toe-biter, millpond

On a twilight walk, I had company: my grandson. I had told him about the otters at the millpond, and together—two eyes being better than one—we scanned the still and cold late-afternoon waters for the telltale V of a swimming, mostly aquatic mammal. There was, however, nothing breaking the surface, so I also did a scan of the shoreline. As I looked down by my feet, I noticed a familiar, flat, creeping shape, perhaps an inch long, working its very slow and deliberate way along a decaying leaf. It was too small for a Giant Water Bug, those ferocious insects known as "toe biters." It also lacked the fiercesome, highly modified first pair of legs that members of the Lethocerus clan use to clamp on to prey before delivering a lethal injection of paralytic and internal-organ-dissolving molecules. (These are, for humans, highly painful, but not overly damaging.) My guess, based on the analysis of the photo, is that this true bug belongs to the Belastoma genus: smaller hemipterans that are less-likely-to-bite-our-species, but still a force to be reckoned with and avoided by wetlands critters. We didn't attempt to pick it up.