bugs – Page 8 – Seabrooke Leckie

Moulting walkingstick

Regular readers will have likely noted that my posts have been a little bit sparse recently. This is not for any lack of possible content or interest in my part – I have quite an assortment of photos sitting on my hard drive that I’ve taken over the last few weeks and would have made for good posts. Mostly it’s just been that time has been short. I expect it to become shorter still, as we come up on the manuscript deadline for the field guide to moths and my co-author Dave and I work diligently to make sure we’ve got all the pieces pulled together. I’ve been thinking for a while that I may need to put the blog on a semi-hiatus for the final month. I won’t shut down altogether, but I will probably only be posting once a week. Once the material has been submitted, at the beginning of September, I should be able to resume my normal posting schedule. So I hope you’ll all bear with me till then. (Incidentally, although we submit the material in about a month, the book itself will be another year and a half before it hits shelves – this is because of the time required for editing and layout and proofing and everything else that goes into producing a book, which, it turns out, is all rather more time-consuming than I’d realized.)

Today’s photos were taken at our Blue Lakes MAPS station this past week. It’s a Northern Walkingstick, Diapheromera femorata, which just recently emerged from and is still clinging to its freshly-moulted exoskeleton. Dan actually found it hanging from a shrub beside the path; he finds a lot of my most interesting critters. Walkingsticks don’t have distinct larval and adult stages; instead, they hatch from the egg resembling a miniature adult, and just grow larger with each successive moult. This individual is a male, I think, as determined by its “twigginess” (females are stockier in build). I posted about walkingsticks a couple of autumns ago when I had one arrive at my moth trap one night. You can read the original post here.

Monarchs

A couple of days ago I’d stepped out into the front yard to hang out a few items to dry, and as I was standing there I was passed by a large, fluttering shape. It took me a few moments to register what it was. It fluttered rather like a butterfly, but the creature seemed to be carrying something. When it came round and passed by me again I realized that it was, in fact, a butterfly, and it was indeed carrying something. It was a pair of Monarchs, locked in copulation. The male was fluttering about while the female dangled below him, her wings folded as he flew so as not to interfere. I watched them for a bit, and after a couple of loops around the yard they finally settled low on the spruce tree, and I dashed for my camera.

I have noticed several Monarchs already this summer, though this is the first mating pair I’ve seen. I’ve been delighted by their abundance. Our fields here around the house are stuffed with milkweed, the greatest density of the plant that I’ve seen anywhere. On a warm summer evening, with a light breeze blowing through the flowers, the deliciously sweet scent is almost heady. Last summer, when we’d first moved in, I’d regarded those fields with great anticipation of the abundance of Monarch butterflies that we would have, and, especially, Monarch caterpillars, which I had never seen. If I was exceptionally lucky, perhaps we’d even find a chrysalis. But all last summer I saw only two or three individuals. I found only a single caterpillar.

The fact that I’ve seen better numbers this year is encouraging to me, especially since reports out of the south after this winter suggested that the Monarch population really took a hit this year due to severe weather and threats from deforestation, and might even be at the lowest levels in over three decades, with the overwintering masses filling only a quarter of their usual acreage. And as if that weren’t enough of a challenge, increases in recent years in the use of herbicides in agriculture here in North America, eliminating milkweed from fields and reducing the amount of hostplant available to monarchs, might also have an effect on populations.

I am sure that over the long history that Monarchs have been wintering in these restricted areas of Mexico this isn’t the first year that they’ve been affected by storms and other weather phenomena that have hammered populations. The difference is that ordinarily they could bounce quickly back because that was the only challenge that faced them. Now they’ve got habitat loss through development and herbicides with which to contend, and whether they recover or not is as much up to us as it is to nature herself.

They have a safe haven here, at least, a veritable milkweed paradise.

Deerflies

I bet you thought that if you’ve seen one deerfly, you’ve seen them all, right? Would it surprise you, then, to learn that there are some 100 species of deerfly in North America alone? Of course, when they’re swirling about your head it’s hard to tell one from another, and you’re probably not looking too closely at them after you’ve squished them, either. You can buy “deer fly patches” in outdoor-recreation supply stores, found in the same aisle as the bug spray, and these are great tools for examining deerflies more closely. They function like double-sided duct-tape, with one side affixed to the back of your cap where the deerflies like to land, and the exposed side flesh-coloured to attract the bugs (who naturally target the back of the head, where it’s harder for animals to smack them). Of course, they’re designed primarily with bug-relief in mind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t apply your entomological curiosity to the catch, too.

