Back in April, we had hundreds of these small orange shelled bugs show up on our back patio. They were all dead. I had no idea what they were and when I tried looking up bugs, I failed to identify them. Recently, while trying to identify the bugs flying around our tomato plants, I came across a site that identified them (http://www.whatsthatbug.com/2008/11/30/lawn-shrimp-4/).

They’re about a centimeter long, and they come out of the lawn and ground cover when it rains to escape drowning. Then, they dry out very quickly. Kind of like earthworms. They tend to flourish when the grass is over-watered, which is definitely the situation we found the lawn in when we first bought it. We scaled back on the watering after we bought the house, and so hopefully we won’t see these critters next year.