Spartocera fusca

This large and strikingly marked leaf-footed bug (family Coreidae) is Spartocera fusca. The lack of common name is pretty criminal for this strikingly marked orange and black species that’s almost 3 cm long. S. fusca is native to “Mexico, the southwestern United States, and Florida”, because everything makes its way to Florida eventually. It eats…

White-Spotted Arvelius

This sad-eyed little green and yellow alien is a white-spotted arvelius, or tomato stink bug, Arvelius albopunctatus. It’s honestly a little spectacular — about 2cm long, brilliant green, with yellow “shoulders” yellow and black spots, and a black striped face — which makes it sad that it has Wikipedia Stub Syndrome (or, actually, doesn’t even…

Neotropical red-shouldered stink bug

This handsome little green stink bug, with its characteristic red stripe across the top of the scutellum and another red stripe down the snout, is the neotropical red-shouldered stink bug (or red-shouldered stink bug), Thyanta perditor. It’s another Wikipedia stub syndrome victim, alas; it lives in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean and…

Homaemus proteus

Meet one of five species of shield-backed bugs in the genus Homaemus: this is Homaemus proteus, notable for those two lovely spots on its scutellum (although not all individuals have the spots, and some have much bigger spots — I wonder if this might be a nymph rather than a color morph, but this is…

Harmostes Serratus

Harmostes serratus is distinguished from other North American species in the genus by the toothed (serrated) edges of the pronotum (the bit behind the head). This little dude is in the family Rhopalidae, known as “scentless plant bugs” because, although these insects look like and are (distantly) related to stink bugs, they are not actually…

Black Stink Bug

This is the black stink bug, Proxys punctulatus, a relatively benign insect found over most of the southern US and down into the Carribbean. It’s about 12mm long, black, with spotted black and cream legs, with a long, pointy face, banded antennae, and a black body with a single white spot in the middle. Like…

Leaf-Footed Bug

This is probably an adult female leaf-footed bug (Acanthocephala declivis) — this species is named for the exaggerated “femurs” on its back legs, and the femurs are larger in the male, with impressive spikes. She’s about an inch and a half long, not including her antennae. Leaf-footed bugs are named after the “leafy” extensions of…