It's Leafhopper Season

Fall is the time when many kinds of true bugs, in the order Hemiptera, reach peak abundance, before going into hiding for the winter. This includes stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, plant bugs, aphids, whiteflies, psyllids, and leafhoppers. If you haven’t looked closely at leafhoppers, there is a great deal you are missing.

A leafhopper in the genus Erythroneura on a redbud leaf.

Leafhoppers use piercing-sucking mouthparts to feed on plant sap. It isn’t a nutritious diet, so they imbibe great quantities, and excrete a copious amount of sugary, sticky, liquid waste. Some leafhoppers are known as sharpshooters, in part because they eject their waste like a squirt gun fires water. This action keeps their waste from gumming up their own bodies, and also works to not draw the attention of potential predators and parasitoids that could track them by their excrement.

Red-banded Leafhopper at our porch light at night.

Versute Sharpshooter at our front porch light at night.

How to Identify a Leafhopper

There are at least 3,000 members of the family Cicadellidae found north of Mexico, and over 22,000 globally. More are likely to be separated from existing species by molecular DNA analysis. Leafhoppers range in size from two to thirty millimeters in length. Most of the diversity occurs in the range under five millimeters.

A pair of Erythroneura bistrata under a redbud leaf.

These are streamlined insects, usually with a narrow body form. The hind legs are long, built for jumping, and there are two rows of many spines on those hind legs. Spittlebugs and planthoppers do not have those rows of spines. The antennae are relatively sort, consisting of hair-like filaments. In most views, without magnification, they appear to have no antennae at all.

Tylozygus bifidus attracted to a blacklight at night in our back yard.

Colorful!

Break out your magnifiers, you are gonna wanna see this. Leafhoppers can be shockingly beautiful, with striking patterns of ivory and red, or blue and red, in stripes or bands, or spotted. At this time of year, species that are normally green may take on the hues of autumn foliage, the better to camouflage themselves. There is almost no end to the “fashion spectrum” for leafhoppers.

Gyponana octolineata that was attracted to a mercury vapor light at night.

You cannot rely on color patterns alone to differentiate species. Newly-minted adults will be paler, even lacking markings initially until pigments manifest and the exoskeleton hardens after that final molt. There may be some sexual dimorphism expressed as differences in color between males and females. There is no doubt individual variation, too.

Erythroneura fraxa, a redbud specialist, on its host plant.

How to Find Leafhoppers

Right now, where we are in northeast Kansas, you cannot avoid leafhoppers. They are in the air, in your lawn, on foliage (especially the underside of leaves), and landing briefly on buildings, fences, or you. Turn on your porch light at night, and you will see a diversity of them flying in.

Empoasca sp. (maybe Potato Leafhopper), green, and genus Hymetta, white, at our front porch light at night.

Try taking photos with a camera or phone that has good macro capabilities. The images show here were taken by me with a Canon PowerShot SX70 camera, one of the bridge cameras or “superzooms” that allow the casual photographer to take a variety of images without changing lenses. Approach the insect slowly. Many will leap, or take flight, but eventually you will have a cooperative specimen.

Illinois Grape Leafhopper on redbud leaf.

Are They Pests?

Whether leafhoppers are pests depends on who you ask, and maybe when you ask. Some leafhoppers, if they alight on you, will probe with their mouthparts, and it is surprisingly painful, albeit briefly, and in an annoying, not agonizing, way. In natural ecosystems, native leafhoppers are part of the food web. In agricultural systems, they can be problematic.

Japanese Maple Leafhopper at blacklight at night.

Some species are vectors of plant viruses that can wreak havoc on crops. Others transmit bacterial diseases. The mechanical and chemical aspects of their normal feeding of course results in some damage to the plant. On leaves, heavy feeding can result in white or yellow stippling where their mouthparts have entered, and chlorophyl has been extracted.

Gray Lawn Leafhopper is abundant most everywhere.

Females insert their eggs into living plant tissue, which also causes damage. Leafhoppers have a general life cycle that includes about five immature instars, an instar being the interval between molts. The young are called nymphs, and they gradually get larger over time. The final molt results in the adult insect. Adults of most species have wings and fly well.

A tiny Dikrella maculata at our front porch light at night.

How Your Observations Help Scientists

By sharing your photos on platforms like iNaturalist and Buggide.net, you can help scientists learn more about the distribution, host plants, seasonal presence, and other attributes of leafhoppers. You may add new county records, or state or provincial records, or even detect a recently-arrived leafhopper of foreign origin. In any event, enjoy the remarkable beauty of these tiny creatures.

