June 5, 2020

At the Creature-of-the-Day Café...

IMG_6011

... you can look through any window.

I checked the photographs of all 870 insects of Wisconsin, then double-checked a separate page of dragonflies of Wisconsin and wasps of Wisconsin, and I found nothing with wings like that and a red spot on its thorax/abdomen, so I cannot tell you what it is. I know when I saw it, I jumped up, grabbed my camera, and yelled, "It's the murder hornet," and for that, I will encourage you to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

53 comments:

stevew said...

Come on Man! I am both fascinated and repulsed by bugs!

That's a beauty.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Yes I have succumbed and are no better.

Inga said...

An orange mayfly?

Guildofcannonballs said...

Denver votes stupid sometimes, granted. But I also remember an 87/13 vote not too long ago, changing us to Portland, failing.

And I know good-hearted folks protesting.

Weird mix, not like homogeneous Los Angelous. How is it spellt>>

stephen cooper said...

Libellula

Guildofcannonballs said...

I've added Umani or whatever, MSG, to my rub, after cheap squeeze mustard.

Then salt/pepper/garlic.

I've got two (Costco).

I've been considering using different utensils to smoke vs. just using the easy one.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, if you look up crane fly in Wikipedia, the first photo looks quite a bit like your mystery insect. Anyway, in your shoes I'd check the Entomology Department for an emeritus professor and forward your picture to him or her.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

Look through any window, yeah
What do you see?
Smiling faces all around
...

Smiling faces sometimes
Pretend to be your friend
Smiling faces show no traces
Of the evil that lurks within (can you dig it?)

Nonapod said...

Looks like some sort a sawfly. They look mean, but they're harmless.

PubliusFlavius said...

Thanks to the Gracious Hostess for allowing me to share 3 musical offerings on the word.....(I love your blogs style on word play :D)

KNEEL

Since so many seem to be taking a knee today.

I apologize for the disparate styles but the lyrical theme is congruent, congruent with my trajectory toward any who dare ask me to kneel.

Look into the ākāśa आकाश...if you can...and charge me with one of your incoherent crimes of inference.

"For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself then he has not
To say all the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows, I took the blows
But I did it my way"

Sinatra-My Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQzdAsjWGPg


"Dealing out the agony within
Charging hard and no one's gonna give in
Living on your knees, conformity
Or dying on your feet for honesty"

Metallica-Damage INC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx-8UxBKUEo

And finally music for people with an attention span....and a humble intention that all men see the divine in each other.

John Coltrane - A Love Supreme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU&t=36s

Mahalo



Matthew Heintz said...

Egg and cream wash, dredge in well- seasoned flour, saute in olive oil and butter until crispy, serve wth a cool climate Pinot Noir from Tasmania!!!

Automatic_Wing said...

I think it's an antlered crane fly.

PuertoRicoSpaceport.com said...

Last week I mentioned that I had read Glenn Curtiss Aviation Book. Someone recommended "Unlocking the Sky" by Seth Shulman. It covers much of the same ground, going up to about 1912. A different viewpoint and a much better book.

Nothing wrong with Curtiss' book, though it might go into too much technical detail for some. It verged on too much for me, who normally thrives on technical detail.

Where Curtiss' book hardly mentions the Wright brothers and Samuel Langley, they play a prominent role in this one. Langley actually built a plane that probably would have flown before the Wright brothers but didn't. About 1910, the Smithsonian sent the wreckage to Curtiss factory and he restored it.

The Wright brothers were pretty much world class assholes. Numerous people who had been working on flight before them had freely shared their research. Yet the WBs would not share theirs. For almost 4 years after the flight at Kitty Hawk, they refused to even let anyone see their plane on the ground, much less flying.

They claimed their patent on warping, even though others had done it before with gliders, also covered movable ailerons and sued Curtiss.

It was all pretty ugly.

Orvil was a world class grudge holder right up to his death in 1946.

Excellent and interesting book about the early days of aviation.

John Henry

PuertoRicoSpaceport.com said...

Continuing on an aviation theme, when I finished Curtiss I decided to re-read Gen Curtis Lemay's "Superfortress" about the development and use of the B-29.

It is "And Bill Yenne" so I don't know how much of the actual writing is Lemay and how much is Yenne. No matter, it is in the first person and very readable.

When I finished that, I decided to reread Barrett Tilman's bio of Lemay. I am currently up to the Berlin Airlift.

Lemay was a fascinating man and I enjoyed learning more about him on the first read and am finding the second read even better.

John Henry

Guildofcannonballs said...


A huge conglomerate* of Americans want to fuck it.

Peculiar, no doubt in deed.

*I didn't know how to spell the term

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

What They Do?!?

The Backstabbers-- O Jay's

(What they do?)
(They smilin' in your face)
All the time, they want to take your place
The back stabbers (Back stabbers)

walter said...

Interesting times in L.A.

Calypso Facto said...

