And it's also not a termite. Even though every time I saw one of these little winged insects, I thought they were termites.
Have you seen this
bug?
For years, I had been misidentifying these small flying
insect as termites. Small, black, long
wings folded down the back. I would see
them occasionally in the house, especially on warm summer evenings. Just one or two, here and there. Nothing like a swarm. Just a wayward bug that found its way inside,
attracted by the lights and aided by an open door.
I didn’t give them much thought until earlier this summer,
when I started to see a lot more of them, particularly around my front door. Still,
it didn’t seem like a swarm, exactly.
And I couldn’t really tell where they were coming from. They
seemed to be attracted to the porch light, and many of them died right there on
the porch. Still thinking they were
termites, I pointed out a few of the dead ones to my regular exterminator (*gasp* the Buglady uses an
exterminator?! Yes. It turns out, the Buglady doesn’t like ants
in her house any more than you do. So I
have the outside of the house sprayed, and it keeps the ants from coming in.)
Anyway, the ant guy looked at the dead “termites”, and
probably agreed that’s what they were, because he didn’t correct me, and in
fact, recommended I call their Termite department. (yes, the Buglady doesn’t want termites
chewing up her house any more than you do, either, so I have an annual termite
inspection, too.)
Two days later, still experiencing the numerous
termite-looking bugs hanging out, and dying around my front porch, I showed
them to the Termite Inspector, who promptly identified them as Winged
Ants. Not destructive, no problem, and
the pesticide that the regular exterminator guy was using around the outside of
the house was obviously killing them.
So, we’re done.
But I wasn’t done. I
had seen winged ants before, and I recalled their body shape was different from
these dead porch insects. So, I decided
to search online. I discovered that the
subject “winged ant or termite?” was actually pretty common. And there are plenty of comparative
illustrations. Here is an example of one
of them.
Image from
animalpicturesociety.com
Notice the ant has a distinct bend in its antennae, a
slender “waist”, and different sized wings, where the termite has non-bending
antennae, a full waist, and same-sized antennae. OK, my porch bugs still looked more like the
termites to me. But if they weren’t
termites, what were they??? Back online
I went…
One of my favorite local insect ID sites is
Arthropods of
Orange County, CA, and it was there that I found my bug. Not a termite OR a winged ant. It was something I had never heard of: a Black Webspinner,
Oligotoma nigra. Once I had
a name to put with the face, I was able to find out more about them:
The females are wingless, and spend their lives in the
soil. All the Webspinners we see flying
around and attracted to lights are therefore males. These little guys live just under the surface
of the soil, or under rocks and logs, and feed on dead plant material, as well
as moss and lichen. They create silk
tunnels from special glands in their forelegs.
Both adults and juveniles are able to do this, and their web tunnels can
be quite extensive when there are a lot of individuals living close to each
other and “adding to” the webs of parents and siblings, creates a colony of
sorts.
