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.
Vine Weevil
A slow, flightless, matte-black beetle that hides by day and emerges at night to notch neat semicircular bites from the edges of leaves.
beetle
Waved Sphinx Moth
A large gray-brown sphinx moth with fine wavy dark lines across the forewings and a scalloped outer wing margin, closely resembling a piece of weathered tree bark when at rest.
moth
Rice Weevil
A tiny reddish-brown weevil with a long curved snout and four faint pale spots on its wing covers, commonly found infesting stored rice, wheat, and other grain products.
beetle
Cabbage White
A common, small white butterfly with one or two black wing spots, whose green caterpillars are a familiar sight feeding on cabbage-family garden plants.
butterfly
Comma Butterfly
An orange-brown butterfly with distinctively ragged, scalloped wing edges and a small white comma-shaped mark on the underside of the hindwing, resembling a dead leaf when at rest.
butterfly
Sleepy Orange
A small, deep orange sulphur butterfly with dark wing borders and a low, wandering flight, named for a faint dark mark that suggests a half-closed, sleepy eye.
butterfly
Little Yellow
A tiny, pale lemon-yellow butterfly with a thin, crisp black wing border, fluttering close to the ground in fields and roadsides across the southern and eastern United States.
butterfly
Orange Sulphur
A vivid orange-and-yellow butterfly with sharp black wing borders, one of the most common butterflies over open fields and alfalfa crops throughout North America.
butterfly
Firefly
A soft-bodied, dusk-flying beetle famous for the bioluminescent flashes it produces from its abdomen to attract mates on warm summer evenings.
beetle
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
Flat-backed Millipede
A slow, armor-plated decomposer whose body segments flare into flat, wing-like keels, giving it a distinctly ribbed, tank-like silhouette compared to rounder millipedes.
myriapod
Boll Weevil
A small, grayish-brown snout beetle with a long, curved rostrum, historically famous for its close feeding association with cotton flower buds and bolls.
beetle
Red-spotted Purple
A large, iridescent blue-black butterfly lacking tails, notable for closely mimicking the unpalatable Pipevine Swallowtail, with rows of red-orange spots visible along the underside wing margins.
butterfly
Seven-spotted Ladybird
A classic bright red ladybird with exactly seven black spots, one of the most iconic and widely recognized beetles in the world.
beetle
Great Purple Hairstreak
The largest and most iridescent hairstreak in North America, with brilliant blue-green upperwings, red-orange spots on the body and wing base, and long twin tails, its caterpillars feeding on parasitic mistletoe clumps in host trees.
butterfly
Vaporer Moth
A tussock moth with dramatic sexual differences: the male is a small rusty-brown day-flying moth with a white wing spot, while the female is a flightless, wingless gray sac-like insect that never leaves her cocoon.
moth
Slaty Skimmer
A mature male Slaty Skimmer is powder-blue-gray from head to tail with jet-black wing tips, giving it a slate-colored, almost monochrome look as it patrols pond edges.
dragonfly
Blue Morpho
A large Neotropical butterfly famed for the brilliant, shimmering iridescent blue of its wing uppersides, which flashes vividly in flight and disappears instantly when the cryptic brown underside is exposed at rest.
butterfly
Emerald Ash Borer
A slender, bullet-shaped beetle with brilliant metallic-green coloring, whose bark-tunneling larvae feed almost exclusively within ash trees.
beetle
Boxelder Bug
A slender black true bug marked with three bold red-orange stripes on its thorax and red wing veins, famous for massing by the hundreds on tree trunks and sun-warmed walls in autumn.
true-bug
Eastern Tailed-Blue
A tiny gossamer-wing butterfly with a delicate thread-like tail on each hindwing and a small orange spot near the tail base, common in open weedy habitats throughout the eastern half of North America.
butterfly
Two-Spotted Stink Bug
A boldly patterned black-and-orange predatory stink bug named for the pair of dark spots on its back, best known for hunting Colorado potato beetle larvae in gardens and fields.
true-bug
Fireflies (Lightning Bug)
A soft-bodied beetle that turns summer evenings magical by flashing rhythmic patterns of cold light from its abdomen to attract mates across meadows and forest edges.
beetle
Spined Soldier Bug
A predatory stink bug identified by the sharp, pointed spines projecting from its shoulders, valued in gardens and farm fields for hunting caterpillars, beetle larvae, and other pest insects.
true-bug