bugs – Page 20

Tuesday Miscellany

I’m a day late with my weekly miscellaneous wrap-up. We had some internet issues yesterday that took most of the day to sort out, which prevented me from doing anything online. It’s somewhat eye-opening to see just how much time is spent on the internet – or how much one relies on it for reference – by way of how inconvenienced one is when it’s no longer available.

The forest has completely greened up over the last few weeks, and the landscape around here is very much beginning to resemble the high-summer state that we first saw it in when we arrived last summer. It’s beginning to look like we’ll be moving at the beginning of July, not quite a month shy of the date we moved in last year. I have to admit, I am really going to miss being on the water. This house has spoiled me, and despite having spent the first 96% of my life not on waterfront, I suddenly feel like I can’t bear to move away from it. However, our prospective new house reminds me a lot of where I grew up, and I’m sure I’ll feel right at home there, too, once we’re moved and settled.

Our landlord came by this afternoon to mow the lawn, which Dan and I had been dutifully ignoring. We have no lawnmower, in part because we both prefer to have long-grassed “meadows” rather than lawns, which are much more beneficial to wildlife. I personally think they’re more interesting to look at than a mowed lawn, too. However, long grass does have a certain unkempt feel that can put off many prospective house-buyers. I was a bit sad to see it mowed, because the wildflowers in it were just starting to appear and bloom. One of the first to come out were these Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) flowers. If everyone’s lawn turned into these when left to grow, do you think anyone would mow it?

Our neighbour up the lake started some seeds indoors this winter, and was extremely generous, sharing some of her extras with me for my “garden”. Among the plants she gave me were these johnny jump-ups, members of the violet family (the common name has been applied to a number of species, but I think these are probably Viola tricolor). They’re just beginning to bloom, the first one opened yesterday. As I was inspecting the plants one day earlier this week, something caught my eye. Can you see it?

It’s a cluster of small, pale green eggs. I assume these are lepidopteran eggs, but what species, or even whether moth or butterfly, I don’t know. There are a few species that feed on violets as caterpillars – several species of fritillary target violets exclusively, for instance, or the Giant Leopard Moth which we saw caterpillars of around here last fall. I’m planning to let them hatch, and then when the caterpillars come out moving them into another container with some violet leaves and seeing if they’ll eat those. If so, I’ll try to raise them that way; if not, I guess I’ll reluctantly give them back (some of) my johnny jump-ups. Hopefully the plants will have grown up a bit more by then.

I spotted this Goldenrod Crab Spider, Misumena vatia, “hiding” out among the flowers of my Allium. It was so well hidden, it immediately caught my eye when I looked at the flowers (as I do every day to admire them). I’m not sure she was having any luck in catching anything, as I never saw her with a meal… but given that she doesn’t make a web, perhaps she ate at other times of the day.

Speaking of eating… Last weekend I bought some Japanese Lanterns, Physalis alkekengi, perennials that produce really neat orange “paper” seed pods in the fall. I remember, growing up, my mom used to have a patch that we’d sometimes collect the “lanterns” from for flower arrangements. I always really liked them, so when I stumbled across them in the nursery I couldn’t resist buying a pack. When I got home I planted them into a nice big pot and set them in the sun. As I do with all my plants, every day I’d check on them to see how they were doing. A few days ago I noticed they had been found by a few beetles, who were sitting in a nook in the leaves. I didn’t think much of it, until yesterday I noticed that holes were starting to appear in the leaves. Hey! Those are my plants! Sure enough, it turns out the beetles (left) are Three-lined Potato Beetles, Lema daturaphila. They favour plants in the family Solanaceae. And guess what family Japanese Lanterns belong to? I’m debating whether to just let them munch, or to try to remove them (repeatedly; I assume they’ll return). So far the damage seems to be restricted to just a couple of leaves on a couple of plants.

