Intermission #6 Chrysoperia carnea - LACEWING

This is a Common Green Lacewing.
It is the adult of a very beneficial larva. From head to wing end it is about 1.5 cm or  5/8 inches long. They are so VERY delicate looking! The larva eat lots of aphids and other pests like caterpillars on cabbage, potatoes and other plants in the garden. They are rather fragile looking adults but do a great service to us in the garden. This is one to encourage! And it is beautiful too!

Chrysopidae:

The Neuroptera, with about 4,500 described species, make up only a tiny fraction of the insects. The Chrysopidae, the largest family within the Neuroptera, consists of approximately 1500 species in 90 genera.

Identification: Soft-bodied insects with shiny, copper-colored eyes, long thread-like antennae, and transparent wings.
Habitat: Common in grass and weeds and on the foliage of trees and shrubs.
Food: Some adults are predators, others take liquids such as honeydew, and some take pollen.?
Life Cycle: Eggs are characteristically stalked. Larvae are highly predatory, mostly on aphids and are often called aphidlions. The larvae pupate in silken cocoons that are generally attached to the underside of leaves

Adult Green Lacewings have a number of defenses, among them a chemical stench they emit from special glands situated in their thorax. One component of the compound is skatole, well known as one of the smelly substances in mammal feces. It is presumed this odor deters predators.  (I have never personally smelled anything, but I'm not physically attacking them, either, and they don't discharge their stink bombs.)

Lacewings face danger when in flight, chiefly from bats and spider webs.  both male and female are acoustically sensitive to the frequencies used by bats in echo location, and are able to take evasive action while being pursued.

They also have a strategy for escaping spider webs: they are so light that when they blunder into a web, they often do not create enough vibration to alert the spider.

Instead of struggling as most insects do, the lacewing carefully works itself out by biting through the strands holding its legs and antennae.

Then, when it is stuck only by its wings, the creature becomes completely immobile, letting gravity do all the work. Slowly, the lacewing will slide downwards out of the web.  It is able to do so only because the tiny hairs on the wings prevent the sticky spider silk from actually contacting the wings' surface.