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.
Brown Widow Spider
Named for its mottled tan-and-brown coloring rather than glossy black, the brown widow is easily recognized by its distinctive spiky, off-white egg sacs and an orange hourglass on its underside.
spider
Tarantula Hawk
One of the largest wasps in the world, with a glossy metallic blue-black body and vivid burnt-orange wings, famous for hunting tarantulas to provision a single underground burrow for its larva.
wasp
Common Wasp
A black-and-yellow social wasp with a distinct anchor-shaped mark on its face, common around gardens and picnics in late summer as its colony reaches peak size and workers seek out sugary food.
wasp
Emperor Moth
A striking silk moth with a large eyespot on each of its four wings, showing pronounced differences between the smaller, orange-brown, day-flying males and the larger, greyer, night-flying females.
moth
Marsh Treader
An extremely slender, thread-like true bug that walks slowly and deliberately across the water's surface on stilt-like legs, resembling a tiny floating twig as it hunts among marsh vegetation.
aquatic-insect
Mediterranean Flour Moth
A small, pale grey moth with fine dark wavy lines on its forewings, whose larvae spin webbing through flour, grain, and other stored dry food products, making it a well-known pest of mills and pantries.
moth
Drinker Moth
A stout, furry moth with warm tawny-orange to buff-brown wings marked by two small white spots on each forewing, named for its caterpillar's habit of drinking water droplets from grass blades.
moth
Ruby Tiger Moth
A small, warm reddish-brown tiger moth with plain rosy-tinted forewings and pink-flushed hindwings dotted with dark spots, often seen resting openly on vegetation in sunny, open habitats.
moth
White Ermine Moth
A soft, fuzzy white moth speckled with small black dots, resembling the ermine fur trim after which it is named, commonly seen resting on vegetation or attracted to lights on summer nights.
moth
Sowbug
A slate-gray, oval, armor-plated crustacean that shuffles through damp leaf litter on seven pairs of legs, recognizable by its overlapping segmented shell and pair of trailing tail-like appendages.
other
Tobacco Hornworm Moth (Carolina Sphinx)
A large, streamlined gray-brown sphinx moth with six pairs of orange spots along its abdomen, best known as the adult stage of the tobacco hornworm caterpillar that feeds on tomato and tobacco plants.
moth
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
Karner Blue
A tiny, silvery-blue butterfly dependent entirely on wild lupine and now known chiefly from a small number of protected sandy-soil habitats in the Great Lakes and Northeast.
butterfly
Puss Caterpillar
A caterpillar disguised as a tuft of soft fur, its dense coat of silky hairs conceals rows of spines beneath, making it one of the most deceptively harmless-looking stinging caterpillars in North America.
caterpillar-larva
Riffle Beetle
Tiny and unassuming, riffle beetles cling tightly to submerged rocks in swift, clean streams for their entire lives, making them one of the most reliable living indicators of healthy water.
beetle
Wireworm
Slender, shiny, and armor-hard, the wireworm is the long-lived soil-dwelling larva of a click beetle, spending years underground feeding on seeds, roots, and tubers before ever taking beetle form.
beetle
Silkworm
Plump, pale, and utterly dependent on humans, the silkworm is the domesticated caterpillar behind thousands of years of silk production, spinning a single continuous thread of silk to form its cocoon.
caterpillar-larva
Eastern Lubber Grasshopper
One of the largest grasshoppers in North America, the eastern lubber is a slow, flightless giant clad in bold black, yellow, and red that announces its presence rather than hiding from it.
grasshopper-cricket
Yellow Fever Mosquito
A dark mosquito marked with a lyre-shaped pattern of white scales on its thorax, closely tied to human dwellings and the water-filled containers people leave standing around them.
fly
Katydid
A leaf-mimicking insect with broad, veined green wings shaped remarkably like foliage, best known for the loud, rhythmic 'katy-did, katy-didn't' chorus males produce on warm summer nights.
grasshopper-cricket
Banded Hairstreak
A gray-brown, tailed hairstreak marked by a postmedian band of white-edged dark spots on the hindwing underside and a small orange-capped blue spot near the tail, closely tied to oak and hickory woodlands.
butterfly
Brown Marmorated Stink Bug
An invasive, mottled brown stink bug identified by alternating light and dark bands on its antennae and abdomen edges, well known for gathering in large numbers on and inside buildings each fall.
true-bug
Devil's Coach Horse Beetle
A large, matte-black rove beetle that raises its flexible abdomen up and over its back like a scorpion's tail and gapes its jaws when threatened, one of the biggest and most dramatic rove beetles in Europe.
beetle
Red Admiral
A fast-flying, strikingly patterned butterfly with velvety black wings crossed by a bold orange-red band and white-spotted tips, often seen basking on tree trunks or sipping from fallen fruit.
butterfly