Garden Pests and Diseases: Friend or Foe #4, 1 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
bluekat - I'm sorry that I couldn't figure out what your caterpillar was, but I'm glad that it isn't doing too much damage to your borage. Maybe it will turn into something interesting.

Tamara - there are actually a few different kinds of predacious stink bugs in my area. I'm not sure if they would be the same as yours, but here are a few from here.

The first is a spined soldier bug. I've posted a picture of one of these before somewhere - it was the bug I used to show the fat "beak" of a predatory stink bug. It was eating a caterpillar. Here is another picture showing a close-up of the coloration... http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=13660... . I've posted a picture of the nymph before which is rather pretty in coloration, but I'll repost one at the bottom of this post.

Another species doesn't have a common name. It's in the genus Stiretus. Here's the nymph... http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=04880... . And here's the adult... http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=17480... . Here are other shots of adults, but the coloration is totally different... hthttp://bugguide.net/node/view/6434/bgimage . I guess this species varies a lot, and this seems to have the stink bug with the "anchor" that you were talking about above. Here's one... http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/beneficial/s_anchorago08.htm .

Here's another species that we have in the southeastern US... http://bugguide.net/node/view/2716 .

Here's one that occurs in Texas as well as Florida... http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/beneficial/a_grandis.htm . Click on the small pictures to see better ones.

There are probably others as well.

Here's the detailed picture of an older spined soldier bug nymph that I promised. There's another in this thread showing a younger nymph eating a leaf beetle (it's just above bluekat's borage caterpillar).