11 July 2008

What's That Bug?

We were spending the evening watering our various plants in the backyard. I checked my compost bin and saw that it was very dry. While I was doing this, the girls joined me. Tiffany looked in and saw several little bugs running around. Of course, you know that compost bins are full of bugs of all sorts. I know this, too. Lately, I've seen a lot of ants, but it's not uncommon to see pill bugs and earwigs, so that's what I expected when she asked, "What's that bug?" Well, it obviously wasn't any of those afore mentioned bugs, but it was really hard to get a good look at. They liked the dark, so if I moved a piece of compost, I saw maybe a hundred of them, but they scattered and disappeared deeper into the compost, that it was so hard to get a good look at them. Finally one of them got caught in an eggshell. Despite their speed, it couldn't climb up the smooth sides of the shell, so I caught one!


It's really dusty. The picture really doesn't look like I remember it looking. Funny thing about pictures. I remember it being blacker and skinnier. Of course it was moving really fast. It was tough to get it to sit still for a picture.

Anyhow, I went searching on the web for this strange creature. I knew it was some sort of larvae, so that helped. But what really helped was running into a wonderful website called What's That Bug? I'm not sure I've figured out what it is, but I think it is the larvae of a carpet beetle. I sent the picture to the administrator of that site to ask, so I may yet find out definitively what the bugs are. I then spent 2 hours looking at bugs on the website. It was way cool.

1 comment:

Amber said...

I'm going to have to disagree. That is gross. I am not much of a bug lover, sorry! But Cora would have thought it was awesome!