With him is a Clavate Tortoise Beetle, Plagiometriona clavata. There are also two of these on my little plants. They also eat plants of the Solanaceae. Now it’s starting to get a bit crowded…

This morning Dan and I went out to do a bit of final site scouting for the first of our three MAPS stations, Hemlock Lake. Although it wasn’t strictly necessary for me to tag along (I won’t really be “needed” until the actual banding begins, whereupon you really need two people in order to operate efficiently and safely), I chose to come so I could help out a bit, but also so that I could do a bit of early-morning birding. I so rarely get up at dawn these days, by the time I’m awake and going, the birdsong is starting to slow down for the day. I take Raven out later in the afternoon usually, hardly the best time of day for birding.

It turned out to be an unusually quiet morning, possibly because it was also a rather cool morning by recent standards. However, we did still encounter a good variety of nice species, including the Chestnut-sided Warbler, above, and the Northern Waterthrush, below, both of whom will be breeding at the site this summer. Who knows, in a few weeks these guys may even be sporting a shiny new band.

The wolf among the flock

Heading down to the dock this afternoon I noticed this large aggregation of caterpillars on the trunk of a relatively young tree. The caterpillars are Forest Tent Caterpillars, Malacosoma disstria, related to the Eastern Tent Caterpillars, Malacosoma americanum, that are the stereotypical tent-builders commonly associated with the name. Whereas Easterns tend to be found in more open areas, associated with successional species such as chokecherries, crabapples, apples, Black Cherry, and other members of that family, Forests, as the name implies, are found in more mature growth, and are generally associated with maples, basswood, oak, and other forest trees.

The caterpillars are easily told apart by the pale line down their back, which is solid in Easterns and broken in Forests. But perhaps the most distinct difference is that Easterns build large tents to live in, while Forests do not; they will congregate together on leaves or trunks, and they leave silk trails along their foraging routes, just as Easterns do, but they don’t build complex silk structures (though they may weave a silken mat that they sit on).

This makes them something of a sitting duck (or ducks), exposed out in the open. The Easterns can retreat into their nest, and spend their non-foraging time under the protective layers of the silk, but the Forests don’t have that option. There’s not much they can do about predation from birds or the like (although I don’t know about the presence of urcticating hairs or unpalatable taste), but they have evolved a mechanism to protect themselves from parasitic flies.

Last spring I discovered a caterpillar with a fly egg behind its head. These larvae, when they hatch, burrow into the caterpillar and feed off it from the inside (without killing it right away). The flies lay their egg at the back of the head where the caterpillar can’t remove it. To say that the caterpillar “wants” to avoid being laid on is an understatement, and so they have evolved to twitch their front ends rapidly from side to side when there’s a threat. I caught these ones twitching; the photos were taken at 3 frames per second (so the above series represents one second).

It was only after I’d run off a series of photos of the twitching caterpillars that I happened to notice the fly, though she’s there in that top photo, too, if you look carefully (it would have to be a she if it were laying eggs). It was wandering along the edge of the caterpillar colony, and the caterpillars were all freaked out, twitching back and forth like mad. Surprisingly, though, only about half of them were doing this, the other half were just sitting still. Perhaps saving their energy, since the fly wasn’t actually targeting them?

There is a particular species of fly that specifically targets Forest Tents: Sarcophaga aldrichi, often called the Friendly Fly for its habit of landing on people without biting (probably interested in the salt in your sweat). Friendly Flies are the number one form of population control for Forest Tents, and their numbers fluctuate in sync with the caterpillars’. In years of high numbers of caterpillars, the Friendly Flies will be abundant, and some people have given them the name Government Fly on the (erroneous) assumption that the government had released the flies to control the caterpillars.

It would logically make sense that this fly wandering about a Forest Tent colony and freaking all the caterpillars out would be a Friendly Fly, except that it doesn’t match any of the photos I’ve found of that species. Flies are one of those groups that really throw me for a loop when trying to figure out an identification, so I can’t even place it in a family reliably. I’ve submitted the photos to BugGuide.net and am waiting to see if someone there is able to ID it.