Put it on the Wisconsin Naturalists page on Facebook with a polite inquiry for id, and someone will give you the right answer riki tik.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

cOVId bUg

SteveBrooklineMA said...

Guessing Ichneumon wasp

Quaestor said...

That is no type of dragonfly or damselfly. The eyes and antennae are without question consistent with the solitary and parasitoid wasps.

Ann Althouse said...

It was quite large. Maybe a 4 inch wingspan.

Fritz said...

Look out of any window

Any morning, any evening, any day . . .

William said...

There's a previously unpublished story by Hemingway in this week's issue of The New Yorker. The story is about how the writer goes out on fishing expedition and (spoiler) fails to land a large marlin. The fisherman is explicitly named as Hemingway. The marlin that he fails to land is huge, one of the biggest ever seen by the guide. A true trophy.... I guess the subtext of the story is how hard it is to create a perfect piece of art. Lots of hard work. You must concentrate and keep just the right amount of tension on the line. You can do most things right and still not land the big one...That's one subtext. Another subtext might be how much fun it is to kill large beautiful creatures just for the fun of killing them....Hemingway had the right ethos for his era. WWI and even the intermission before WWII had lots of killings and on a mass scale. Our ethos is more about demonstrations and gentle riots.

Sprezzatura said...

Re creatures, I’m no Samsa, but I’m definitely too buggy to get comments through the delete machine.

Who knows why?

Probably something about civility.

Anywho, If I was trashing the greatest country ever known, I’d be defended. If I was a kid who, unlike all the other kids that got out of the way, stood up and smirked at a crazy loon elder minority man, I’d be described as Meade’s ideal re a son.

Whoops!

I did it again.

Facts and logic are dangerous here. Delete!!

walter said...

Biden beat Biden for the nom!
I'm not joking!

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

Superfly

curtis mayfield

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

I thought at first it was a dipterid of some kind (i.e., a fly, not a four-winged insect at all). Several have suggested crane flies, which would be large as well, and the fact that you can't see a red spot on the abdomen in the photos might just be because none of them give you a ventral view. But the first of the three species of spider wasps also looks a good bet. The orange legs aren't exactly a giveaway, but they ought to narrow the search down.

Man, but you have some weird-ass species names in there. I like "The Badwing," myself.

MadTownGuy said...

Cicada Killer wasp? Saw what looked like one a few years ago when we lived near the Westmoreland neighborhood but it was hovering over its nest and I didn't want to get close enough to measure its wingspan.

narciso said...

Well then



https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1268991547321786370

Guildofcannonballs said...

There is no evidence anyone can surpass the U.S.

Guildofcannonballs said...

There is evidence abortions murder for profit daily happily.

And will kill to do so tomorrow.

William said...

In that same issue, I also read the profile of Maxine Hong Kingston. I read her book The Woman Warrior when it came out over forty years ago. I can still remember parts of it. It must have been a very good book....It was about the immigrant experience, but there was something wraith like about all the characters in it. Amy Tan's books about the Chinese immigrant experience have more specificity....My favorite book about the immigrant experience is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That's my origin story. One branch of my family arrived in America at about the time of the novel's setting....Betty Smith, the author, in the novel claimed to be Austrian-Irish. According to Wiki, Betty Smith was German on both sides of her family. Betty Smith in telling about her childhood seems to have obfuscated her ethnic identity. I understand that German immigrants, especially during the WWI years, were given a hard time, but it's not the sort of thing apparently that their children want to write about.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, the large wingspan but single pair of wings pretty much confirms it to be a type of crane fly. Please do check with an Entomology professor and let us know.

William said...

Further thoughts on discrimination and the immigrant experience: I have read that some forms of discrimination are ennobling. It didn't work that way with the Germans. In Europe, the major powers wanted the Germans to remain in small, squabbling principalities. The Germans felt that their national greatness had been denied to them. Some of the appeal of the Kaiser and Hitler was not to the German sense of superiority but the German sense of having been oppressed. If you dwell too long on your wrongs, the broken places never heal and the limp becomes your identity.....Betty Smith was probably right to simple create a pretty fiction about her parents' ethnicity. In any event, Germans have made good Americans but very poor Europeans.

RichardJohnson said...

SteveBrooklineMA
Guessing Ichneumon wasp

Your guess is better than mine.About the only insect species I can identify are fly, cockroach, and mosquito. However, your mention of Ichneumon reminded of a a fascinating book by Bernd Heinrich. The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology.
His father went on collecting trips all over the world for Ichneumon and other species. Bernd was born on the family estate in Poland circa 1940- which before WW1 had been part of Prussia. At the end of WW2 the family fled to Germany, then to Maine- collecting all the while. While Bernd didn't follow his father's wish that he also study Ichneumon, he did become a field biologist. It's a great read.

Yancey Ward said...

