bugs – Page 21

Monday Miscellany

It’s amazing just how fast the trees leaf out once they start. Just two weeks ago I was noting the late afternoon sun glowing through the sprinkling of leaves on the saplings across the road from the house. Now, I can barely make out the neighbour’s house, which was so apparent in winter. By June, I won’t be able to see it at all. All manner of plant life has greened up or is hard at work at it. Some shrubs are completely leafed out, while the tall ash trees are only just starting. Like the creeks that start tumbling over their rocky beds at spring melt, once spring arrived, time seems to have picked up speed and is rushing by.

We’ve had a fair bit of rain over the course of the last week. It seems to have gotten all the wet out of its system now, however, and we’re forecasted to have mostly clear skies the rest of the week (whether it remains that way remains to be seen). Although all that rain was undoubtedly part of the reason behind the green explosion, the animals were less than happy about it. This Blue Jay, for instance, was looking a bit bedraggled as it visited the feeders one afternoon.

The rain has made the ground near our dock rather soggy. As Dan was flipping his boat over one day last week to try to locate a leak that had gotten worse over the winter, he disturbed this guy from the pool of water around the boat. I spent a lot of time debating the identity of this guy. The bright green upper lip and speckled underbelly should make it easy to ID, I figured. I think that it’s a Mink Frog, Rana septentrionalis, but it could also be a Green Frog, Rana clamitans. I couldn’t figure out a definitive ID characteristic that would rule one out based on the photos I have. A Mink Frog would be a “lifer” for me, a species that I’d never encountered previously. In Ontario they tend to be found further north than the GTA where I grew up, but we’d be at the southern edge of their range, here. They’ve been recorded over in the Park. I’m leaning toward Mink because of the small eardrums, dorsal ridges that terminate halfway down the back, and lack of strong barring on the back legs, but I get the impression these are all somewhat variable features.

Before Dan flipped over his boat, he bailed out some of the water. And sitting in the water was this guy. I believe it’s a water bug in the genus Belostoma. It was rather large, about an inch long, and quite active within the container Dan had scooped it into. This group of water bugs are among those where the female lays her eggs on the male’s back in the spring. He “broods” the eggs, keeping them clean of fungus, protecting them from predators, and making sure they’re well oxygenated (by doing “push-ups” at the surface of the water). I’m not sure if the lack of eggs on this one means it’s a female, or just a male that hasn’t been laid on yet. I did notice, however, in examining the photos on my computer, that it’s sporting a bunch of red mites.

I found this strange beetle clinging to a piece of driftwood beside my moth trap one morning. I wasn’t sure if it was alive, as it fell off the wood when I touched it, and sat with its legs curled under it. I set it on a shelf in a vial for a couple of hours as I sorted through my trap and photographed the moths I’d caught. When I returned to it, it was sitting in a different spot in the vial, and its legs appeared to be out. As soon as I picked up the vial again, however, it fell over and its legs curled underneath it again.

I pulled out my trusty Kaufman Guide to Insects (I love that book, have I mentioned that?), and there it was at the bottom of page 193: Bolitotherus cornutus. Looking it up on BugGuide.net reveals its common name to be Forked Fungus Beetle, or sometimes Horned Darkling Beetle. The two horns are projections from its thorax, and are used in “battle” with other males to win females (I’m not sure the purpose of the orange “hairs”). They are associated with bracket fungi of hardwoods such as maple and beech. The Kaufman guide makes a note that they are adept at “playing dead”, so I guess that’s what my beetle was doing whenever I disturbed it. Was pretty convincing!

While out with Raven today I encountered this bracket fungus projecting from the side of a stump. Just recently I had read over at Huckleberry Days about Dryad’s Saddle, Polyporus squamosus, a stalked bracket fungus that appears about now, so I thought, “Aha! A Dryad’s Saddle!”. I took a documenting photo and returned home. I pulled out my mushroom guide just to confirm and look up a couple of life history details about the species, and now I’m not convinced that it’s Dryad’s Saddle after all. All the photos I can find on the web for the species show it being concave where it attaches to the stalk, rather than convex like my fungus. I searched through the guide a couple of times and poked about the ‘net, but couldn’t come up with an identity.

Very close to the same spot, I stood and watched this bee fly hovering at several Spring Beauties at the side of the road. It was much oranger than previous individuals I’ve seen, and I wondered if it was just a dark Bombylius major, the species I’ve seen before, or a different species. I gather the half-light/half-dark wing markings are fairly distinctive, and seem to only be shared by B. major and B. mexicanus. It’s hard to make out the specific pattern of dark, but I’m leaning toward B. major.

