Our New Jersey Insect Friends

One of the most enjoyable parts of any trip is befriending the locals. Our trip to New Jersey was no exception. On the first morning of our stay, for instance, a neighbor came to visit the tent. Or, more precisely, climbed secretly up under the fly to the top of the tent while we were sleeping and perched motionless on the mesh at the peak, gazing fixedly down at us, until we woke up and realized we had a guest. Here's the neighbor -- Mr. (or Mrs.?) Praying Mantis:


If you have never seen a praying mantis, they are big. Seriously big. This one was seven or eight inches long. They have enormous alien-looking bright green eyes. There were lots of them around in Maryland when I was a little girl. Grandma Frey used to bring them inside and put them on the curtains because they eat mosquitoes. They'd stay there all summer. When a mantis strikes at its prey, it moves so fast and so suddenly and returns so abruptly to motionlessness that you can hardly believe it moved at all, except that now there are insect wings hanging out of its mouth. Sorry this picture is blurry -- it turns out to be hard to take photographs of insects through tent mesh.

While we were looking at the praying mantis, it reminded us of another big insect -- the walking stick. I commented to Dad that I had never seen a walking stick. It appears that the neighborhood was listening, because which neighbor showed up on the tent mesh the next day?

Right! Mr. (or Mrs.?) Walking Stick! Contrary to appearances in the photo, it was on the outside of the mesh, under the fly, just like Mr. (Mrs.?) Mantis. It was the same length as Mr. Mantis, but much skinnier. I have no idea which end is its head and which is its tail. On the day it visited our tent, we both thought that the long stringy end was its head, with antenna at the end, but now I'm taking a second look and I'm not so sure.

Having learned about the friendliness of the neighborhood, I was very careful NOT to say that I really, really wished I could see a really, really, really big spider. However, our friendly neighbors were not discouraged. An evening or two later, we had a new guest. You know who it was!


Right again! Mr. (or Mrs.?) Spider! (Look along the center line of the tree, a little way from the bottom.) Like her friends Mr. Mantis and Mrs. Stick, Mrs. Spider was quite large: maybe the length of two quarters laid side by side. The most interesting thing we learned about Mrs. Spider that night was that, if you are wearing a headlamp (Dad was -- a new, very bright one) and you look at a great big Pine Barrens spider, it glows blue. Very bright, electric, brilliant blue. This picture doesn't do justice to the spider-light at all -- the blue doesn't show, and besides it was much brighter. But if you enlarge it and bear in mind that it was taken in darkness, with a flash -- you might get some idea of just how bright it was. There are actually two spiders in this picture, both glowing with what I sincerely hope is friendliness.


Maybe it was a Wolf Spider.


"Wolf spiders can be found at night by using a headlamp to see their eyeshine. Relatively few spiders have eyeshine. At night, wolf spiders can be collected by taking advantage of their eyeshine. If you hold a flashlight or a headlamp up by your forehead, the light from the flashlight will reflect off of the tapetum located in the eyes of the spider (much as a cat's eyes reflect light). What is a tapetum? It is a layer of reflective cells in the back of the eyes that functions to increase the amount of light hitting the retina of the spider. Relatively few spider families have a tapetum, and thus using eyeshine is often an excellent way to find wolf spiders. Other families in the US that have eyeshine include the Pisauridae or the fishing spiders. Some crab spiders also have eyeshine."

That was the end of our insect visitors to the campsite. I also met a jellyfish at the beach, but that's a different story. We did have an interesting avian visitor, but we heard it rather than saw it. This was a whippoorwill, which neither of us had ever heard before. It sang melodiously just before dawn and just after sunset. Here's how it sounded.

Quite a diverse neighborhood, that Campsite 174!