bugs – Page 18

Small-scale biodiversity

At Maplewood Bog, in the clearing where we have our banding station set up, there is a large patch of bright yellow wildflowers. I think these are Woodland Sunflowers, Helianthus strumosus, a relative of the common giant sunflowers often planted in gardens or as crops for their seeds, although there are a few members of the genus Helianthus that look similar. They are lovely, bright, cheerful flowers that add quite a bit of colour to the meadows and hillsides in the region. In most areas I just see them in small patches, but at Maplewood, and more specifically at the banding spot, they cover a broad expanse of the grassy clearing.

In between my net checks (we alternate, I do one then Dan does the next, which gives us time to band any birds we collect or have a snack if we need), I’ve taken to poking around the meadow to see what’s new. A couple of visits ago I found this spider tucked in one of the flowers. I’m still not sure of the species, although it appeared to be a male because of the large appendages out front (pedipalps, used in mating). There was another on a nearby flower. Intrigued, I started checking other flowers to see if I could find more of the spiders. I didn’t, but I turned up some other interesting critters.

sun1 — Dogbane Beetle, Chrysochus auratus

I decided to see just how many species of invertebrate I could find on the sunflowers, either using the plants for food or simply as substrate for resting. Here’s a collection of most of the other stuff I found during our last two visits (I missed a few species that were too quick for the camera). I haven’t identified many of the species, because there were a lot of them, but have included IDs for a few.

There’s a lot more happening out there than you might first suspect! Take a moment to slow down and look more closely, you might be surprised at what you find.

sun2 — Wasp mimic flower fly, poss. Sphaerophoria sp.

sun3 — Tarnished Plant Bug, Lygus lineolaris

sun6 — Tumbling Flower Beetle, poss. Mordella sp.

sun8 — sweat bee, poss. Augochlora or Augochlorella

sun12 — long-horned bee, poss. Melissodes sp.

sun13 — Red-blue Checkered Beetle, Trichodes nutalli

sun20 — Bee mimic flower fly, Eristalis transversa

sun26 — skipper sp., poss. Dun Skipper, Euphyes vestris

sun27 — Longhorned beetle, poss. Graphisurus fasciatus

sun28 — Pearl Crescent, Phyciodes tharos

sun30 — Sedge Sprite, Nehalennia irene, and Tarnished Plant Bug, Lygus lineolaris

sun32 — A common colour pattern in beetles; poss. Asclera sp.?

sun31 — Bluet, poss. Northern Bluet, Enallagma cyathigerum

sun36 — Baby spiderlings, maybe harvestmen youngsters? Were near adult, above.

Scheduled post: Dragonfly patrol

Normally when we go out on our MAPS visits I try to remember to take a deerfly patch, a sticky piece of tape that affixes to the back of your hat and traps the deerflies when they land on your head. This weekend, when we visited Rock Ridge, I forgot to grab one. I figured I was in for a long day of tolerating deerflies, but I discovered I had some unexpected help. As I walked along the paths, dragonflies would leave their perches and zip up to snag one of the circling (and somewhat oblivious, it seems) deerflies out of the air from beside my head. It was neat to hear the rustling of dragonfly wings as they darted by my ear. I didn’t think to keep count, but there were probably a dozen dragonflies that swept by and snatched a deerfly from the crowd about my head. Above is an Eastern Pondhawk, Erythemis simplicicollis, and below a Slaty Skimmer, Libellula incesta, enjoying their freshly caught meals.

Scheduled post: Moving day!

Today was moving day! If everything went well (which, fingers crossed, it did), Raven is one happy puppy. The cats, most likely, are not so happy, but they’ll settle in quickly to their new surroundings. It will take Dan and I a little while to get completely unpacked and settled in, but once the last box is put away we’ll be happy, too. And I’ll especially be happy to return that truck to the rental office. At 26 feet, that thing is a beast!

I couldn’t think of a catchy way to tie this in with the first photo, so I won’t. I found this insect at Rock Ridge this week. I’ve only ever seen one other, which I’d spotted at my parents’ old house in Halton County. It’s a scorpionfly (family Panorpidae), its name obviously taken from the similarity of the curled tail to the desert invertebrates. In North America, scorpionflies are only found in the east. Their habitat can be quite variable, from woodlands to grassy fields, often but not always near open water or seeps. They’re usually seen low, a few feet off the ground, resting on leaves. They use that long “beak” to scavenge dead or dying insects, though sometimes will take nectar from flowers. Despite their appearance, scorpionflies do not sting – the bulbous end to their curled tail is used in mating.

Garden beetles

We’ve hit the moving crunch. Our moving truck is booked for Tuesday, though I plan to call tomorrow morning to see if we might be able to pick it up at closing tomorrow, instead of opening on Tuesday (it’s all the same to them, as far as rental potential – they don’t lose any business by giving it to us when they lock up Monday night). That would allow us a few extra hours to load it so we wouldn’t have as much to do the day of.

