Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Mr. Mosquito

We have a new pet. I'm assuming his stay with us will be relatively short, but we'll enjoy him while we can.

Last night, as Flapjack was dashing out the front door to explore, a biiiiiig bug flew in. That got the two of us pretty excited and we spent about 5 minutes chasing it around. Then, I realized that Elise has this cool bug catching equipment that she got from Aunt Amy for Christmas. It took all of about two seconds to slurp the thing up with the sucker thing. Then, it took about 5 minutes to get the thing to crawl out of the sucker and into the habitat enclosure. I should mention, as a point of interest, that I finally succeeded in this task when I realized that the little bugger preferred to hang upside down.

Anyway, thinking it must be a male mosquito (and I was right, btw!) I put a grape and some water covered lettuce in with the little guy and went to bed for the night. Elise has been enjoying looking at him with her magnifying glass. We gave him a piece of strawberry at lunch today, but I think his heart isn't in it. Mr. Mosquito may be on his way out. Sure is interesting to watch, though!

2 comments:

Jon McConnel said...

If it's really a biiiiiig bug, it could well be a crane fly.
http://whatcom.wsu.edu/cranefly/

SWE said...

Thank you, Jon!!!!

It looked mostly like a big mosquito, but with some differences, so this makes much more sense. A cranefly for sure!

Looks like it won't live much longer. There are piles of them outside at night-I may just mention it to the HOA so they can sample.

Thank you again for the positive ID on our bug!