This blog provides an informal forum for terrestrial invertebrate watchers to post recent sightings of interesting observations in the southern Vancouver Island region. Please send your sightings by email to Jeremy Tatum (tatumjb352@gmail.com). Be sure to include your name, phone number, the species name (common or scientific) of the invertebrate you saw, location, date, and number of individuals. If you have a photograph you are willing to share, please send it along. Click on the title above for an index of past sightings.The index is updated most days.

2024 November 2

2024 November 2

   Jeremy Tatum writes that several European Winter Moths were at his Saanich apartment building this morning.  The wing patterns of some Winter Moths are rather bland and featureless (see, for example, October 18); the one below is rather well marked:

 

Winter Moth Operophtera brumata (Lep.: Geometridae)   Jeremy Tatum

 

Here are six more from Ian Cooper, October 31.

The first is a very tiny insect, almost certainly a hymenopterous parasitic wasp, which spends its entire immature stages growing inside the egg of another insect, possibly in company with several brothers and sisters.  This one may be parasitoidal in the eggs of a bug, and is possibly Trissolcus

 

Possibly Trissolcus sp. (Hym.: Scelionidae – Telenomoninae)  Ian Cooper


Male Linyphiid spider (Ara.: Linyphiidae)   Ian Cooper

Rugathodes sexpunctatus  (Ara.: Theridiidae)  Ian Cooper

 

Snail-eating Beetle – Scaphinotus angusticollis (Col.: Carabidae)  Ian Cooper

Globose springtail, Dicyrtomina ornata f. saundersi (Collembola – Symphypleona – Dicyrtomidae)
Ian Cooper


Deroceras invadens
  (Pul.: Agriolimacidae)  Ian Cooper