Post your Insect shots
- Thread starter jdeg
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Square headed wasp, one of the Trypoxylon species. They are ground spider hunters. Getting fairly rare here due to habitat loss. Nice
Some sort of Walking Stick insect
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From:
David G. Cook[FONT="]Wildlife Biologist/Invertebrate Conservation Coordinator[/FONT]
[FONT="]Wildlife Diversity Conservation Section[/FONT]
[FONT="]Division of Habitat and Species Conservation[/FONT]
[FONT="]Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission[/FONT]
This photo is of a praying mantis, not a walking stick, although the resemblance is uncanny! Praying mantids have raptorial (grabbing) front legs to help them secure and eat animal prey, whereas walking sticks don’t (and eat vegetation). The mantid in your photo looks like a grass-like mantid (AKA American grass mantid), Thesprotia graminis, known from the southeastern US. Here’s a good article about this species (https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN123500.pdf), plus additional photos (https://bugguide.net/node/view/4823).
Anyone know what type of insect this is?
[FONT="][FONT="]From:[/FONT]
David G. Cook
Wildlife Biologist/Invertebrate Conservation Coordinator
Wildlife Diversity Conservation Section
Division of Habitat and Species Conservation
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
I concur that it looks very much like a digger wasp in the genus Sphex. Id oubt it’s S. funerarius, as you proposed, since that species is native to Europe and Asia. However, there are other Sphex species known from Florida to choose from. I can’t tell if the entire abdomen of the wasp you saw was red, or if starts red and ends in black. If all red, your choice might be limited to Sphexhabenus (https://bugguide.net/node/view/31732/bgimage). If red and black, your choices seem to include S. ichneumoneus (https://bugguide.net/node/view/414/bgimage),S. jamaicensis (https://bugguide.net/node/view/56796/bgimage),and S. dorsalis (https://bugguide.net/node/view/1318208/bgimage). FYI, here’s an entertaining account of Sphexichneumoneus: https://floridawildlifegardentails.wordpress.com/tag/sphex-ichneumoneus/. I hope this information is useful to you! [/FONT]
