Orange Dragonfly From Last Summer

 

Milkweed Bugs on a Milkweed Plant

More specifically, they look large Large Milkweed Bugs (Oncopeltus fasciatus).

 

Few things are this colorful.  

(Click to enlarge.)

Cicadas Are Here Again

 

Brood X of the seventeen-year cicada (Magicicada septendecim) has emerged from the ground, as one can see from the above image of a discarded exoskeleton.  Judging by their body parts strewn on the ground, many don’t make it, but others take to the trees and produce a call that sounds like the transporter from Star Trek.  Cicadas are a big news story, at least in this part of the country. 

(Note: Brood X should not be confused with Brand X, a jazz fusion group in which Phil Collins played drums in the Seventies.)

About a week ago I came upon the bizarre scene shown below.  A cicada was missing its abdomen entirely, but the head and thorax were still alive and walking, pulling along some kind of predatory wasp.  Presumably the wasp had eaten away the cicada’s abdomen, and was in the process of eating the rest of the cicada.  

As Dieter would say . . . truly disturbing.  

Harvestmen Eating Blueberry Muffins

I went camping a few weeks ago with some friends from high school. (We were at Burke Lake in Fairfax County, so it wasn’t exactly the deep wilderness.)  When night fell, our campsite was swarmed by harvestmen.  The next morning, we found dozens of them crawling over our tents.  But what was even odder was that during the night harvestmen were crawling over the picnic table, apparently looking to eat our leftovers.  

(I should note here that harvestmen are arachnids of the order Opiliones.  They differ from spiders in lacking a constriction between the two body segments, and having one pair of eyes rather than three or four  pairs.  An alternate, and probably more common, name is “daddy longlegs”.  I am using “harvestmen” here, because it is simpler, and because I am unsure of the plural form for “daddy longlegs”.  Is it just “daddy longlegs”, or “daddy longlegses”, or is it “daddies longlegs”, in the tradition of “courts-martial” and the Latin “patresfamilias”?) 

The harvestmen seemed particularly to like the blueberry muffins.  

Here are some pictures.

Harvestmen are known to be omnivores and scavengers, which would leave them well-suited to consume human-produced foodstuffs.  My casual internet searching provided two mentions of harvestmen eating human food, here (“One in a terrarium will survive on tidbits of bread, butter and fatty meat as well.”) and here (“A harvestman will eat little ants on a crumb of bread and then eat part of the crumb.“).  I have to wonder if the reason that harvestmen were common at the campsite was that they had become accustomed to scavenging the remains of campers’ meals.  

Cicada

I’ve been going through my photographs from the last few years looking for things to put on the blog.  I came across this cicada, which looks like Linne’s Cicada (Neotibicen linnei), a type of annual cicada, although the thorax coloration is different than is seen in some internet examples.  

The picture has a nice sense of green, in that the green of the cicada is reflected in the green of the surrounding vegetation.

Here is a closer look from a related picture:

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 4: The, Um, Spider

For our final installment, we have the Halloween spider skeleton, available for $20.99 from Target.  

I don’t know if I even need to say this, but . . . SPIDERS ARE INVERTEBRATES!!!  THEY DON”T HAVE SKELETONS!!!!! 

My series is at an end.  And, as I said earlier, maybe it is wrong for me to provide osteological criticism of plastic Halloween skeletons.  And maybe that is why I don’t getting invited to Halloween parties.  Or maybe it is because none of my friends ever have Halloween parties.  

In any event, I feel better.

The Wings of the Dragonfly

A great many years ago I read an article about scientists studying dragonflies.  The method for identifying a dragonfly in the field was to shoot the dragonfly with a shotgun shell filled with dirt.  The body would be damaged, but usually enough of the wings would remain intact to determine the species.  (The patterns of veins in insect wings are a key factor in establishing and identifying insect taxa; in fact, wing veins can be preserved in fossil insects, and used in the naming of species from millions of years ago.)

I’m not up on the state of the art in dragonfly research, but I have to wonder if the shotgunning is still necessary now that we have digital photography.  Even with my amateur-level camera, I can get pictures of perching dragonflies that clearly show the details of wing venation. 

Here are some from the last few years:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

(I felt that I should have one more post for August.)

As always, click to enlarge

Mosquito Hopes and Theories Are Dashed

The Asian Tiger Mosquito (Aedes albopictus) is an introduced species of day-biting mosquito which has been making summers unbearable in parts of the Washington area for the last fifteen years or so.  The adults die off during the winter in temperate climates; populations survive via eggs.  

   Much of the country experienced an abnormally cold winter in 2014, which, I thought, might have had an effect on this obnoxious species. A recent study discovered that Aedes albopictus eggs will suffer 100% mortality after being exposed to temperature of 10° F (-12° C) for four hours, or 5° F (-15° C) for one hour.  On January 7, the low temperature at Reagan National Airport was 6° F; on this day the temperature may possibly have met the condition of four hours at 10° F or lower.  For most of the spring I held out hope that the cold might have locally eliminated the Asian Tiger Mosquito (until it could recolonize from warmer areas, which one hopes would take a few years).

   But then on May 21, I received the first Asian Tiger Mosquito bite of the year.  Asian Tiger Mosquitoes are still here, bringing another summer of misery.  I assume that ultimately it was a problem of microclimate. Members of the species lay their eggs in holes in trees and other cavities where rainwater accumulates.  These cavities presumably created sheltered environments in which the temperature was significantly warmer than that of the surrounding air.  

Personally I Am Not That Hungry

I haven't written anything here in a while, so I thought that I'd note something interesting that I read recently. Scientists have released a fly in Florida whose larvae eat the brains of fire ants, a pest accidentally introduced from South America.

This is good news, unless of course you are a fire ant. But I doubt that fire ants read this blog, so I am probably safe.