I have no idea what this spider is. Not being insects, they’re not usually treated in much depth in the usual insect guides, although Stephen Marshall’s Insects doesn’t do too badly. It looks like it might be a type of crab spider, but I’m not sure. I’d knocked it off the branch of a tree onto a white sheet when I was out looking for beetles (as per a post by Ted of Beetles in the Bush that suggested if you go around thwacking some branches in the spring, it’s possible to discover some beetles you might not normally encounter). I’ve only gone out the once and thwacked half a dozen branches before I was disrupted by the arrival of a real estate agent who was coming to take photos of the house, and then it rained much of last week. Now that the weather is nice again I plan to give it another try.

A few animals from a little closer to home… with the nicer spring weather the cats have been allowed to go outside in their harnesses to sit in the long grass, enjoy the sunshine, and watch the birds. They’re tied to the deck with short 10-foot leads, so they’re not really a threat to anything except perhaps the odd bug. Both for the safety of wildlife and the cats themselves, I never let my cats roam about outdoors, so this is about as outdoor-cat as these guys will get. They enjoy it, though. Despite the chipmunk who thumbs its nose at them by foraging on fallen seeds under the birdfeeder five feet away.

Fish eats cat. Fish spits up cat.

Since late winter, when the snow was just starting to melt, Raven has been taking an increased interest in water. At the first start of ice breakup, she’d paddle her feet in the shallows of the lake, but it’s taken her a while of gradually working up to letting her feet leave the security of the ground. Even when she started doing that, she’d only push forward half a body length, and then quickly turn around to paddle back. After once or twice of that, she wouldn’t go after sticks that were further out anymore, she’d just look at you and whine. We’d taken her out in the boat a couple times and “thrown” her overboard, and she’d paddle back to shore just fine, but was reluctant to go in of her own accord.

Then, a couple days ago, it was like she had an epiphany. We’d thrown a couple of sticks for her just out of reach from where her feet could touch bottom, and she’d pushed off to grab them, but turn quickly back around. She showed a bit of willingness to go a bit further, and so we got her to do two body lengths, and then three. Then Dan suggested throwing the stick way out and seeing if she’d go for it. So I tossed it four or five meters out, and she struck right out to retrieve it.

Within the course of five minutes, she was suddenly paddling all over the place like a bonafide water dog. Not only that, but once she realized she wasn’t going to drown if her feet left the bottom, she discovered that hey – I actually like this! Now when we take her down to throw sticks for her, she’ll jump right in the water and start paddling out before you’ve even tossed the stick out. Quite a change from the puppy who was reluctant to even get her feet wet last fall!

Monday Miscellany

Is it just me, or has the spring, once it finally arrived, really been flying by? Here we are in May already. I think April must have disappeared when I blinked.

A varied assortment of miscellaneous photos this week. We did a bit of hiking about the last few days, which resulted in a number of them. This White-tailed Deer was actually observed as we were returning from one of our several outings. As we were coming down our dirt road, there were a group of five deer standing in the middle of the road. I’m not sure what they were doing – it’s too late in the season for them to be getting road salt, and I don’t think our road gets salted anyway. But there they were, nonetheless, and slow to clear out. Even once they did, they paused at the road edge to watch us drive by. This photo, cropped only slightly for composition, was taken with my wide-angle lens, through the car window.

The stream of returning migrants has started to get heavier. In the last week I’ve had nearly as many new arrivals as I’d had through all of the rest of April. One of the more recent species to show up has been the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. These gorgeous birds have been singing in our woods, and we even had a couple of them visiting our feeders, where they come for the sunflower seed. This particular individual was the first one I saw at the feeder. Naturally, as soon as I grabbed my camera he took off and sat in a nearby tree for a bit where he was a bit farther away. It was a dreary day, with a bit of drizzle, but he really added a splash of colour to the landscape.

While out hiking the last few days, we’ve noticed quite a number of these dark little skippers flouncing around a few feet above the forest floor. They hardly settled at all, barely long enough for a quick look, nevermind a photo. It was just by chance that while walking Raven today I this one skipped across in front of us. Raven sat-stayed (she’s been very good with that lately) while I sloooowly slouched over toward where the butterfly landed. I managed to get a couple of serviceable shots before it took off again. It’s got an interesting pattern, with the centre parts of the wings very dark, such that they look like they’re in shadow. These dark wings help to identify it as a duskywing, and the single small white spot in the centre of the forewing makes it a Juvenal’s Duskywing, a fairly common spring butterfly of oak woods.