Check out my observations on iNat, and my Flickr album for inspiration.

"That's all, folks!"Typical behavior, dodging to the opposite side of foliage.

Happy International Jumping Spider Day

I can hardly believe we are one third of the way through October already, but at least we can celebrate International Jumping Spider Day on October 10. This is the ninth anniversary of the "holiday," which was founded by Shaham Tamir, a macrophotographer, in 2017. It is also known as National Jumping Spider Appreciation Day.

A male White-jawed Jumping Spider, Hentzia mitrata, from April of this year, Wyandotte County Lake Park, Kansas.

The annual #Arachtober event is also in progress on social media, and the photosharing site Flickr, where it originated. I am privileged to know both of the Arachtober founders, Joseph Connors and Ashley Bradford. As the name implies, Arachtober honors not only spiders, but mites, scorpions, harvestmen, and all other arachnids.

An immature female Golden Jumping Spider, Paraphidippus aurantius, has taken down a soldier beetle in our Leavenworth, Kansas back yard, in June.

Jumping spiders have become wildly popular in both the pet trade, and in pop culture in recent years. It is an encouraging example of how attitudes towards spiders can be changed through creative and, well, relentless, approaches. It helps that the members of the spider family Salticidae are often fuzzy, with one pair of very large, forward-facing eyes that give them a much more endearing appearance than most other spiders. There are now jumping spider plush toys.

Studio portrait of a male Bold Jumper, Phidippus audax, from our back yard in Leavenworth, Kansas, in May of this year.

Salticids are also the subject of research in many disciplines, especially animal behavior. Some species, such as those in the tropical genus Portia, exhibit the ability to plot their attacks on prey to avoid detection by their intended victim. Courtship behavior in jumping spiders is also complex. Males and females are frequently sexually dimorphic, to the degree that the sexes can be mistaken for different species.

This tiny, adult male Attinella concolor, was the first of its kind I had ever seen. June of this year, Leavenworth, Kansas.

Jumping spiders are the most diverse family of spiders, with a collectively global distribution, save for Antarctica, and are among the easiest spiders to find. They hunt on foot, without the aid of a web, but deposit a silken dragline for safely returning from a missed jump.

You can probably find one hunting on the exterior of your house right now. Approach slowly, as they have keen eyesight and are exceptional at detecting motion. I have had many a jumping spider escape beneath the siding of our home because I moved a little too fast. The underside of leaves, on tree trunks, and on the ground are other places to search for them. Sometimes they stray indoors, too.

There are some jaw-dropping ant mimics among the jumping spiders, like this male Synemosyna formica that I found on the outside of a neighbor's house here in Leavenworth, Kansas in early May.

Since Heidi and I were on a road trip to and from Tucson, Arizona at the start of the month, I have decided to participate in Arachtober using images from my iPhone 14, much as I did for National Moth Week this year. Spiders are a challenging subject for even those who are most accomplished at phone photography, so my results may be....mixed.

Phone pic of a female Green Lynx Spider, with American Snout butterfly prey, and her egg sac at right. Madera Canyon, Arizona, last week.

Please leave a comment telling us how you celebrate Jumping Spider Day, and/or Arachtober. Did you have a phobia that you were able to overcome? Do you make art involving arachnids? Maybe you have a pet spider? While I do not accept unsolicited images here, you are welcome to include a link to images you have elsewhere. Enjoy the rest of the month!

Did I Mention My YouTube Channel?

This post is not an advertisement. I am trying to put a positive spin on news I received from Blogger, the Google host for this blog. I received an email recently announcing that they will be taking down certain videos from blog posts, including a whopping twenty-one (21) of mine. This will render about twelve of my blog posts essentially useless, until I can reload the videos in a different manner. If I can figure out how to do that. This is the latest in a long series of joy-sucking events affecting this blog.

The affected posts are old, especially by evolving digital standards, and I suspect that the Blogger platform simply stopped supporting the video format I was using, and/or created a way to load videos separate from images. I’m going to try and insert a video here from my YouTube channel, to see if that works.

This video plays for me, hopefully for you, too. A flower fly, genus Eristalis, grooming itself.

Ideally, I want to update the affected blog posts, but, failing that, I will take them down. Turns out the internet is more ephemeral than we think it is anyway. Many websites come and go, on the whims of their creators, as a result in changes in technology, and for other reasons.

