I found this insect in my driveway yesterday. I live in Northeastern North Dakota. I've never seen anything like this. It has a soft back, didn't appear to have wings, has those large pincher-type things in the front. It was trying to walk, but seems to be injured. I looked online for an hour trying to give it a name, but came up with nothing. any ideas?
It's a giant water bug, probably in the genus Lethocerus. Here are a couple:
http://davesgarden.com/guides/bf/b/Hemiptera/Belostomatidae/none/none/genus/0/
In her Pulitzer-Prize winning book, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard tells of coming across a frog that doesn't jump away as she approaches:
....he was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from him as if snuffed. His skin emptied and dropped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taunt, glistening skin of his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part to his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped, bewildered and appalled....I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one....It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs....It seizes its victims with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs-all but the skin-and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.
Interesting!!
but...YUCK
I'd never seen one of these before, but shortly after I posted this, we saw ANOTHER one just about a block away, on the sidewalk, also struggling for life. After reading about how nasty they can be, I really hope we don't run in to any spunkier ones! I'm wondering why, since they are a "water bug" I'm finding them on the sidewalks? Unless they are left over from the standing water we had after the snow melted. But that was over a month ago.
From a University of Florida website:
During mating season they fly from pond to pond or pool of water. It is during these flights that these insects fly to lights in large numbers, earning their other common name, "electric light bugs".
