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Photo#427013
Either a moth/butterfly or a fly or a bee...? And maybe a parastic worm tagging along for the ride. - Synanthedon exitiosa - female

Either a moth/butterfly or a fly or a bee...? And maybe a parastic worm tagging along for the ride. - Synanthedon exitiosa - Female
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
July 15, 2010
Size: about 2cm but not 1" yet
Note: size is from tip of head (not antennae) to tip of abdomen (not counting unidentified poopy thing).
Please excuse the pill-bottle orange film over the pics. It is, in fact, currently residing in an orange pill bottle. You're not missing much -- it's black black with a red-orange ("Bitersweet" Crayola marker red/orange) stripe.
It's powdered (wings and body) like a butterfly/moth, and has a curled...straw-tongue like a butterfly (sorry, it was really thin and didn't show up with my old camera). This straw is tucked away when not in use (you only see one ring protruding from the head, and you don't really know what it is unless it drops down).
The wings caught my attention. Only 2 wings (so, not butterfly/moth, then?), and the second/lower half of the wings are clear, with thick black veins and 'hem'. Usually it's almost fully open when at rest, or else it is folded under the upper half, so you don't see it (see other pics). Each wing is also about 2cm long.
The legs looks quite like moths and butterflies too, though... T_T
Found in my back yard, under the peach tree and caught at the cedar evergreens.
When outdoors, resting, the abdomen lay flat. When indoors (or, from captivity onwards) the abdomen tends to be angled strictly upwards. And oftentimes the transparent egg/worm/unidentified thing poops out a little. I really doubt it's a stinger. It's transparent, and the non-tip end has more color, sometimes pulsing a little (think worm swallowing under a microscope). When I first caught this fellow, this unidentified anal object was nowhere to be seen.

Images of this individual: tag all
Either a moth/butterfly or a fly or a bee...? And maybe a parastic worm tagging along for the ride. - Synanthedon exitiosa - female Either a moth/butterfly or a fly or a bee...? And maybe a parastic worm tagging along for the ride. - Synanthedon exitiosa - female

When you search on a scientific name,
just use the genus or just the species. Because of the node system that BugGuide uses, the two parts of the scientific name are actually on separate nodes, one for the genus, and another for the various species. Most of the time the full binomial will work, but using half the name always works.

If you want to see what we have on grasshopper worms here, type that into the search. Try different combinations of worm and parasite and parasitoid and hopper and cricket, etc. See what comes up and then follow where they lead.

 
Uwaaaah, thanks so very much
Uwaaaah, thanks so very much for your pointers, as well as shifting the pics into appropriate sections of the site!
I did as you suggested, and finally found some info on grasshopper worms. Which allowed me a better google search for more external info. Thanks so much for your (and everyone else's, too!) patience, as I learn the ropes of researching on BugGuide and online, generally.

Moved
Moved from Sesioidea.

Search will not "work"
if you try searching on black moth, for example. It will try to return everything that is black and everything that is moth, and that will overload the search. You just need to be creative in how you make your request. If on the other hand you search on "black orange", it will be a long search, but your bug will appear in the list.

 
Mm, no, sorry for not being c
Mm, no, sorry for not being clear. Actually, I was looking up another bug with it's scientific name (and later tried it with the common name too when scientific didn't work), but each time the Search just blanked out on me. Like, it ran for a little, then just gave me a blank page. It may just be me. *shrug*.
However, thanks for your search advice! It will definitely help me in the future, considering I know no scientific names (family or species), know no family characteristics (I rely, as I mentioned, purely with the images XP), and so what you said will definitely come in handy in future! Thanks again!

Synanthedon exitiosa...
... or Peachtree Borer clearwing moth most likely to me.

Moved
Moved from ID Request. Clearwing Moth

 
thanks for id-ing!
Thanks! I really did try to look into moths and butterflies, but I guess I didn't go into the right families. (because I don't actually know the characteristics of each family, I go by looks on the pics as I browse)
Do you have any idea what the thing sticking out of the abdomen is?

BTW, is it just me or is the search not working...?

Thank again!

 
That thing...
... out the abdomen is ovipositor, so that is a female. About the searching, it just takes some time to play with. You can type the name of order (Lepidoptera in this case), family (Sesiidae) or suspected species name and than just browse it down to that level what you were looking for. Good luck!

 
Oh, I forgot to say, I am ver
Oh, I forgot to say, I am very thankful that it was an ovipositor (the first I've seen of it's kind) and not a parasitic worm. Thanks for clearing that up for me. But that also brings me to another question, I hope you don't mind. It doesn't seem like BugGuide has a section for parasitic worms that have insect hosts. In fact, even most of my google searches give me worms for humans (understandable, but frustrating all the same). While I don't have, anymore the worms or the host, do you have any suggestions on where I might find info on insect's parasites, or how I would figure out what worm was in my grasshopper (so that I can see if I can avoid it happening again)? Any and all help greatly appreciated.
(And yes, I'm sure it was a worm this time --- not only was it long, round, opaque/pearly white, and entirely individualistic in its squirming about, it also happened to come out of the thorax, and the 'amputated' leg of the grasshopper, not just the hind end. T__T)

 
thanks for your reply! When
thanks for your reply!
When I search, I do try searching scientific names, if I know what they are. It just seems that 50% of the time, that gives me a blank page. If it persists, I might just give the website a note, in case it's a bug with them and not with me (but highly unlikely, since it seems everyone else is searching just fine. o.O)

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