Small, dead, half-dry jellyfish
Not this one, but one like it. Dry and leathery-looking, but still in one piece. I'd been watching videos and reading about these jellies; it seems that only the tentacles will sting, so this time I dared to touch the upper part. It was sticky, like fly-paper. And it had trapped a couple of things.
A bug. Maybe two bugs.
Stuck tight.
I pried the bug off, and brought it home in a pill bottle. Here it is, right side up.
Something else for BugGuide.
It was dead when I found it, but undamaged except for the loss of part of a leg and a scratch on the wing covers. I wonder; did it die because it got stuck on the jellyfish, or was it poisoned by its venom? I can't imagine that this is its usual diet.
This would be, I think, a true bug; it has the long sucking tube of a bug. So, back to BugGuide's gazillion photos of bugs. (399 pages of them!) Any hints you can give me would be greatly appreciated.
*Update: Wow! I'm down to the Family, already! He's some sort of Dirt-colored Seed Bug, Rhyparochromidae. (Only 10 pages of these.) More or less like this one, from California.
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he looks as if he was about to be submerged in amber :-)
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's what he thought it was. Same colour, same texture.
ReplyDeleteExcept that it must smell different.
It seems, if I've got the family correct, that these bugs are really flat-bodied because they crawl under the seeds of conifers. If that's so, he was 'way out of place.