That reminds me of another evolutionary episode in my writing career. Several years ago, I was paid to write educational and topical posts for the Insectlopedia web page, an online service for After Bite® products from Tender Corporation. Tender Corp was subsequently bought out by Adventure Ready Brands in June, 2020, and all communication ceased. Emails went unanswered, and eventually they removed all the posts I had written, or most of them.

My articles for Insectlopedia still exist on the “Wayback Machine” of Internet Archive, but they are difficult to search out and link to.

If you go to the “More” tab at the top of my blog page, you will find non-functioning links to those old Insectlopedia posts. I will eventually get around to removing those, too, but may recycle some of them in the context of this blog. Apologies for the current inconvenience.

To all followers who are also struggling bloggers, I see you, and empathize with you. Well-intentioned people will say to you “Does anybody even read blogs anymore?,” and otherwise offer bits of discouraging wisdom. I can tell you that yes, people do read blogs. They want genuine, reliable, accurate content, especially now with the contamination of commercial sources by Artificial Intelligence (AI). They want perspectives not dictated by the vagaries of Wall Street and corporate agendas. Carry on, you are a soldier for good things.

Good News and Bad

Lately, I have not been motivated to write, but two recent events in particular prompt today’s post. Neither has happened yet, actually, but both have been announced. One of them invites your participation, and the other erases future opportunities to enjoy a visit to a renowned institution.

Butterfly Big Day is September 12, 2026. Captive butterflies in butterfly houses don't count, though.

The other day I was approached by a colleague, via a social media messaging channel, and asked to promote the first “Butterfly Big Day,” taking place on September 12. This is an attempt to take an almost literal snapshot of global butterfly abundance and diversity through community science. The one-day project is sponsored by a variety of organizations and working groups, including The Urban Butterfly Initiative, which created the event.

Participation in the Butterfly Big Day involves joining the iNaturalist project, and uploading your photos of butterflies seen on that day to the platform.

World Wasp Week is September 20-28.

In the process of joining the Big Butterfly Day project, I learned that World Wasp Week is also coming up fast: September 20-28. The same procedure exists for that undertaking as well: Join the iNaturalist project, then upload your images of wasps, bees, ants, sawflies, and related members of the order Hymenoptera, seen during that time period. Autumn, in the northern hemisphere, is typically a great time to see wasp diversity. Don’t forget the tiny ones. In fact, that is where the greatest wasp variety exists, and none of those little creatures sting, either.

Don't forget the tiny wasps, like this diapriid, for World Wasp Week!

Flowers are the logical place to observe and record wasps, but it also pays to look at aphid colonies. Aphids secrete copious amounts of a sugary liquid waste called honeydew, and wasps, ants, bees, and other insects crave it. Turn on your porch light at night, because a surprising number of wasps are nocturnal. Many of those are very small, but there are some large ichneumon wasps that will likely visit, too.

There is another date looming that is, unfortunately, not so full of joy and excitement. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia just issued a press release announcing that the museum will be closing to the public as of September 27. This abruptly ends a nearly 200-year run of existence for the museum, which was its own entity, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, until 2011, when it became an affiliate of Drexel University. Coincidence? Maybe.

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, in Philadelphia, USA.

The statement that was broadcast cited the Covid pandemic as a major factor in decreased attendance, from which the museum has apparently never fully recovered from. The museum administration claims that it maintains a commitment to public education and engagement, but is consolidating resources to protect the large and historically valuable collections housed within the facility.

The letter also asserts that they are not underestimating the impact this decision will have. Oh, but they are underestimating that. The repercussions for museums across the entire United States, and also abroad, will be anxiety-inducing at best, and drastic at worst.

What the average person hears in the media statement is “We value a vault of dead organism specimens over the education of living human beings.” It affirms the existing beliefs of many that science is elitist and exclusionary.

I have to bite my tongue when I hear friends and colleagues praising the museum for prioritizing the collections. I get it. I have worked in collections myself, including the Smithsonian Institution (on private contract in the 1980s). They are invaluable and irreplaceable. The problem is, we have done a terrible job of communicating that value to people who don’t work in museums. Science is suffering from public distrust enough as it is, without closing a major portal to understanding it.

I have friends who have worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and others in Philadelphia who know the museum intimately. This is beyond gut-wrenching for them, and is arguably a slap in the face to their years of employment, volunteerism, and patronage. I have never been to the museum myself, but am deeply mourning the fact that I will never be able to.

Enough. Go out there and document the butterflies, wasps, and other creatures, while you still can. Visit museums and nature centers while they are still open to you. Take nothing for granted, but do your best to guarantee a future that is better than our present.