Dan and I came across this scene in the park on one of our hikes last week. This Garter Snake was strung over the log, dead but otherwise untouched. The injuries to the snake are all near its head, and the way the head lies over the log while the rest dangles off the side suggests that this was the kill of a hawk. It could have been one of a number of hawk species that live in our area, but the most likely hunter was probably a Red-shouldered Hawk, which are reasonably common in the forests around here. They hunt in the forest, sitting on a branch in a tree to spot their prey, then swooping down from the perch to snatch it. Since the most dangerous part of the snake is its head, the first thing a hawk does is dispatch it quickly by severing its spine. The bird may have been disturbed by something (probably not us, as we didn’t notice any hawks in the area) before it was able to consume its meal.

My second tiger beetle of the spring, a different species than the first one. This one, I believe, is the common Six-spotted Tiger Beetle, Cicindela sexguttata. It’s the only species we have that is entirely bright green, with pale spots on the elytra. The only other species in Ontario that resembles it is Cicindela denikei, which is also all green, but with either no or almost no pale markings. Although my beetle resembled C. denikei more than the traditional C. sexguttata, I know it had to be the latter if for no other reason than location – C. denikei is virtually endemic to northwestern Ontario.

Another recent arrival is this Baltimore Oriole. Although they’ve been back in the area for about a week now, this is the first individual I’ve spotted. It was singing in our front yard, from high up in our mature maple tree. It was foraging among the buds, and pausing periodically to sing in cheerful outbursts of melody. I had the window open, and could hear it from where I sat at my desk, so I grabbed my camera and went out to watch and admire it a while.

I’ve noticed a few dragonflies around just over the last couple of days. Today I had a Green Darner zipping along the road, quickly out of sight before I could do much more than have the ID register in my brain. All of the rest of the dragonflies I’ve seen have belonged to this species. I’m reasonably certain this is an American Emerald, Cordulia shurtleffii. Most emeralds have bright green eyes, but the immature females have brown eyes. The diagnostic characteristic of this species seems to be the pale ring around the base of the abdomen. Although some dragonflies will have green markings, the emeralds are the only group where the green is iridescent. American Emeralds are often found along forest edges around bogs and fens, and sometimes vernal ponds in forest interiors. We actually found these in juniper rock barren clearings, without any water immediately nearby. This one was sitting in a juniper shrub, with its wing caught among the needles, so I was able to easily pick it up for a photograph.

There are some wild Canis sp. in the park, but whether they are Canis latrans, the Coyote, or Canis lupus, the Gray Wolf, seems to be a matter of some debate. Coyotes and wolves can interbreed freely, and both can mate with the domestic dog, Canis lupus familiaris, technically a subspecies of the Gray Wolf (with the point of divergence having taken place some 15,000 years ago), so it’s possible that the wild canids that roam the park are even a cross-breed between any one of these groups. Regardless of their taxonomy (the animals themselves don’t really care, do they?), these packs are the primary predators in the park. Every now and then you’ll see evidence of their activities. Scat is most common, but while out recently, we came across the bleached remains of a deer kill. This is the skull and upper mandible of a White-tailed Deer. You can see the bony knobs behind the eyes which the antlers are affixed to.

And the last photo in this installment is of a cocoon. It just happened to be hanging from a low branch immediately over the path Dan and I were walking along. Curled up and secured with silk, the leaf was also attached to the branch by silken glue to prevent it from falling off in the blustery winter months. I don’t know who the architect is for this home, but they seemed to still be in residence. I briefly considered plucking it from the branch and bringing it home with me to see who emerged, but we still had a few kilometers left to hike, and I didn’t have a safe way to protect it from being jostled or crunched while we made our way back to the car, so I reluctantly left it.

Today at Kingsford – Clown Beetle

As mentioned previously, I spent this weekend back at my parents’ old house in Halton, where I grew up. I had returned with my mom with the intention of visiting with my dad (who is minding the house until it sells), and collecting a few plant specimens from my mom’s garden. She has put a lot of time and effort into it over the years, and it has become a beautiful perennial garden. Her focus over the last decade or so started to shift toward daylilies, so there are well over 100 varieties in the garden that produce a fabulous riot of colour in the summer.

Mixed in with all these, however, are quite a number of other perennials, some of which I coveted. Oh, sure, I could just go down to our local nursery and pick up a few cartons of the species I had in mind. But taking divisions from some of the plants in my mom’s garden has a whole lot more sentimental value. I did end up with all of my target plants, with the exception of the goatsbeard, which proved resistant to our efforts to chop into the roots to divide it. I was a bit disappointed about that, given the profusion of insects attracted to its blooms in the summer, but still quite happy with my other plants.

