Have you tried What's That Bug web site, cebury?? Awesome site.

Patty S.

Here is a link that might be useful: What's That Bug?

oOoOOo whoever runs that site will rue the day that you let me see that link Patty... I have a few hundred photographs of unknown bugs, lol

I have "Garden Insects of North America" but it's really hard to use for this type of thing. Quite good if there's actual insect damage but when they are just flying around... not so helpful

I know. This is such a helpful site, and you can post up your photos and have the bug experts quickly ID your guy. Let us know what it is. I have this interesting fly that is very similar to yours, that likes to land on my avocado leaves. It just sits there. No fruit on my young avos, yet, and I don't see if laying eggs, but if I can snap a pic of it, I'm going to post it on this site, too, to see what it is, and if it's friend/foe/neutral.

Patty S.

Interesting!
The second image in the first row looks very familiar.
I have them on my peppers, and I'm not sure if they're helpful or harmful.
Good luck on the ID's!

Josh

All are flies of one sort or another. Don't think any are predators/parasites.

The top three look like midges, to me. Do you live near a pond or a lake?

Patty: Yeah I've spent many hours on BugGuide.net and WhatsThatBug.com researching with my kids the various little bugs, insects, and critters found around here. They are excellent repositories but are extremely cumbersome to try to use yourself to ID something. The above pics are the first time I've done so and haven't had a reply yet. Going through thousands of images in each family take forever to ID a spider or whatever, even when bugguide at least starts you out based on a specific shape.

Rhizo: Thanks so much! It does appear to be a midge.

The Chironomini midge here looks very close to the middle one of mine above.

>>> Do you live near a pond or a lake?
There is a small estuary about 1 mile (as the wind blows) north of here fed by the San Joaquin River. Other than that, our city is filled with ponding basins everywhere, almost everyone lives within 1 mile of one. Although they are dried up now, the late season rainfall may have left some with enough muck for perfect breeding grounds.

Never seen them before but I know much more about them now. I know the city takes action against the throngs of foreclosed homes with swimming pools serving as breeding grounds for insects. That is, unless the skate borders got to them first.

You're very welcome, cebury. I've seen a few gazillion midges in my day, lol. Most of them are pretty benign.

I think that everyone who is even just a little bit interested in the good and bad insects (and others) around us should own at least one good field guide. They can be helpful in narrowing down an insect to a specific group...maybe making it possible to use What's That Bug a lot more efficiently.

I happen to like the Audubon Society's guide to North American Insects and Spiders, and have recommended it many times.

I should clarify that there IS a citrus midge pest, but that is not what you've pictured. You're safe!

Thanks again Rhizo!

Along the same topic, my citrus always have these spiders in them. They are very common on my trees and ones I see in nurseries, but I may have to pickup that Audobon Society book or perhaps Bugman's guide at the WhatsThatBug site.

{{gwi:603569}}

They are usually the size of a nickel and don't seem to create major webbing for traps, but I've seen smaller spiders residing in messy disorganized webbing. They frequently are guarding dead moths, flies, etc like in this photo (which was quite large, but you can see a medium sized photo by clicking the pic to photobucket):

{{gwi:603570}}

Any ideas?

That's a jumping spider, but I don't know which of the zillions that exist it might be.

Yeah I was going to post again that I figured it was some type of Jumping spider, since it fit the body shape but I didn't want to bring the thread unnecessarily back to the top again.

Interestingly, I've seen hundreds of these spiders over the last few years and they all look identical (except size of course) and just before reading your post I found a totally different one, mostly black like many of the google pics show them.

Thanks Rhizo!