Author: myip2014

Continue reading “The Birth of a Monarch: The Movie”

I bent to look at a little bright yellow fungus, and lo and behold, a red eft:

I have never seen one before, and I thought it was a salamander. Close, but no cigar. It is indeed in the salamander family, but newts are a semi-aquatic sub-group whose juveniles are terrestrial. The red eft is the juvenile form of the Eastern Newt, Notophthalmus viridescens. The larva is aquatic, and so is the adult, but the juvenile lives on land for two or three years before eventually returning to water.

Here it is in close-up. It is about 2 inches long.

The neon orange color warns predators that this is an unwise choice of meal, since the animal’s skin produces a poison called tetrodotoxin. What is more, the tetrodotoxin in these orange efts is seven times more concentrated than that of the green adults (Spicer et al 2018) .

Some Eastern Newt larvae have been found in the pitchers of the carnivorous plant, Sarracenia purpurea. 

This cannot possibly be a good choice of home, because even in the unlikely event that the larva survives the gastric juices of the plant and the eft then hatches, when it tries to escape the downward-facing hairs on the inside wall will make the climb out pretty challenging.

I fear the hefty eft effed as it left .. (sorry, I couldn’t resist. Best said out loud in a Cockney accent with no ‘h’) .

* That name ‘eft’ is from Old English efte. ‘an eft’ became ‘a neft‘ and then ‘a newt’. The juveniles kept the old name.

Franz Kafka’s novel Metamorphosis was thought by Vladimir Nabokov to refer to a beetle *, and this is the story of a small beetle that metamorphoses through three distinct stages (post-egg), until it appears as our familiar ladybird (or ladybug in the US).  There are rather a lot of photos today, and little text.

We begin with the larva, this one is I think the fourth of five stages:

It splits its skin (leaving white spiky remnants still visible), to form a pupa:

or two:

The pupa is motionless, and at the mercy of predators:

And from the pupa emerges the soft, spotless adult, head first and wings last:

The empty pupa case is left behind:

and the soft vulnerable ladybird rests with its wings expanded:

Gradually the wing cases harden, and the spots develop. This next photo is taken 2 1/4 hours after emergence:

24 hours later, it has fully darkened and the spots have grown too:

Small miracles, every day. here is a time lapse 3 minute video of the whole process:

To be precise, my photos are of a Harlequin Ladybird, or Harmonia axyridis, photographed in Maine, USA, but an immigrant from Eurasia. It is a member of the family Coccinelidae.

* Kafka’s beetle is sometimes referred to as a cockroach, but Nabokov, who was a renowned lepidopterist, thought it was just a “big beetle”, and drew a picture on his own annotated copy of Metamorphosis. It looks quite like a ladybird to me!

From Josh Jones’ blog: http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/franz-kafka-says-the-insect-in-the-metamorphosis-should-never-be-drawn.html

I love those photos of someone’s dog having a good shake after a swim, water spraying everywhere. But I had never seen a bird shake, until last week. It rained overnight, and in the morning up flew a hummingbird, perched on a twig, and:

Successfully blow-dried, she settled her feathers:

It turns out that until recently birds were known to shake after a bath, but not after rain. In 2011, The Royal Society published a magnificent paper analyzing the kinetics of the Anna Hummingbird’s shake. Here is a diagram that will give you a flavor of their work:

(From Ortega-Jimenez, V., and Dudley, R 2011. Aerial shaking performance of wet Anna’s hummingbirds.)

Astonishingly, they can shake while flying, not just while perching. And while perching they put their wings out to counter-balance the head angle, just as you can see in the first  photo. The shake is super fast: 30 shakes/second. This is because the tinier the animal the faster it has to shake to get rid of the water. A dog shakes at 4-5Hz, but a mouse shakes at 27Hz.

If you see something out of the corner of your eye hovering near red flowers, you automatically think “Hummingbird”, but no, these are Clearwing moths. This one is a Hummingbird Clearwing, Hemaris thysbe. 

