentacles.

Some marine worms belong to a category of organisms that scientists call extremophiles because of their ability to withstand extreme conditions once thought to be uninhabitable. The Pompeii worm, for example, lives in scalding water at the mouths of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Pompeii worms keep one end of their two-inch bodies in scalding water at 80° C (176° F), while the other end extends to far cooler water, at 20° C (68° F). This represents a 60° C (108° F) one-end-to-the-other temperature gradient, a condition that no other known animal can regularly withstand. Scientists have also discovered worms more than 550 m (1800 ft) beneath the ocean surface living on and in a freezing crystalline network of methane gas and water, called methane hydrate, that has seeped from beneath the ocean floor.

Bumble bee Bumblebee, common name for any of a group of large, hairy, usually black-and-yellow, social bees. They are found primarily in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, often ranging farther north and higher in altitude than other bees. Fifty species of bumblebees are known in North America.

Cricket (insect)

Cricket (insect), common name for insects of a family characterized by the chirping courtship call of the male and by the needlelike or cylindrical ovipositor (organ at the end of the abdomen where eggs are deposited) of the female. The male produces his courtship song by rubbing a grooved ridge on the underside of one of his front wings against the sharp edge of the other front wing. True crickets include the familiar black field cricket and the house cricket.

Crickets have long antennae and hind legs adapted for jumping; organs for hearing are located on their front legs. Solitary by day, crickets remain in crevices, under rocks, or in shallow burrows dug in the soil, emerging at night to feed on plants. During breeding season, the male cricket attracts a female with his call, sometimes driving off other males that intrude on his territory. The call is distinctive in each species. The snowy tree cricket varies its chirping according to the air temperature. The temperature in Fahrenheit degrees can be estimated simply by adding 40 to the number of its chirps in 15 seconds. In most crickets, after mating the female uses her long, spearlike ovipositor to insert eggs into the soil or plant stems. The young, called nymphs, resemble the adults. They reach full size after 6 to 12 molts during which they shed their outer covering; as adults, they usually live six to eight weeks.

Ladybird Beetle

Ladybird Beetle or Ladybug, common name for any of about 6,000 species of brightly colored beetles found in temperate and tropical regions throughout the world. The ladybird beetle is less than 1.2 cm (less than 0.5 in) in maximum length. It has a nearly hemispherical body, rounded above and flat below, a small head, and short legs. Ladybird beetles are often red or orange above, spotted with black, white, or yellow. Some species are black, with or without spots. The larvae are also brilliantly colored, often blue, with stripes of orange or black.

All the ladybird beetles, with the exception of the members of one vegetation-eating genus, are carnivorous. In both the adult and larval stages they feed on insects harmful to plants, such as aphids and scale insects. Because of the help ladybird beetles render farmers in destroying agricultural pests, the beetles were popularly regarded in the Middle Ages as instruments of benevolent intervention by the Virgin Mary, whence the common name ladybird.

A common North American species of ladybird beetle, the nine-spotted ladybug beetle, is orange above, spotted with black. Adults of the two-spotted ladybug beetle often hibernate in houses during winter. This beetle is orange above, with a single large black spot on each elytron (protective outer wing). The convergent ladybug beetle is a western American species, the adults of which commonly swarm in large numbers on mountain peaks. These swarms are collected by western agricultural firms and are distributed to farmers for aphid control. The vedalia, an Australian species, has been imported into California to fight the cottony-cushion scale insect, which attacks citrus trees.

Chorus Frog

Chorus Frog, common name for any of seven species of small, mostly terrestrial members of the tree frog family. The western chorus frog and Strecker's chorus frog are representative species. These stout-bodied frogs have smaller toe pads and less foot webbing than most tree frogs. Body coloring may be gray, brown, or light green, interrupted by irregular spots and stripes. Chorus frogs occur over much of the eastern United States and southern Canada in habitats ranging from upland forests to prairies. Adults reach 2 to 4 cm (0.75 to 1.6 in) in length. Females are larger than males. Male chorus frogs have dark, wrinkly throat skin—the vocal pouch used to produce their mating calls. Some chorus frogs make a sound like that of a finger running over the small teeth of a plastic pocket comb.

Chorus frogs mate in the winter or early spring, usually in shallow water. During mating season they are rarely seen away from their breeding sites. At other times of the year they are concealed in vegetation or are buried in the ground. They feed on small insects.

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