November 1, 2010
Greetings;
Since I wrote in to ask what kind of buy I happened upon, I posted his pic on Facebook and one friend said it looked like a potato bug. When I searched for other pictures of “Potato Bug”, most of them looked just like the little critter I found.
I’ve attached the picture here in case there’s no way to trace this email to my original post.
If you can post more information about the Potato Bug, I’d be interested to read what you came up with.
Jessica Good
Our Automated Response
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 2:11 PM
Thank you for submitting your identification request.
Please understand that we have a very small staff that does this as a labor of love. We cannot answer all submissions (not by a long shot). But we’ll do the best we can!
Greetings;
We recently moved to Cedar Mesa on Colorado’s Western Slope. It’s mid-October, so the days start out cool, warm up for a bit, and the night time temps are about in the upper 30’s to 40’s.
At the beginning of our late-morning stoll on the property, I found what appears to be a mixed-breed insect heading towards a cedar tree from under the back deck.
It’s about 1.5″ – 2″ long, and has a head like a very giant ant or grasshopper, its 6 legs are similar to bean sprouts but look like beetle legs, and its abdomen looks like that of a wasp. It does not appear to have been injured or mutilated (missing wings, etc.).
Would you happen to have seen one of these before or know what it is?
November 2, 2010
Hi Jessica,
We are sorry we did not respond to your original letter. As our automated response indicates, we are unable to respond to all of the mail that we receive. Now that you know that this is a Potato Bug, you can use our search engine to find letters from our archive, or you can scroll down the list of categories on the home page until you reach Potato Bugs to see all the letters we have compiled in that location. You can also find Potato Bugs in our Top 10 tag.