They are the size of very large bumblebee, with the long curled tongue typical of moths, and they are quite territorial, very much like actual hummingbirds. These two below had a tiff just after I took this photo, and then one retreated:

The two above are a second species, the Snowberry Clearwing, Hemaris diffinis,  which has dark rather than pale legs, and two dark stripes on its underside. It is sometimes rudely called the flying lobster. I came across these two mating, flying around conjoined, then settling for a short rest on the grass:

The clear wings are supposedly a consequence of losing the usual scales that cover a moth’s wings, because their flight habits are so energetic, though I find this hard to believe.

To see how they mimic hummingbirds, watch this brief video. If a real hummingbird comes close, the moth flees.

Most moths have small bodies and large wings, but these have huge bodies and relatively small wings, so the initial gestalt is very un moth-like.

I am for some reason reminded of a lovely story about Charles Darwin, told by his granddaughter, the author and wood-engraver Gwen Raverat. They were playing Lexicon, a predecessor of Scrabble. He put down ‘moth’, and she added ‘-er’ to the end. Darwin stared at this mysterious word and said “Mow-ther, mow-ther, there’s no such word as mow-ther.”

I was walking with a friend in the woods, when a small brown bird suddenly flew up from the ground in front of us. On a lucky day (for us), this suggests we have disturbed a mother, quietly tending her nest. And there it was, concealed under a few small ferns, right in the middle of the trail:

And containing two stunning blue eggs:

The mother usually doesn’t go far, but she is hard to see in the dappled woodland. This time, we found her, a hermit thrush, Catharus guttatus faxoni:

Ground-nesting birds seem to be running a terrible risk of discovery, and indeed studies show that the best predictor of nest success is how well-concealed and camouflaged the nest and eggs are. So why do they have bright blue eggs?? Search me.

Hermit thrushes may have two or even three broods per year, especially if the first brood fails. This brood is extremely late, although luckily for these chicks this is a species that migrates very late, mid-October being common, so they should make it out before winter closes in. Like many Mainers, they over-winter in Florida.

Hermit thrush song is haunting, with short 1.5 second snatches, called song types, separated by 2.5 second silences. Roach et al (2012) studied Maine Hermit Thrush song in detail. Each song type is slightly different, rather like a nightingale, and a male has a repertoire of up to 12 song types. Each male’s repertoire is entirely different. A song bout can have up to 100 song types in it. Listen here:

Human hermits are usually shown in caves, but here is a ground-nesting human hermit: John Singer Sargent’s The Hermit (Il solitario), 1908

[Not for the faint of heart]

A tiny war was fought in my yard this morning. While deadheading my flowers, I found a fierce battle underway, between a Jagged Ambush Bug, Phymata sp., (right), and a Friendly Robber Fly, Efferia aestuans:

Both were alive and moving, but the ambush bug had the upper hand, and its pale green proboscis was sunk into the robber fly:

I went away for half an hour, and when I came back the ambush bug was alone:

I searched for the robber fly, and found it lying intact but motionless on a lower leaf:

It may or may not have been alive, but it was certainly paralyzed: ambush bugs inject a paralyzing poison through their proboscis, and then eat their prey at leisure. This ambush bug had foolishly allowed its prey to slide out of its formidable grip, uneaten.

Ambush bugs are so-named because they lie in wait, extremely well-camouflaged, until woe betide the unwary bug that wanders too close:

Below is the same one in close-up, carefully positioned on the yellowy-black centre of the flower where it is almost invisible:

The biblical phrase “they lay in ambush” fits its posture perfectly, and makes me realize why “sit in ambush” or “stand in ambush” just don’t cover it.

Appendix: Extra detail for those other obsessives like me:

Wikipedia says Robber Flies  “..have three simple eyes (ocelli) in a characteristic depression on the top of their head between their two large compound eyes. They also have a usually dense moustache of stiff bristles on the face; this is called the mystax, a term derived from the Greek mystakos meaning “moustache” or “upper lip”. The mystax has been suggested to afford some protection for the head and face when the flies deal with struggling prey” . You can see one of the simple eyes pretty clearly in the closeup below, and also the bristly mystax (today’s new word.)

