Subject:  What is this creature?
Geographic location of the bug:  Hartford County, Connecticut
Date: 09/24/2017
Time: 08:55 PM EDT
Hellooooo Bugman. It’s great to see your site as active as ever. I sent you an inquiry years ago and you were able to help. Thank you! Could you please help again? We have been seeing several of these guys and I thought they were roaches at first! The body looks more like a moth to me, but the antennae look more like a beetle. The wings stand up at an interesting angle.
How you want your letter signed:  Thanks again! Annie

Caddisfly

Dear Annie,
This is a Caddisfly, and your observation that it resembles a moth is understandable.  Entomologists tend to agree that the Caddisfly order Trichoptera does share many similar traits with the Moth order Lepidoptera.  Do you live near a body of water?  The nymphs of Caddisflies are aquatic and they are commonly called Caseworms.

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Subject:  Autumn Brown Bug
Geographic location of the bug:  New Brunswick, Canada
Date: 09/16/2017
Time: 08:34 AM EDT
These bugs just started coming around recently as the weather starts to change these bugs started to come around everywhere!! What are they?!
How you want your letter signed:  Thanks, Danielle

Caddisfly

Dear Danielle,
This is a Caddisfly in the order Trichoptera.  Caddisfly nymphs are aquatic and they are frequently called Caseworms as they construct often elaborate protective cases from twigs, sand and shells.  Since the nymphs are aquatic, we suspect you live near a body of fresh water.  Your submission is the second we are posting this morning from New Brunswick, Canada. 

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Subject: Water Bug
Location: Western New York
October 21, 2016 3:20 pm
One of our class room got tadpoles from Africa. The water they put into the tanks was from a pond in one of the teachers backyard. This bug popped up in it yesterday it has a grass straw that it looks like it breathes out of not sure though, and it’s body is protected by this grass looking shell (I guess to camouflage it?) I’ve Googled it and can’t find it anywhere! Thank you in advanced
Signature: -school custodia

Caseworm

Dear school custodia,
Were we betting on the origin of this Caseworm, the aquatic larva of a Caddisfly, we would put our money on the pond in the teacher’s backyard and not that they came in with the tadpoles, but we can’t help but to wonder if one of your classrooms wanted to observe the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs, why didn’t they choose to observe a local species of frog rather than to import tadpoles from Africa?  This classroom experiment is going to result in frogs and we hope someone doesn’t decide to release the African frogs into the local pond at the end of the experiment.  Introduction of non-native species into the environment is one of the biggest threats to the survival of native, endemic species in our current climate of globalization.  Alas, we digress.  It was not our intention to lecture your school on the ethics of globalization when you asked about the identity of the Caseworm.  Every species of Caddisfly has a distinctly different Caseworm.  Some make their cases from sticks, some from shells of molluscs, some from pebbles and some from sand.  In our mind, a much more interesting experiment would be to observe the lives of creatures in your local ponds.  Oops, we started lecturing again.

The frogs will be sent back once project is done. They chose this species because of its fast life cycle from tadpole to frog.
And thank you it is a very interesting water bug! The class will be watching it’s life cycle as well 🙂

Thanks for the reassurance.

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