This butterfly is easily recognized by its habit of rubbing its wing surfaces together while perching upside-down on a twig or flower. Spare the fat green hornworms you see on your garden plants and you'll be rewarded when they grow up into handsome, nectar-feeding adults. The caterpillars will eat nearly anything, so you can relocate them away from your tomato vines without starving them. Many plants owe their propagation to the continual but somewhat sloppy collection efforts of these busy seed eaters. Their nests may be identified as much by the ring of flower crumbs around the openings as by the bustling activity of large red ants marching to and fro.
Harvester ants make up the majority diet of horned lizards .
Its specialized fore-legs are held folded and still until an unwary insect wanders past the camouflaged predator. Mantids are a gardener's friends, eating huge numbers of pests and reducing the need for garden chemicals. On the dunes, they often appear, as in this photo, amid the foliage of the bladderpod . These extremely odd-looking insects are usually encountered when turning over loose soil.