The Wheel Bug Emerges

I came home today to the most wonderful surprise I've had in a long time:

Arilus cristatus, the wheel bug, in all of its salmon-colored glory.

For those of you who aren't familiar with my love of this particular insect, the wheel bug is my absolute favorite insect. Why? To list a few reasons, it's an assassin bug, it's the largest terrestrial true bug (Order Hemiptera) in North America, and it has that ridiculously interesting cogwheel protuberance on its pronotum. This bug is unique and when you see it, you know what it is and that you shouldn't test its patience.

The fresh new bug on the left, with its out-of-style skin on the right.

Anyway, what we're actually looking at here is the wheel bug right after it has molted out of its 5th instar. Wheel bugs go through a nymph stage of life with five separate growth periods (instars), and it sheds its skin between each period, growing as it does so. At the end of its fifth instar, it has finished its nymph stage and emerges as a fully-formed adult: with wings and its characteristic cogwheel. This wheel does not appear in any of the nymphs. If you're lucky and can catch the wheel bug soon after it has molted its final larval skin, you're in for a treat. It emerges as a beautiful red/pink/orange color....let's call it salmon. 

The wings still have a leathery sheen to them, and are clear enough that you can see the white and red-striped abdomen.

Unfortunately, this salmon color doesn't stick around forever, and fades to jet black within a few hours. Though I suppose in the long run, it's better for camouflage reasons. It's not as striking as the red of course, especially after its yellowish-gray pubescence overtakes its body, but it's functional.

If you want more information on wheel bugs, you can check out a previous post of mine here. 

Cedar Bog....well, it's a fen

This weekend placed me in Dayton, Ohio for the Midwest Native Plants Conference. It was beyond spectacular and I was bombarded with new information everywhere I turned. The conference committee was gracious enough to award me with a scholarship to attend the conference, so I tried to squeeze all the information I could out of the three short days the conference took place. The conference was very well-planned and went smoothly, by the end of the weekend I was exhausted. Really though, I would make sure all my weekends were filled with biology like this one if I could.

The conference hosted some amazing speakers, particularly Steve McKee and Jim McCormac. Steve talked about Botanical Detective Work and his adventures with searching for plants in Richland County that haven't been looked for in over 100 years, which lit a fire under me to go explore Washington County some more. It's amazing what can slip under our noses due to simply not paying attention to what's growing (or crawling!). Jim gave a talk about hummingbirds and the ones we're likely to see in Ohio, very neat stuff. There were some beautiful pictures included to boot.

On the last day of the conference, Sunday, everyone split up into small groups to head into the field. My particular group headed to Cedar Bog, south of Urbana, and I lucked out with who else joined the group: Steve and Jim were both there, with Jim leading it, and we also had Cheryl Harner and Nina Harfmann. The group was in very capable hands. Essentially, if we passed by a plant, one of them would know what it was. Needless to say, I was writing down names like crazy.

Now, Cedar Bog is actually a fen. What's the difference? A bog is acidic, low in minerals, and doesn't really drain. A fen, however, is fed by water, neutral or alkaline, and supports more than Sphagnum moss. But, it was called a bog before it was recognized as a fen, so the name sticks.

Anyway! We found a massive amount of plants and animals during our trek, and it was extremely rewarding. It was the best use of a morning I've had in quite a while. By the end of it, I had taken pictures of 59 different species. That's pretty darn good, I'd say. Having said that, it's time for some pictures.

She has all her limbs, it's just a weird angle, don't worry!

 This beauty descended on a single strand of web and hung around long enough for us to get some nice shots of her. It's a female dark fishing spider, Dolomedes tenebrosus. You can tell it's a female from the sheer size of it: males are smaller. Due to their size, they can take out some pretty sizable prey.

This guy's tricky.

 What at first looks (and sounds) like a bumblebee is actually a robber fly, family Asilidae, Laphria species. Robber flies can be quite large and are vicious when they take down their prey. This one is a bee mimic, which is pretty evident, and if you want to know more about its mimicry, head over to Jim's blog: he's written a good summary of it. Robber flies are my favorite example of why it's important to pay attention to insects. You might think it's a common insect at first, but if you look closer, you'll often be surprised. Something I always look at when I hear a loud buzzing sound from an insect is the eyes. A robber fly's eyes will be very different from what you're used to seeing on a bee's body, so that's the quickest way to separate them. This one happened to be at eye level and caught me off guard after I turned away from the fishing spider. I scrambled for my camera and it flew off the leaf, but thankfully it landed on another one nearby. I'm glad I didn't scare him off, especially since I had already let an assassin bug get away from me a few days before, and later this day a tortoise beetle would escape from my lens. You can't win them all, but when you win one of these huge charismatic flies, you feel a bit better.

