Bugs in My Garden

A valley of houses and rice fields near my house.

Every year, along with the usual suspects, there are weirder and weirder bugs roaming around the environs of my house. Here are some of the specimens I saw over the course of two days.

Friday

New cocoon.

About a foot away was this caterpillar working hard to make itself a cocoon.

Saturday

The yearly stick bug sighting.

Friday's caterpillar was now encased in a fully-formed cocoon.

Shrivelled head.... and what appear to be legs.
My only guess is that the caterpillar molted its head and legs off as it formed its cocoon. This was under the new one, and another head/legs ensemble was under the other one.

Munching.
This spiky guy was busy munching my pansies.

As my pansies have long-ago peaked and commenced a leggy downward spiral, I finally decided to pull some of them out. This little beauty was attached to one of them. I saved it and it is currently propped up in the crook of one of my lavendar plants.
Look at the cool gold thorns!

These one-track minded buggers just can't stay away from my grapefruit tree.

Here's what happens when you try to scrape them off with a stick.
Sorry it's so blurry - shooting and scraping at the same time are somewhat difficult. You get the idea.

Grasshopper.
They look like little green junks sailing about the garden.

Aaaand then there's the house spiders.

This one was chilling above my spice "rack." Assuming it was the one from the other day, I thought it looked smaller than before, but blamed it on perspective.

However, once ANOTHER one appeared on the scene, I deduced that this was in fact NOT the same as before, instead a smaller-bodied version. This concerns me.

When I went back to check on its movement oh, an hour or two later, a second spider had come to dine on its abdomen. At this point I decided to check out exactly what kind of spiders I was dealing with. I had been totally cool with the one, trying to be ok with the appearance of more... until I read this guy's blog. Here is an excerpt:

Okay, it was getting crowded but I could live with two. I ignored them. A few days later, I found the second spider, curled up and dead, in my sock drawer. Hmm, this meant either a territory war or a wedding. I dumped the corpse and forgot about it. For a couple of weeks.

Then one evening, I arrive home and go to my bedroom to find the tatami floor--where I sleep, thank you--covered with skittering baby spiders. Now this was pushing my hospitality waaay too far. I spent a good part of the night picking up baby spiders with Kleenex and sweeping out the rest. From that point on, it was back to the slipper.

I do NOT need hundreds of baby spiders "skittering" around my bedroom. That scene was cool and all in Charlotte's Web, but that was outside, on a farm. So, out s/he went.

The captive.
You can imagine how my heart was pounding out of my chest by the time I got it in there.
I didn't even bother shaking it out of the container once I got it outside, lest it flip about and land somewhere on my person. I left that pitcher outside in the driveway all night.


This is what was left of the original (?) spider.
As if it wasn't creepy enough to pry its dangling head and shriveled abdomen off my wall with the Mukade Chopper, the strand of webbing that ended up connecting said abdomen to said Mukade Chopper contracted during transport, creating the illusion of life. Said spider head ended up on the floor. And then in the garbage can. Not much of a funeral. Sorry, dude.