Woolly Apple Aphids - a Continuation of the WTF?! Post

Today, the day my camera died, and our walk through the eastern most area of Second Marsh, just past the GM plant in Oshawa. However, before my camera gave up completely :-( it had two revivals. Luckily as we saw the most incredible and freakishly odd yet adorable creature we've ever seen.

As we walked through the path, we spotted what appeared to be these neon periwinkle blue lavender coloured little tiny flying creatures. They appeared to float lackadaisically through the air. I reached out my arm to catch one on my black sleeve and here I saw this tiny little fuzzy moth like flying insect. Little pieces of itself seemed to come off and stay on my sweat top cuff as it crawled a bit along the material. They appear to be almost dying. I tried getting one shot with my camera in between its death throes but they are difficult to photograph. This is probably due to their minuscule size as well as the fact that they get overblown easily because of their almost white value.

Here is the previous post I made about them, not realizing what this clump of fuzzy white stuff all over a tree branch was. Turns out it is a huge hoard of these aphids. Incredible! In my life I have never seen or heard about these insects. Though they are pests they are adorable and fascinating to see with the naked eye.

To add to the images in my previous post, this photo, which completely freaked me out as I opened it on my computer and upon closer inspection realized that the petals are not dead dried Pink Cone Flower petals, but are the flowers' petals covered in thousands of these aphids!

Here is another interesting article on these aphids, on Wordpress.