Anita363's photostream  

Can anyone confirm the ID? Found these handsome little guys under bark of a dead Japanese Maple limb in winter. Assuming I've got the ID right, only the 5th record of this sp. on BugGuide, & the only one north of Virginia. 4.7 mm.

An entire new insect order for my collection. Under bark of a dead Japanese Maple branch. The red are immature stages, the black adult.

Turned over an old landscaping timber & found these growing from the bottom.

This is a firefly larva and matches pics on BugGuide of the Black Firefly (Lucidota atra); I've also found pupae of that species (which glow!) in leaf litter a couple of meters from here and seen adults as well. Found while digging up the remaining rotten roots of the elderly dogwood uprooted during the October snowstorm, but unable to ascertain whether they came from the tree or from leaf litter. 16 mm.

We lost an elderly dogwood (Cornus florida) to uprooting in the Great October Snowstorm of '11. When I went to yank the remaining roots, it became obvious why: the main structural roots were all hollowed out. I found this huge larva crawling around nearby. It does match root borer (Prionus) larvae, and Prionus laticollis is the only sp reported on BugGuide from NJ or neighboring states, so I'm going to go with that for now. We saw an adult this past summer, so I was primed to recognize it: there can't be too many things around that are this big!