At one point the fly got a little too close to a couple of very upset caterpillars, and they turned on it, appearing to bite at it. The fly squirmed through their attack and moved away. I didn’t see it make any moves to deposit an egg on a host while I was there, it mostly stuck to the edges of the colony. I finally accidentally disturbed it and caused it to fly away as I was trying to brace my hand on the tree trunk to support my somewhat heavy camera/lens combination (it didn’t help that it was very windy out today). Considering how flighty most flies are, though, this one was fairly docile.

I’ll have to keep an eye on that tent caterpillar colony over the next few days, and see whether the fly either returns, or I notice any caterpillars carrying little white spheres behind their heads. It’s interesting just to encounter a particular species and to know something about their life history, but it’s even cooler to come across a behaviour or species interaction like this.

Monday Miscellany

This weekend was spent visiting my family, at my parents’ new place east of Brockville. I packed up Raven and headed out on Friday, and then returned home late today. It was a tri-purpose gathering, combining a belated Mother’s Day with two birthdays (mine and my sister’s, which are two days apart, usually on Mother’s Day weekend). My entire immediate family was there, an uncommon event these days as we’re spread across nearly half of southern Ontario, with close to 450 km (280 miles) separating the two furthest people (the closest two are still an hour’s drive apart). It was a really nice weekend, full of family and good times, but I must admit that in four days I didn’t do a smidge of naturalizing. I barely did any birding, even; aside from about 15 minutes spent with the binoculars Saturday afternoon, my only birding was what I noticed singing or caught a glimpse of while wandering around. My camera spent the weekend in its bag.

So my Monday Miscellany is on the short side this week. The first photo is from mid-week. The Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, including this stunning male, have been making regular trips to the feeders. I’ve been seeing more of the females than the males, although the males can be heard regularly singing in the vicinity. They’re big fans of the sunflower seeds, so we’ve been continuing to fill our feeders even though the winter birds have all mostly departed. I always look forward to the return of these guys to the feeders in spring.

The Ruby-throated Hummingbirds have settled in to the area, I think. My mom had at least two females visiting her feeder, and I heard a male doing a U-display at one point. I have yet to see a female here, but then again, I was away all weekend. It astounds me how fast these little birds can beat their wings when flying (an average of 50 beats per second, but substantially higher in certain situations). Watching them hover in the air as they pause to scan their surroundings is like magic. They should be starting to nest soon; also magic? the amazingly tiny nests they build, and the even more amazingly tiny eggs they lay in them.

On the particularly rainy day we had last week, I noticed this little guy sitting on the small sumac tree that’s near the feeders in front of our house. He would feed, then sit on the branch for a while, then return to feed, then back to the branch. I guess with the weather so cool and wet, he didn’t want to waste a lot of energy flying all over the place, so he stuck close to a guaranteed food source.

On my birthday Dan and I went out in the afternoon to visit one of the MAPS sites. It’s the site we have to paddle in to, and at the launch point where we were putting the boat in to the water, I noticed a large patch of vibrantly coloured bushes. The area where they were growing seemed to be under water, and it was hard to tell if the plants were victims of higher-than-normal water levels, or if they were swamp or other wetland bushes. Their colours, and those of many of the small saplings growing among them, really reminded me of the autumn landscape.

These could almost have gone in to the “Wings of the day” W week post. I’ve noticed both dragon- and damselflies to be becoming much more abundant recently. The above, a Springtime Darner (Basiaeschna janata), and below, a Common Baskettail (Epitheca cynosura), were both observed along a stretch of dirt road slightly to the north. They were flying along the edge of the road, in the low, open area between the hard-packed dirt and the forest. Many dragonflies are territorial, and will patrol up and down a stretch of road, path, forest or pond edge, or other open area, as they watch for intruders and look for females. Indeed, these two were doing just that, sweeping up and down the road and then periodically landing on a tree or twig to sun and “recharge”.