From the always interesting ZMan- his take on the sudden calls to defund the police:

"No one should prevent them from doing it. We’re long past the point of defending society from the lunatics. There is nothing worth defending now. Let them deal with this gollum they created. It would be endlessly amusing seeing the mob chasing the beautiful people around in their burning neighborhoods. Imagine the cast of the cable chat shows being forced to grovel and plead to a mob of gentle giants. My goodness, that would be the best television those people made in their lifetimes."

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, BTW I followed the link to 877 species of insect, and it includes many things that are manifestly not insects, especially millipedes and crab spiders. They also have at least one jumping spider (where is Phidippus when we need him?) Except now that toads are frogs, perhaps millipedes are reclassed as insects. Who knows these days?

I couldn’t resist checking out the UW-Mad Entomology Department website. They have an illustrated discussion of murder hornets as compared to more common species. The difference is striking. Also a link where you can post insect questions, which may help.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

will the Dem's quadrennial "Mattering of Black Lives"

...provide cover for the Africans American of Obamagate infamy?

Yancey Ward said...

An excellent explication of today's payroll report and all its moving pieces in regards to trying to capture the employment/disemployment effects of the shutdowns- by Jeffrey Snider.

Flat Tire said...

Crane fly. Insect Identification app is great. I use it frequently. I have about 5 apps and this is my favorite.

Lucien said...

Creature-of- the-day had me thinking Rocky Horror Show (and, alas “horror show” gets me thinking Clockwork Orange), but I suppose you mean it in the sense of creature du jour.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Why presume it’s a murder hornet? Maybe it’s a justifiable homicide hornet.

Lewis Wetzel said...

I got this quote from Elian Kazan's _A life_:
"I’ve hated only two people in my life. One was Tallulah Bankhead."

Apparently Tallulah Bankhead was stoned or drunk all of the time. She hated Kazan, and while Bankhead was in the same room with Kazan, and Kazan was trying to to talk to her, Bankhead would only talk to him via a third person, so he might say she was missing her marks, and Bankhead would say (to a third person) "Kazan is a terrible director. He lets people cross between me and the camera."

effinayright said...

PuertoRicoSpaceport.com said...
Continuing on an aviation theme, when I finished Curtiss I decided to re-read Gen Curtis Lemay's "Superfortress" about the development and use of the B-29.
********

My dad was a B-29 bombardier during the Korean war, but not WWII.

I enjoy watching military history on YouTube, and was recently surprised to see Curtis Lemay planning a Tokyo bombing raid with the help of one of his aides, identified as Lt. Col Jack Catton.

Well.. I had never realized that Jack Catton, then a one-star general commanding Pease AFB where I lived in the 60's, was that same guy. Then I recalled I had actually had a conversation with him when he was a two-star at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota. (He went on to become a four-star as head of the AF Logistics command).

Very cool to realize you actually spoke with a key figure in our war against Japan in WWII.

(p.s. He had a very hot daughter, named Beth: BOOM chicka BOOM chicka BOOM...)

Ann Althouse said...

I'm willing to stop at the conclusion that it is a crane fly. Here are some details for identifying a crane fly.

I'm seeing at the Orkin (pest control) site that "Hatched larvae may cause damage to plant roots in large concentrations and attract more pests, like skunks, birds, and raccoons, who may try to dig up the ground in order to feed on them.... To eliminate a crane fly infestation" — not that I think we have an "infestation" — "you need to focus on their larvae." The way to *prevent* them from moving in in the first place is: "Maintain a healthy and vibrant turf or lawn, improve drainage soil is dry and aerated." That's something I can say is done on our property. I can't believe anyone in this city has a more healthy, vibrant, aerated lawn.

RichardJohnson said...

Flat Tire
Insect Identification app is great. I use it frequently. I have about 5 apps and this is my favorite.

Back in the day,when people did insect identification by referring to something printed on pieces of paper, entomologists called them insect identification KEYS.

tim in vermont said...

Well, after a few weeks of onesies, twosies on daily cases in Vermont we had 36 in a single day. It looks like all but two of them came from a neighborhood with a lot of recent refugee immigrants like Somalis right outside Burlington. I don’t know if it was Somalis who were testing positive, but the rest of the state is still having between one and five cases a day, so Memorial Day and the opening has appeared to have little effect. They are opening up for indoor dining in the next day or two, so we will see what effect that has.

Quaestor said...

Why presume it’s a murder hornet? Maybe it’s a justifiable homicide hornet.

Any mayhem wrought by Asian Giant Hornets (Vespa mandarinia) is totally justified. In the realm of insect politics, they're the Antifa Black Bloc.

Bob Boyd said...

Looks like it's missing a leg.

PluralThumb said...

"Why presume it’s a murder hornet? Maybe it’s a justifiable homicide hornet."

I see five legs ?!

Mazo Jeff said...

I think it is a Red Belly Sneetch!

Big Mike said...

Looks like it's missing a leg.

That clinches the case for a crane fly. They’re notorious for the ease with which legs detach.