But the header image is obviously not a plant. It’s a beetle, a member of the family Histeridae, the Clown Beetles. Many of these beetles are interesting shapes and colours, which gives the family their name. In the case of this guy, Hololepta aequalis, he was extremely flat (the Kaufman guide describes it as “paper-thin”). Both the adults and larvae of this family are predatory, preying primarily on other insects such as grubs and maggots. Only a few species in the family are dorso-ventrally flattened like this one. These species typically live in newly-dead hardwoods, between the outer bark layer and the inner wood layer, before the bark has loosened much and started peeling off. Obviously there is great advantage to a flatter profile for this habitat niche.

I found this guy, not on a log, but crawling across my shoulder. I felt a tickle on the exposed skin about my neck, and brushed him off in reflex. I actually hadn’t dug any plants yet, so I’m not sure at what point I picked him up. Possibly when poking around the forest I’d brushed against something and knocked him off. I took my photos and then released him outside again.

I noticed, when I looked closer, that he had a bunch of mites crawling across his shoulders and belly. Quite a few mites; ordinarily, when I see them, there’s only a few on any given host individual. I’m not sure of the identity of the mites; I didn’t get very clear photos (the light was poor and the beetle active, making for a lot of blurry pictures), and they can be hard to identify at the best of times. So I’m not sure about their purpose hitching a ride on the beetle. I’ve read a few things that suggest they may not be parasitic (ie sucking blood), but rather are just along for the ride. But it will probably remain a mystery.

Meeting the Whites

I was over in the park last week, hiking through the forest, the first time since last fall. I had gone specifically with the intent of looking for wildflowers, but of course anything can turn up while you’re out. I was paused photographing some Spring Beauties, kneeling in the dry leaf litter, when a pair of butterflies fluttered over and flopped onto a leaf a couple feet away from my knee. They were joined together in coitus and having trouble flying. I took the opportunity to snap a few photos of them.

They were whites, which was fairly obvious, but I wasn’t certain which species. Cabbage Whites have dark dots on the uppersides of their wings, which these didn’t have, so they were something I wasn’t familiar with. When I came home, I pulled out my Kaufman guide to butterflies and had a flip-through. After studying the plates and doing some poking about online, I think these are Mustard White, Pieris oleracea. However, there’s a very similar species, the West Virginia White, Pieris virginiensis, that also occurs in our area. The difference is subtle, and seems to be in the hint of yellow to the underwings, and the distinctness of the shading along the veins (guides talk about the shading being dark green in Mustard White, and gray to brown in the West Virginia White, but I can’t really see any colour one way or another). I held out hope initially that these were West Virginias, but I’m thinking now that the tinge of yellow probably makes them Mustard.

This is mostly disappointing only because it would be cool to have a rare butterfly flutter over and flop at your knee. While Mustard Whites are fairly common in the province, West Virginias are much rarer, found in only a few dozen scattered localities, with their population concentrated in just three main areas: Manitoulin Island, the Halton/Hamilton region along the Niagara Escarpment (incidentally, where I grew up), and the Frontenac Axis. They prefer moist, mature deciduous forests, and possibly part of the reason for these three areas being their strongholds is that they happen also to be the main areas where deciduous forest is still extensive in southern Ontario.

Interestingly, they were virtually unknown from the province until the mid-1970s when somebody found a population in the Halton Forests near Milton, Ontario. The forest habitat there was threatened with destruction by the expansion of the gravel quarry that still exists in the escarpment there. In 1977 the Toronto Entomologists’ Association (despite the city name, it is active over much of the province, as reflected in its website’s name, Ontario Insects) undertook a detailed study, commissioned by the provincial government, on the local population. They studied population demography, movements, size, parasites, and other ecological information about the butterfly. Their findings were used to support the case for listing the species as Endangered in Ontario.

A few years later, during the 1980s, additional populations of the butterfly started popping up – one in the Frontenac region, another on Manitoulin, and then smaller ones in other varied locations around the province. Eventually, in 1990, the government downlisted the butterfly from Endangered to Vulnerable, and the quarry expansion was allowed to go ahead (I can’t really begrudge the quarry this; we as a society demand a lot of gravel, and it has to come from somewhere).