W Week – Wings of the day

White-striped Black, Trichodezia albovittata

To wrap up my W week I thought I’d post the counterpart of yesterday’s Wings of the Night: whereas yesterday was moths, today is butterflies. Well, mostly. Two butterflies and a diurnal moth. The latter is above, with Raven’s foot for scale. That wasn’t actually intentional; I noticed this little black-and-white lep fluttering along the roadside, and I had Raven sit-stay while I chased it around in circles waiting for it to land. It gravitated toward Raven’s black fur, warmed by the sun, and tried landing in a couple of spots on her haunches before settling in front of her paw. Even there, it didn’t stay long, just long enough for me to snap a couple of blurry shots as it trembled its wings.

It’s a White-striped Black, a diurnal species of wet areas within deciduous woodlands. Its larval foodplant is jewelweed, aka touch-me-not, part of the genus Impatiens (though I’m not sure that it would be interested in the ones you grow in your garden). Common, it can be seen most of the year, across most of the continent, from Alaska to California to the Atlantic.

Spring Azure, Celastrina ladon

Not far up the road I discovered this beautiful little blue guy. Although I regularly seem little blue butterflies flitting about in the spring, they hardly ever seem to come to rest anywhere, and when they do, you barely have time to get your camera to your eye before they’re off again. This was the first rather obliging individual I’ve encountered this spring, and the closer look allowed me to identify it as a Spring Azure. Another species that’s found nearly continent-wide, it’s generally associated with edges or openings in forests.

Spring Azures, Celastrina ladon

Larva are associated with dogwood, meadowsweet and New Jersey Tea, but the adults will nectar on a reasonably wide variety of flowers. I found these ones obsessed with a patch of Sessile Bellwort. They never flew far from it, and when they landed (always with their wings shut, of course), it would always be to visit the flowers on these plants. Interestingly, they spent as much time at the base of the flowers as elsewhere, and I wondered if they were working their proboscis between the petals to get at the nectar rather than coming up the long way from the mouth of the flower.

Olympia Marble, Euchloe olympia

And finally, Olympia Marble. This is a species I had never seen before; in fact, I had never seen any marble before, so when I came across these while out hiking with Dan through one of our MAPS sites, I had no idea what it was. The patterning on the underside of the hindwing is distinct, and beautiful, a rich yellow-green. Their eyes were coloured to match.

They’re found in open woodlands and open habitats such as grassy knolls and meadows, and alvars and sand dunes. Add to that treed rock barrens, which is where I found one pair of these. It was the male that caught my eye, as he fluttered in the air around a stationary female who sat on the top of a wildflower stem. After a few moments he came to rest beside her, and then after a few moments more he took off and flew away. The female, meanwhile, continued to sit there, and I was able to get quite close to her. The first photo was actually of a second individual that I encountered along an open road allowance later that afternoon.

Presumably the male mated with the female and then headed off, leaving the female to lay her eggs on her own. The species is fairly specific to Hedge Mustard and various types of rockcress. The adults fly in late spring and then die, leaving behind just their progeny to carry on. Interestingly, the eggs aren’t laid on the leaves of the plant, but rather the flower buds, with a single egg per bud. The caterpillars, when they hatch out, eat the flowers and seeds but ignore the leaves.

For more wings, of both night and day but all lacking clubbed antennae, pop over to NAMBI for the latest edition of The Moth and Me. Although it was due up a couple of days ago, being busy with family has slowed me down so that I didn’t meet the intended deadline. Ah well – better late than never!

W Week – Wings of the night

Io Moth, Automeris io

Okay, so maybe that’s stretching a bit to tie the subject in to W week, but I just had to share some of these moths with you. I’ve continued to do mothing on a fairly regular basis, aside from a brief stretch last week where it was just too chilly or two rainy for mothing to be productive. Things warmed up this week, and a couple of nights ago I set out my sheet and my light trap to see what new stuff was flying.

