Ever since I was a small boy who chanced upon the terrifying spectacle of a pair of mating beetles on the sidewalk in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I've maintained a horror-fan's fascination with the insect world. So naturally, I was intrigued when I spotted this creeper lurking near the entrance of our house on the Eastern Shore.
It's a buggy place out there for sure, particularly on a steamy midsummer night when the lights stay on inside and the windows become irresistible, luminous magnets for a teeming, insectoid phantasmagoria of unimaginable variety. Watch and you'll see everything from sub-tropical jumping spiders to fantastically woolly caterpillars to clambering katydids (which are apparently vicious predators).
But none so far had topped this freaking stranger. Which is about as weird as
that unidentified bastard I discovered in my shag carpet last year. So I was duly stoked at the opportunity for another cloud-sourcing experiment to uncover the nature of this little beastmaster. But for my own skills at internet searching, I quickly verified the identity of my discovery and thus spoiled the mystery while adding to my own trove of trivia.
Per the excellent website,
InsectIdentification.org, (a gem of the web, no doubt) this is a 'wheel bug' of the assassin bug family of 'true bugs' of the order
hemiptera and famous for the painful bite it inflicts with that absurdly large rostrum. Yikes!
