Bug Encyclopedia
Search and identify bugs & insects — beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, bees, spiders and more — with size, habitat, danger, behavior, and how to tell them apart.
Common Clothes Moth
A tiny, plain golden-buff moth that rarely flies far into open light, best known not for its adult form but for its silk-spinning larvae that chew holes in wool, fur, and feathers.
moth
Common Whitetail Dragonfly
A stocky pond-side dragonfly whose mature males sport a broad, chalky white abdomen that flashes conspicuously against boldly banded wings.
dragonfly
Common House Mosquito
A slender, drab brown mosquito that emerges at dusk from catch basins and forgotten containers to fill neighborhoods with its familiar high-pitched whine.
fly
Common House Fly
A dull gray fly with four dark stripes down its back, the house fly is one of the most familiar insects on Earth, following people and their food waste to every continent.
fly
Common Green Darner
A large green-and-blue dragonfly and the official state insect of Washington, best known among dragonfly watchers for an annual migration that spans multiple generations.
dragonfly
Common House Spider
Tucked into a messy tangle of silk in a quiet corner, the common house spider is one of the most familiar indoor spiders, quietly picking off flies and other small insects that blunder into its web.
spider
Cabbage White Butterfly
A small, plain white butterfly with one or two black spots on each forewing and dark wingtips, one of the most common and widespread garden butterflies in the world.
butterfly
Mourning Cloak Butterfly
A deep maroon-brown butterfly bordered with a cream-yellow band and a row of iridescent blue spots, unusual among butterflies for overwintering as an adult and being one of the first to appear in early spring.
butterfly
Blue Morpho Butterfly
A dazzling, hand-sized rainforest butterfly whose wings flash brilliant metallic blue in flight, an effect created not by pigment but by microscopic light-bending scales.
butterfly
Question Mark Butterfly
A ragged-edged anglewing butterfly named for the tiny silver question-mark squiggle on its mottled brown underside, with tawny-orange upperwings dotted in black.
butterfly
Painted Lady Butterfly
A medium-sized orange-and-black butterfly with a mosaic of white-spotted black wingtips, famous as the most widely distributed butterfly on Earth and a long-distance migrant.
butterfly
Eastern Comma
A ragged-edged orange-and-brown woodland butterfly named for the small, silvery comma-shaped mark on the underside of its hindwing, with a cryptic dead-leaf pattern that camouflages it perfectly when its wings are closed.
butterfly
Barn Spider
A brownish, mottled orb weaver famous as the inspiration for Charlotte's Web, commonly found spinning large nightly webs on barns, porches, and other structures.
spider
Orange Tip
A dainty white butterfly whose males flash vivid orange wingtip patches, while both sexes show a beautifully marbled green-and-white pattern on the underwings.
butterfly
Gray Hairstreak
A small slate-gray butterfly with thin white lines, an orange-capped black spot near the hindwing tail, and one of the broadest host-plant ranges of any North American butterfly, making it a familiar visitor to gardens and fields alike.
butterfly
Checkered White
A white butterfly patterned with irregular gray-black checkered spots, commonly fluttering low over open, sunny, weedy fields across much of North America.
butterfly
Spring Azure
One of the earliest-flying small blue butterflies of spring, with soft pale-blue upperwings, a whitish gray underside dotted with faint dark markings, and no tails on the hindwing.
butterfly
Clouded Sulphur
A medium-sized pale yellow butterfly with crisp black wing borders, commonly seen fluttering low over clover fields and roadside meadows across North America.
butterfly
Eastern Pondhawk
A bold, ground-perching dragonfly whose bright green females and powdery blue males look almost like different species, and which readily preys on other dragonflies.
dragonfly
Bogong Moth
A modest brown, mottled moth famous for its extraordinary mass seasonal migration across thousands of kilometers to cool alpine caves in the Australian mountains, forming one of the largest known insect migrations by biomass.
moth
Cotton Bollworm
A variably colored caterpillar, ranging from green to brown to nearly pink, that burrows into cotton bolls, corn ears, and tomato fruit, feeding concealed inside the very structures it damages.
caterpillar-larva
Hackberry Emperor
A brown-and-cream butterfly closely tied to hackberry trees, notable for its bold eyespots and habit of landing on people, cars, and other unusual surfaces rather than flowers.
butterfly
Asparagus Beetle
A small, boldly patterned blue-black beetle with cream and orange-red markings that clusters on emerging asparagus spears in spring.
beetleYellow Scorpion
A robust, sandy-yellow scorpion of arid regions that spends daylight hours buried or hidden beneath stones, emerging at dusk to hunt.
arachnid