Well, was it ever a productive evening! I had around five dozen species of macro-moth, the larger species that are easier to identify. I haven’t been spending much time or energy on the micro-moths since they’re usually harder to ID, and I figure it’s probably best to take it in steps. It’s enough work just to learn and remember the big ones, especially when they start coming at you fast and furious (so to speak).

The above moth was the indisputable highlight of the night. Or morning, depending on how you look at it; I found it hanging on to the inside wall of my moth trap. Sometimes these large moths can get rubbed up a little inside the trap as they crawl around the egg cartons (although not so much as to cause harmful damage; it’s mostly just aesthetics that suffer), but this one was in very good shape. It’s an Io Moth, a male. The females have similar patterning but are a browny-red. They’re widespread across eastern North America, and can be found much of the year. Although there’s nothing to give you scale in the photo, he was probably about 10 cm (4 in) across with his wings spread out.

Lemon Plagodis, Plagodis serinaria

Another yellow moth, this one a little smaller (3 cm, 1.25 inch across). It was not the least bit cooperative about a photo, despite a number of attempts (via re-chilling it in the fridge before trying again). Eventually I just gave up and took a photo through the clear plastic container. It’s a lovely one, though, a Lemon Plagodis. Mostly a spring and early summer species, it’s associated with deciduous forests of the northeast.

Modest Furcula, Furcula modesta

There are several species of Furcula; all have these dark bands bordered by orange dots (not as noticeable on this species) on a white background, and a curly dark blue and black thorax. This one, the Modest Furcula, has very thick, very dark bands compared to the others. It’s only just starting to appear right now and will fly for much of the summer. It’s widespread, found in deciduous forests from southern Canada into New England in the east and Arizona in the west.

Modest Furcula, Furcula modesta

The Furculas have this cool habit of curling up and playing dead when disturbed. Presumably it helps with discouraging predators, but it does make it hard to get a photo. In Europe the Furculas are known as Kittens (eg., Modest Kitten), which makes you want to scoop it up and cuddle it. They have such great names for moths over there.

Apical Prominent, Clostera apicalis

The prominents are among my favourite groups of moths, although it’s hard to say exactly why. Perhaps because they’re never found in large numbers, and they all have interesting shapes and colours, they seem special somehow. This is one of a couple that have a similar pattern, with that thick white squiggle at the rear of the wing; I think this one is the Apical Prominent. I love the tail sticking up. Another summer species, it’s found across much of Canada and into bits of northern US, associated with early successional/riparian species such as birch, poplar and willow.

Black Zale, Zale undularis

The Black Zale is a sexy moth. The photo really doesn’t capture the rich deepness of the black. It has an almost velvety feel to it. It’s got the characteristic Zale shape, including a couple of tufts on the back of the thorax, but it’s the only Zale species to be all dark like this. It’s found through most of eastern North America. Up here it’s a spring species but in the south it has a longer flight period.

Pink-barred Pseudeustrotia, Pseudeustrotia carneola

This photo is of one from my trap, but I actually found one this afternoon just sitting on a blade of grass in a field. It’s a small moth with a big name, one of those sorts of Latin names that I need to pause to sound out – Soo-doo-stro-tia. It’s a holarctic species, found through both North America and Eurasia; in the former, it occurs in open fields and meadows and in forest edges and clearings (the latter would be the case with us, since we have no field within sight of my moth trap).

Night-wandering Dagger, Acronicta noctivaga

And finally, I think that this is a Night-wandering Dagger (aren’t most moths night-wandering?), but there are several black-and-white moths with complex markings like this. The key to identification is often looking at whether the wing spots are bordered in white, whether the lines are jagged or rise up on one end, which lines are pale and which are dark, where the dark shading is. The daggers are a group of mostly monochromatic species. Some of them have elaborate markings like this, while others are pale with distinct black dashes at the shoulder and rear edge and sometimes in between.

That’s it for this batch, but I’m sure it won’t be the last!