Once Again I Have Nothing of Interest To Say, So Please Enjoy These Pictures of Huge Bugs Crawling on My Window Screens
Posted on August 23, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 38 Comments
In case you’re wondering, unless you’re viewing these on a monitor larger than 24 inches diagonally, these pictures are either at or smaller than life size. Yeah, they were big’uns. Fortunately, crawling on the outside of the screen as opposed to the inside.
My mom kills every mantis she sees now, after having seen one sit on her hummingbird feeder and snatch hummingbirds out of the air and eat them.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
mantises are wonderful…they prey on insects!
Patrick
@1
You have bugs that eat birds! Jeez. Now I get why you have screens. Saw them on TV and assumed Americans were a bit picky about bluebottles!
Oh, WHOA, those are huge. *shudder* But in a good way.
I wonder what the cats’ response is. My cats used to get crazy about insects crawling on the other side of a glass window – and be each time very, very disappointed.
The stick insect is completely harmless to people – it’s a vegetarian. The preying mantis, on the other pedipalp, is mucho-cool. They eat a lot of bad bugs, so I buy mantis egg sacks for my yard every couple of years.
I’d love to have one that big in my yard! I could even hope that Ms. Mantis eats that nasty male Anna’s Hummingbird that chases all the other birds from the nectar feeder.
I think that, in Ohio, it’s against the law to move a Preying Mantis, let along kill one..Be warned. I have a lovely “Assassin Bug” on my basil, I have named her Natasha.
My cat likes to box with praying mantises. It’s just about the most adorable thing you could imagine.
Boredom has clearly set it. Time to get cracking on another book in the Android’s Dream universe.
Pretty please? With bacon on it?
Thanks to “A Bug’s Life”, I won’t ever be able to look at a picture of a stick-bug again without hearing David Hyde-Pierce’s voice.
You have walking sticks *and* mantises in Ohio?
OK, now I understand why you live there.
They just want to study your behaviors prior to reporting to the mothership and scrambling the invasion fleet.
“They just want to study your behaviors prior to reporting to the mothership and scrambling the invasion fleet.”
Not to worry, Kodi will save us.
We don’t get mantises that big here in New Zealand, but we have some equally impressive stick insects. I remember one morning many years ago seeing my cat on the doorstep batting at a massive stick insect, which was batting right back at her, it’s little arms (legs?) boxing away. A couple of hours later when I came bag there were only legs remaining. Stick insect legs, obviously. Although I think for a while it was a fairly even match!
Saw my first mantis in years just a few das ago – not nearly that big, though.
Nice stick bug. I get mantises in my backyard all the time, but I haven’t seen a stick bug in several years.
Those bugs are big enough to tape bacon to.
That is one awesome mantis (I’m a little surprised that no one has referenced the movie)–I don’t recall seeing any that large. I have seen stick bugs here in Texas that were almost six inches long, and it does make you jump a bit when a branch suddenly moves and starts to rock back and forth.
We have another insect down her called the crane fly–it looks like a mosquito on steroids. The body can be up to 1.5 inches long and the spread of the incredibly spindly legs can exceed six inches. When I was a kid, I enjoyed telling cousins from up north that it was a Texas-sized mosquito–“when they bite you, your whole arm goes numb”. It sent more than one kid running and screaming.
Yeah, kids can be mean, but I always told them the truth after the initial fright–that crane flies can’t bite and die with a day or two.
That mantis looks like something Johnny Rico would hang over his mantlepiece. Very cool indeed :)
I’ve got a sojourn in New Mexico coming up, and have been gleefully reading up on the flora and fauna. Two-inch long wasps that hunt tarantulas. That actually hunt spiders the size of your hand, for the love o’gh0d. Figure the damn thing must make a sound like a Dornier.
#20, Mark HB. Google “Giant Japanese Hornet.” They give me fear in great quantity…
I grew up in SW Ohio, not far from where JS lives. I remember catching those huge mantises on our yew shrubs. They’d just sit on me, but if I put a finger near them they’d grab it in their pincers and try to chew. Never broke the skin though and I found it more amusing than not. That’s a 10 year old boy for you…
I live in Arizona now – we have a few mantises here, but none so big as those in Ohio.
I never saw a walking stick though…
#21, JimR…. oh holy Cripes. Really. This is the blighter to which I alluded:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk_wasp
And I note that aside from it’s Stealth paint-job, it’s also significantly less of a mankilling bastard, and it’s sting doesn’t include a “Hey, Sting This Mook Guys!” beacon. Gahhhh!
John Scalzi has nothing to say?
Hell hath frozen over!
I’d keep an eye on the holes in that bottom screen.
Brad:
I didn’t say I had nothing to say. Just nothing of interest.
Please Mr. Scalzi,
Do you have any recommendations for those of us who have neither anything to say, nor any ginormous bugs on our screens? Frankly, sir, I’m at a loss.
You could always make giant origami bugs.
Your brain’s like a swiss-army knife, Scalzi. And by that I don’t necessarily mean that you’ve lost the little tweezers.
I was about to make the obligitory Starship Troopers reference but I see that MarkHb@20 has beaten me to it. Nice!
That Mantis picture needs some lolcats treatment as I immediately thought he looked as though he was saying “I R teh peepin Toms”
JS @ 26: LMAO!
And now I see that you live in the empire of T’ang Lang. :)
@Brandon: Nah, he’s saying “I can haz bacon-kitteh?”
By the way, Mr. Scalzi has a junior praying mantis. While deployed to a tiny East African city so nice they named it twice (now a major CENTCOM base), I came across a mantis close to a foot long (give or take a few inches). I left it alone in the hope he would snag some of those dang malaria-carrying skeeters.
You realize, of course, that most praying mantises are hypocrites.
American Bugs are lame.
I bet none of those are even poisionous. Im mean how do you teach children a proper respect for the outdoors if that out doors is in danger of killing them.
You guys have it lucky!
Australian Bugs are FTW.
Hi, I have just found your blog and read a little. I am new to this and was looking round to see what other people do on their blogs. I was attracted by your catchy titles. I loved the picture of the “bugs” on the windscreen. If my camera was working, I would send you a photo of the ones I have in my dried bug collection that got me 99% as an assignment. It is awesome and I am very proud of it but I had to kill a few bugs. Oh well…..
Sorry, I meant to say the window screen