Photos
Not often we get soils so poor here in the Northeast that all they'll grow is lichen! But I think this open area used to be a claypit. In any case, dig down anywhere in this part of the coastal plain & you get this impenetrable red mineral clay. I know from personal experience: my family moved into a new housing development in a nearby town when I was a kid, & there was no topsoil at all. This is what our yard looked like, minus the lichen.
ID help welcome.
Cute little fellers, even if one of the little so-and-sos did get my butternut squash last year.
Not listed for Middlesex County on NJOdes, but IDed by Jim Bangma -- Z-shaped thoracic stripe, among other things. Apparently he doesn't update the range maps on the basis of photo submissions, though, because it's still not listed in Middlesex County.
I thought I posted this a long time ago, but apparently it slipped through the cracks.
Scuddieria nymphs, I believe. Bodies ~5 mm long.
The vernal pools were just teeming with life, including these cool little branchiopod crustaceans (~2 cm long). www.flickr.com/photos/anitagould/8690475495/in/photostream shows a shot in the hand.
There are 2 sp of Eubranchipus in NJ: E. vernalis & E. holmanii (nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/P1002R0O.pdf). The latter seems to be much less common, & has been proposed for listing as a species of special concern in NJ. I'm therefore guessing this is the former, but don't know how to tell them apart, or even whether it's possible to tell the females apart.
The vernal pools were just teeming with life, including these cool little branchiopod crustaceans.
There are 2 sp of Eubranchipus in NJ: E. vernalis & E. holmanii (nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/P1002R0O.pdf). The latter seems to be much less common, & has been proposed for listing as a species of special concern in NJ. I'm therefore guessing this is the former, but don't know how to tell them apart, or even whether it's possible to tell the females apart.
Not too common to find, but the habitat seemed fitting.
The turtle is dry, so the shell looks a bit tan.
24 mm. Found crawling around our bathroom, transported outside on this piece of paper. Watch, it'll be called a House Katydid or somesuch. EDIT: Pine Tree Cricket -- Thank you to Martytdx for the ID.