Unfortunately, that’s not the only threat to the species. Both Mustard and West Virginia Whites lay their eggs on members of the mustard family, Brassicaceae. In the case of the West Virginias, in Ontario their laval foodplant is known to be almost exclusively Cutleaf Toothwort, Cardamine concatenata and other toothworts. Mustard Whites use toothworts and some other species such as rockcress (Arabis sp.).

The invasive Garlic Mustard, Alliaria petiolata, also belongs to the Brassicaceae. In some regions, Garlic Mustard has become widespread, taking over the forest floor and pushing out native mustards including the host plants of the two whites. Even in areas where native mustards remain, often the butterflies will lay their eggs on Garlic Mustard rather than toothwort or rockcress (in the case of the West Virginia, in some areas it appears they are choosing Garlic Mustard preferentially over natives, for unknown reasons). It turns out, however, that Garlic Mustard contains some sort of compound that proves toxic to the larvae of these butterflies, and caterpillars feeding on the plant die before their second instar. Obviously this spells a quick end to those populations. There are many Garlic Mustard control programs in the province, particularly in the West Virginia’s population strongholds, that should hopefully help the butterflies. Fortunately, I don’t recall having seen any Garlic Mustard around here last summer, so hopefully it hasn’t moved in yet.

I’m off for the weekend, heading back to Halton for a couple of days. The weather is supposed to be wonderfully gorgeous, sunny and warm, and I’m hoping to see lots to post about!

Bees of the earth

About a week ago I took Raven up the road to the abandoned property for her daily walk. It was a gorgeous day, and as I’ve done on most gorgeous days recently, I took my macro lens and kept an eye on the ground looking for bugs. I’m starting to see a lot more insect activity on the warm days, particularly on sunny afternoons, and especially on south-facing slopes in open clearings. There are two such south-facing slopes at the property, and I make sure to pause and scan them at least once on every visit now.

On that particular day, I happened to notice some new activity at one of these sites. Insects, flying low to the ground, near a bit of bank where there was no leaf litter so the soil was exposed. The slower, winding flight of the insects, along with their weaving back and forth as they prepared to set down on the ground, made me think these were bees, and indeed as I got closer I was able to snatch a quick look at a couple before they popped into the air again, confirming the ID. Beyond that rather broad classification, however, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. My mind thought immediately of a post about long-horned bees that I had read over at Bug Eric‘s blog recently, but although these bees had longer antennae, their behaviour didn’t seem to fit.

I settled down on my knees in the dirt in front of the bank and waited, hoping for one of them to come to rest on a leaf near enough to me to be able to get a few photos, in part to help with identification later, but also to share on the blog. As I waited patiently (Raven, also; she had found herself a nicely destructable stick), I happened to notice this bee inside a little hole in the dirt. Figuring it would likely be leaving shortly, I set my camera pointed at the hole and waited. The bee seemed to be taking its time. I couldn’t really see what it was doing, as the hole was too small to get a good look.

Finally, after a few minutes of sitting with the camera pointed at the hole, the bee emerged. I got a couple of shots and then it took off. Curious, I took a twig and started poking around in the hole. My hypothesis was that these were young bees emerging from the burrows where they pupated and turned into adults. I was expecting that if I dug around a bit I might be able to find more of them, but there was no evidence of any other bees, or even any burrows of any sort. Puzzled, I left the bees to their activities, gathered up Raven and headed home.

It was only when I got home and cracked open my Kaufman guide to Insects that I figured out the answer. These were mining bees, members of the family Andrenidae. They are solitary bees (as opposed to the colonial sort we think of traditionally with honeybees), who build nests in the ground into which they deposit their eggs. So they were in fact building burrows, not leaving them. I felt badly for having destroyed that poor female’s hard work.

They tend to nest in loose congregations, however each female bee builds her own nest by herself, and the proximity to other nests is mostly a function of habitat availability. They typically create a network of burrows, with the entrance often under a leaf or the edge of a log or rock. At the end of each burrow the create a nest chamber into which they place a ball of pollen and nectar collected from local spring wildflowers, and they lay their egg on this ball. When the larva hatches out, this is what it feeds on until it is ready to pupate. The female seals off the chambers once the egg is laid, and the young are left to fend for themselves.

There are several genera of mining bees; I believe these ones belong to the genus Andrena, although identifying them down to species can be difficult and usually requires an expert, which I am not. Most mining bees in the genus Andrena are springtime fliers, although there are some that are out and about in summer or fall, and a handful even in winter (probably not up here, though).

They continue to hang out at that same spot, I noticed them again last time I took Raven there, though I didn’t spend any time watching them. They only raise one brood per year, so once these eggs are laid, the adults will all die and disappear, until the new generation emerges next spring.