I first noticed that not all of the deerflies landing on my deerfly patches looked the same while out doing MAPS last summer. Some days, when the bugs were really bad, we’d get upwards of 30 or 40 trapped on the patch over a morning. Dan topped out with around 85 crammed onto the thing at once, one particularly buggy day. With that many side-by-side you can really begin to notice the subtle differences. For instance, the top photo is of a very yellow individual with a yellow-and-black thorax and distinct black markings on the abdomen. The second photo, meanwhile, shows an individual with a grayish thorax and thick black markings on the abdomen. Some deerflies have iridescent-red eyes, while others have iridescent-green. Even size varies a little, with some individuals noticeably larger or smaller than others. Nearly all of them are contained in the genus Chrysops, and have the black bands on the wings, and a yellow abdomen with black markings.

Last week at our Maplewood Bog MAPS site I discovered this very distinct deerfly stuck to Dan’s hat. I’d never seen one so dark before, so it caught my eye. Looking closer, I noticed it had fuzzy orange shoulders and bright red eyes. I stole Dan’s hat (temporarily) so I could get a few photos of it; it was too bad I only had my wide-angle lens with me, so I couldn’t get a crisp macro shot of it.

I looked it up when I got home. It was easy to find in BugGuide’s list of deerfly species, as it was the only one that was dark with orange shoulders. This is Chrysops cincticornis. BugGuide has ten photos of the species in their database, all of which are from Ontario and New England, and all of them taken in June. The page offers no information on the life history of the species, and I could find little else (at least in a quick search) on the web. The two pages with actual information indicated that they lay their eggs on certain species of rushes, sedges and grasses in groups of (on average) 215 eggs, and their main flight season in Maine is from the third week of June through the second week of July.

Starbellied Orbweaver

Every week or so (it’s become less frequent since I got busy with MAPS) I’ve been walking down to the bog at the back of the property to see what’s going on. I went out a couple of days ago, taking my camera in the hopes of snapping a photo of our Baltimore Checkerspots, which hang out there but which I’ve never seen anywhere else (these were ‘lifers’ when we discovered them there last summer, though I admit my butterfly life list is a little thin from lack of effort). I saw no butterflies, perhaps because it was slightly overcast, but I did discover this fabulously cool spider hanging out in a web there. I think this beats out the Black-and-yellow Argiope and the Marbled Orbweaver for Coolest Spider I’ve Seen To Date.

A quick search of the spider section in my copy of Stephen Marshall’s Insects (sadly, my much-loved Kaufman Insects offers only a cursory coverage of spiders due to space limitations) turned up the ID: this is an Acanthepeira species, likely A. stellata, the Starbellied Orbweaver, though the different Acanthepeira species can be difficult to tell apart and definitive ID often requires examination of the genitalia (makes you wonder how they can tell each other apart, then – do they go around checking out each others’ nether-regions?). The Starbellied is a widespread species, found from eastern Canada south to Florida and east to Kansas and Arizona. Like most orbweavers, it builds a stereotypical spiderweb, vertical with a spoked-wheel appearance, in sunny locations a few feet above the ground. As far as I can tell, the fact that I found it in our bog is simply coincidence, though BugGuide offers limited information on the species and Insects even less. I may have to add a good spider guide to my ever-growing list of books to buy when I win the lottery.

Sunday Snapshots – Another emergence

When Dan and I were out in the field checking our nestboxes I happened across this chrysalis firmly attached to a horsetail stem. It was such an intriguing shape and colour, I snipped it off to bring it back and try to find out who it belonged to, too. I didn’t have long to wait with this one – four days later the owner emerged. I had checked the jar when we got home around lunchtime, and just a couple of hours later, as I was working outside, Dan came out holding the jar to say it was out. The owner, it turned out, was a beautiful Viceroy butterfly. I released it on the first daylily bloom of the year, where it paused for a bit to warm in the sun and pump its wings before taking off.