Although our internet won’t officially be disconnected till either late Monday or Tuesday morning, I probably won’t have any free time for blogging again until after we’re moved in. We’re not sure when our internet will be hooked up at the new house, they seem to put you on an order list and then give you a call a few days in advance once they know when they can fit you in. We hope it might be by the end of the week, though there’s the potential for it to be later than that.

Because I won’t be online to be able to post during that period, I thought I would schedule a few short posts to go up in my absence. These will be just a couple of photos each, a week-long Monday Miscellany. Fingers crossed that I’m back on the web quickly.

Today’s photos are of a bunch of beetles that I found hanging about my garden recently. This first one is Clytus ruricola. I noticed it when I was loading some plants in to the car to drop off at the new house this afternoon. I’m not sure what plant it was on, I just happened to spot it after it had fallen off and was crawling around the floor. Thinking it was a wasp, I left the door open and hoped it would leave. When I came back with the next plant it was at the edge of the seat and tumbled out to the ground.

That’s when I noticed it wasn’t a wasp. It’s an excellent mimic, however, right down to the way it moves. Most beetles move in a relatively fluid motion, but this one was very jerky, in a perfect imitation of how a wasp moves. Had me fooled! The species is found through the northeast in May through July. Its host trees are decaying hardwoods such as maples.

This one is Trigonarthris proxima, a flower longhorn in the subfamily Lepturinae. I found it while admiring my garden one morning, sitting on the Sweet Williams. The flower longhorns, as their name implies, are often come to flower blossoms to eat the pollen.

This final one was also on the Sweet Williams. I flipped back and forth through my Kaufman Insects (the only guide not yet packed away) and investigated possible genera on BugGuide.net, and finally found a match among the flower longhorns as well (not terribly surprising). Apparently with this group the broad “shoulders” where the thorax meets the wings and the tapering toward the end of the abdomen are characteristic field marks (it’s very pronounced in the species in the second photo, but the angle that I took the photo at doesn’t show it). This species is Analeptura lineola. The adults are around from May to August. The larvae are associated with a variety of hardwoods.

It’s a bug-eat-bug world

Over the last few weeks I’ve collected up quite a number of photos of predator-prey interactions in the invertebrate world. I’ve been doing a bit of “housecleaning” in my computer’s file folders, going back and revisiting photos I took at the beginning of June and trying to sort things out into some semblance of an organized filing system (the jury’s still out on how effective it actually is). I came across these and thought I’d throw them all into a post together.

Most of the photos could actually be “it’s a spider-eat-bug world”. Jumping spiders, such as this one, are one of the groups I see most often with prey. Perhaps this is partially because they’re one of the groups I see more often in general. Perhaps it has to do with their method of hunting (since they don’t use webs, they have to hold on to their prey).

Spiders are like flies for me – if I can put it into a general family, I feel I’ve done good. There are a few distinctive species, by by and large a lot of them look the same to me. The large, forward-facing eyes and stocky build identify it as a jumping spider, family Salticidae. My best guess for this is a member of the genus Eris, maybe Eris militaris, the Bronze Jumper, aka Bronze Lake Jumper, which seems to be a fairly common and widespread species. It’s eating a cricket. I spotted it a couple of weeks ago on an open rock at Rock Ridge.

On the same visit, I snapped this photo. It’s of an unidentified clubtail, munching away at a deer fly. The dragonfly had snagged the fly out of the air as it buzzed about my head, and then settled on the rocks only a few feet away to enjoy it. It’s too bad you can’t train the dragonflies to buzz around your head patrolling for deer flies.

This spider also has a deer fly, but it didn’t catch it out of the air. I’d been wearing that sticky tape that you put on the back of your hat, which snags the deer flies when they land on it. However, it seems to decrease in efficiency as it fills up, so I’d been pulling the caught flies off the tape and tossing them on to the rock. I can’t bring myself to crush them with my fingers, but as I pulled them off often a wing would remain stuck to the tape (it’s very effective stuff), and the spider snagged one of the flightless flies. I think it might be a type of wolf spider, many species of which are hunters rather than web-builders.

Another one of those discarded flies got picked up by this ant. The fly was easily twice the size of the ant, but she was marching along with it like it weighed nothing at all. She couldn’t even really see where she was going, and I wonder if she was following a pheromone trail or if she was just wandering blindly.

Another jumping spider, this one spotted on the trunk of a tree with an unidentified fly prey. It could be a female Maevia inclemens, Dimorphic Jumper, which seem to have that pale abdomen with two red stripes. The males, true to the species’ name, are either black or grayish, with white legs.

And the last one is of the Goldenrod Crab Spider, Misumena vatia, that has been sitting in the Allium in my garden. One day when I checked on it, she had caught something. That something was a bee, possibly a mason bee (genus Osmia) of some sort. My favourite part of this photo is that you can see the bee’s tongue still hanging out, the tapered, orange-tipped appendage hanging from its head.