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.
Camel Cricket
A wingless, humpbacked cricket with unusually long legs that gives it a spider-like appearance, often startling people when it turns up in damp basements or crawl spaces.
grasshopper-cricketSpotted Camel Cricket
A wingless, humpbacked cricket relative with mottled markings and enormous hind legs, more often found lurking in damp basements and cellars than singing in a meadow.
grasshopper-cricketCave Cricket
Humpbacked and wingless with absurdly long legs and antennae, this pale, silent insect thrives in the total darkness of caves, basements, and damp crawl spaces.
grasshopper-cricketCamel Spider
A fast-running desert arachnid, neither a true spider nor scorpion, with enormous jaw-like chelicerae and a reputation exaggerated far beyond its actual behavior.
arachnidCricket
A dark, round-headed jumping insect best known for the rhythmic chirping song produced by males rubbing their forewings together, often heard rather than seen after dusk.
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Mormon Cricket
A hefty, flightless katydid whose swarms can stretch for miles across western rangelands, marching en masse in search of food and mates.
grasshopper-cricketJerusalem Cricket
A large, wingless, ground-dwelling insect with a shiny amber body, a strikingly human-like face, and a robust, banded abdomen, most often uncovered while digging in soil.
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Snowy Tree Cricket
Nicknamed the thermometer cricket, this pale, delicate insect sings a steady, rhythmic chirp whose pace rises and falls so predictably with temperature that its chirp rate can be used to estimate the air temperature.
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Northern Mole Cricket
A stout, velvety brown cricket with shovel-like front legs built for tunneling through damp soil, more often heard as a low buzzing trill at night than seen above ground.
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Water Cricket
Despite its name, the water cricket is not a cricket at all but a compact, velvety true bug that skates over the swirling surfaces of streams and riffles in search of trapped prey.
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Mole Cricket
A stout, velvety brown cricket relative with broad, shovel-like front legs adapted for digging, spending most of its life burrowing just beneath the surface of moist soil.
grasshopper-cricketField Cricket
A stout, dark cricket whose loud, rhythmic chirping is one of the most familiar summer and fall night sounds in fields and lawns across much of the world.
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House Cricket
A pale tan, dark-banded cricket originally from warm regions of Asia that has spread worldwide both as an occasional indoor nuisance and as a widely farmed feeder insect.
grasshopper-cricketBush Cricket
Known by its long, thread-like antennae and evening chorus of chirps, this leaf-colored insect spends its life hidden among grass and foliage, often heard far more often than seen.
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Roesel's Bush Cricket
Marked with a pale cream border along its thorax, this compact bush cricket produces a continuous, high-pitched, buzzing song reminiscent of an electrical hum from dense summer grass.
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Speckled Bush Cricket
A tiny, plump, green insect finely dotted with dark speckles, this bush cricket forgoes song almost entirely, communicating instead through nearly silent, ultrasonic clicks.
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Great Green Bush Cricket
Europe's largest bush cricket, this brilliant grass-green insect fills warm summer evenings with a loud, sustained buzzing call audible from a considerable distance.
grasshopper-cricketSun Spider
A fast-running, fiercely built desert arachnid with oversized jaws, often mistaken for a giant spider despite belonging to an entirely different arachnid order.
arachnidKatydid
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.
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Great Golden Digger Wasp
A large, strikingly two-toned solitary wasp with a golden-haired thorax, reddish-orange midsection, and black-tipped abdomen, often seen digging burrows in bare soil to stock with paralyzed katydids and crickets.
waspGiant Weta
One of the world's heaviest insects, a giant flightless cricket relative endemic to New Zealand that has survived for millions of years by filling the ecological role usually taken by small mammals.
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Common True Katydid
A living leaf that spends its life high in the treetops, the common true katydid is far more often heard than seen, producing the loud, rasping "katy-did, katy-didn't" chorus that fills eastern summer nights.
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