Thread: Insect Bite
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Old 27-07-2010, 04:04 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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Originally Posted by No Name View Post
shaped approx like a tiny moth or grasshopper
Methinks a moth looketh not a whit like a grasshopper. Except inasmuch that both are insects, as opposed, say to a spider or a crustacean. Though the woodlouse, a crustacean, is frequently mistaken for a beetle. But flying with wings is a bit of a giveaway that it is an insect, since insects are the only invertibrates that can fly with wings. Albeit that sand-fleas can jump a long way, and not many people realise that they are crustaceans; some spiders use their silk to fly like a kite, and probably some other tiny invertibrates just float on the wind as part of the "aerial plankton".

But in sum, if it looks to you equally like a moth or grasshopper, then I suggest that to you it would look equally like a true bug or a beetle or lacewing or a flea or a blackfly. Since many of these things come in a wide range of colours and patterns, telling us its colour is pretty irrelevant. I would suggest you have not really given us any kind of suitable information to identify the bugger.

If you were to ask me in general "what's rather small and gives you nasty nip around the feet and ankles in the garden", I would say most likely some kind of blackfly. But there are also some "true bugs", ie hemiptera, that bite (bed bugs are a "true bug", and are closely related to flower bugs, which are common in the garden), and that's what I suspect when I pick up a bite while visiting the raspberries. Froghoppers, which are big jumpers, are also true bugs, so there is jumping in the family.

Someone mentions thrips. Apparently thrips are a bit stupid and occasionally bite people because they mistake us for the plant material many of them eat. But I'd doubt they give a nasty nip and I doubt they'd do anything resembling jumping. Also most thrips are 1mm or less, so yours is rather on the large side for one, and you'd have difficulty discerning any stripes on a thrips without a microscope.