Beaver ponds start small:

and sometimes shrink again as quickly as they started,

leaving wildflowers behind in the enriched and newly sunlit soil:

Multiple generations can create large wetlands:

and of course open water:

Beavers build and abandon lodges, then reoccupy them a year or two later for no apparent reason. Last year all my beaver ponds were bereft of beavers, but this year they are back. This one was caught by my game camera returning to the lodge with a huge bunch of ferns, perhaps for a family inside:

This one was swimming round in a different larger pond, slapping his tail in warning, but circling back to try and work out where and what we were. Here comes that powerful one-foot long tail:

and later a tail-slap with the tail at full stretch in a final salute:

The tail is scaly, and is used as a rudder in swimming. The tail slaps are thought to serve as warnings to family members, and to drive away predators. It is also a place to store fat through the long winter.

PS Sadly, that muscular tail has caught people’s attention for the wrong reasons. Hunters in New England consider the tail a delicacy, and in Poland the tail of the European beaver (a different but pretty similar species) is apparently coveted by some elderly men:

https://www.thejournal.ie/polish-agriculture-minister-beaver-4673479-Jun2019/

[Some of you may not know that these stunning butterflies have become iconic in US environmental circles because they make an epic migration annually from New England to Mexico and back, depend entirely on milkweed, and their numbers are dropping.]

I do hope you are not sick of monarchs, because I have some very intimate photos for you this time around.

Monarch life starts when two consenting adults meet:

The male grasps the female’s abdomen with his claspers, and hangs on. Usually he is the one on top, and she dangles underneath. The mechanics are mainly shielded by their wings, but I caught a glimpse:

They remain joined for anything between one and eighteen hours! They can fly around while conjoined like this: here the one on the left is being towed backwards and upside down through the air by the other:

This pair started in my flowerbed, flew up high into a small birch tree (I stood on a ladder to photograph them), descended to a goldenrod, and then flew up into a huge spruce, at which point I gave up.

In the fullness of time, the female lays her egg, and eventually a tiny caterpillar emerges. (I showed you the egg and first stage caterpillar in an earlier post.)

A caterpillar is basically a tube. Food (milkweed leaves) goes in one end:

and out the other:

Just like toddlers, they grow inexorably, and eventually they split their skins, to reveal a new one waiting underneath. (Why don’t human children have a new set of clothes waiting underneath the old ones?) Anyway, in this photo the old discarded shriveled skin is sitting in a little heap just behind the freshly garbed caterpillar, whose antennae are still bent and floppy, showing that he/she has only just emerged.

Nursery Web spiders lay their eggs on a silk pad, and then wrap the whole thing in several layers of thick silk until it is spherical. They guard this egg sac carefully, carrying it around with them. This one was on a milkweed pod: it is a Pisaurina brevipes.

In closeup, you can see the six eyes, and also the short furry pedipalps; they use their jaws and pedipalps to carry the egg sac.

The sac contains a few hundred eggs. When they are ready to hatch, the ever-vigilant mother builds a tent-like web structure and places the egg sac inside it. This nursery is what gives the species their name. When the young emerge they are fully formed tiny spiderlings, and stay inside the tent for about a week, while she guards them.

This different much smaller unidentified species has an egg sac too:

To the right, just visible behind the leaf, is a predatory insect lying in wait, so these eggs may not have long for this world.

Some spiders hang their egg sacs from a thread. I think these exquisitely decorative hanging egg sacs are created by the Common House Spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, although the photos I can find online don’t have this marvelous oriental lantern shape, so it is possible it is some other species.

Next time you shudder at a spider in your bathtub, try to remember their softer side. Louise Bourgeois’s giant Spider sculpture (1996) was conceived of as a tribute to her mother, who was a weaver, and its protective posture reminds me of all the maternal spiders out there.