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.
Underwing Moth
A master of camouflage whose bark-patterned forewings hide brightly colored, banded hindwings that flash into view only when the moth is disturbed in flight.
mothPunkie
An almost invisibly small biting fly that swarms near wetlands at dusk, where only the females take blood meals from animal hosts.
flyThrips
A minuscule, slender insect with fringed, feather-like wings, often noticed only as a fast-moving dark speck darting across a flower petal or windowsill.
other
Diving Bell Spider
The world's only truly aquatic spider, famous for spinning an underwater silk bell that it fills with air, allowing it to live, hunt, and breed almost entirely submerged.
spider
Brown Recluse Spider
A uniformly light-brown spider with a faint violin-shaped marking on its back and only six eyes instead of the usual eight, typically found hiding in dry, undisturbed indoor and outdoor spaces.
spider
West Virginia White
A delicate, pure-white spring butterfly of eastern hardwood forests with faint gray veining on the underside, flying only for a few weeks each year before its short-lived toothwort host plants fade.
butterflyChigger
A nearly microscopic mite larva that waits in clusters on grass tips for a passing host, taking a single brief meal before dropping away unseen. Only this larval stage is parasitic; the free-living adult spends its life hunting tiny prey in the soil.
arachnidBot Fly
A stocky, bumblebee-mimicking fly whose adults never feed and live only long enough to mate and locate a rodent or rabbit burrow for their eggs. Despite their harmless, buzzing adult stage, bot flies are best known through the larvae that develop as internal parasites of small mammals.
fly