This is Michigan lily, Lilium michiganense, and just too beautiful to pass up. This picture turned out very well, and it's such a treat to run across a flower as vibrant as this one.

So that's where the Valentine's Day heart comes from.

Our group reached an open area in the fen and was taken aback by the plants and insects we found hanging around in the sun. I saw my first  Elfin Skimmer, Nannothemis bella, darting around, and also these Seepage Dancers, Argia bipunctulata. The dragonflies were much tinier than what I'm used to, which was super cool. Both species are endangered, making Cedar Bog a very important place for the survival of these two species. 

 Female Nannothemis bella, a wasp mimic not only in color, but in movement.

I still have 54 species to cover, so this Midwest Native Plant Society/Cedar Bog story arc will be elaborated upon in future posts, for sure. The diversity of the place is astounding, it still wrinkles my brain. If you haven't been there before, make sure to add it to your list, it's well worth the trip. 

 

Science Link Dump

I spent about an hour today after work reading a variety of science articles I found and wanted to aggregate them all here for those of you who feel inclined to read some of them. Sometimes I'll post them to Twitter, but 140 characters isn't really enough to explain some of them.

So let's start it off with a gastropod video:

The video was taken by Kerry Weston with the New Zealand Department of Conservation and I certainly was not expecting it to go the way it did. When I think of snails, I don't normally think of words such as stealthy, carnivorous, and brutal as associated with them. But apparently I have been shown the error of my ways. It's so great when that's demonstrated in such a blunt way.

This next video is from NPR and we switch our focus onto the hydrogen bomb.

A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space

If you want a larger video, you can click on the embedded one and you'll be taken to the Vimeo website. I'm always interested in watching old footage of nuclear explosions. It's from a vastly different time, when we weren't really sure of the effects of radiation. We've come a long way since then. I also get the feeling from some of these videos that the US government (and the Soviets as well) were treating their nuclear tests like a kid with a new toy--wanting to see how big of an explosion they could produce, and how many islands they could destroy. I have a nifty chart from a 1996 issue of Popular Mechanics that seems to confirm that:

The following link is for you fans of mathematics out there: MathematiciansWant to Say Goodbye to Pi. Math isn’t my forte, which is why I’m studying Biology, but I try to appreciate it. I’m curious to watch arguments unfold over different concepts, it shows that the science is still changing and the ways of expression are being shaped even today. The article lays out some good arguments for using Tau over Pi, and I’m inclined to agree. It seems akin to an argument about using the Metric system over the United States customary system.
But really, I’m mostly interested so that I can watch and read the arguments over which system is better unfold amongst the mathemeticians. It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to listen to informed people argue. Especially over a core science.

Moving away from the specialized subject-specific material, the next article is a wonderful piece about science’s place in diplomacy that’s from Scientific American’s guest blog: LindauNobel Meeting--Peter Agre and Torsten Wiesel: Nobel laureate scientificdiplomacy builds bridges.

I love reading articles that tackle where science intersects with other areas of life. Frankly, there’s not enough being written about that subject, which is a shame. Science hits every area, even if it’s not so obvious at first. There’s a real potential for science to do good in all areas of life and for it to work with other professions. Many times, it will be possible in a surprising way that’s pretty darn novel.

To add another link from Scientific American’s guest blog, I think it’s time for some trivia: Lindau Nobel Meeting--Sentences That WinNobel Prizes.

Obviously there isn’t such a thing as “Nobel Prize-winning sentences,” but it’s neat to compile a representative list from the papers of Nobel Laureates. My favorite is the one from Sir Harold Kroto:

"We are disturbed at the number of letters and syllables in the rather fanciful but highly appropriate name we have chosen in the title to refer to this C60 species."

Science and humor in the same sentence? Blasphemy!

I’m finishing this post with a webcomic from Abstruse Goose, a delightful comic that focuses on many topics, including science. When the topic of the day is science, it’s always insightful, and can be uplifting. This particular comic combines science, maps, and The Lord of the Rings, so where can you go wrong with that? Nowhere, that’s where.

Permanent link

Boy do I love nature quotations

So I have another post started that will explain what I've been up to with my research project, but in the meantime, I have this one.

I was reading Richard Conniff's blog and came across his post Learning to Feel at Home. It's filled with great quotations about nature, but one quotation in particular struck me as outstanding. It's lent me a nice springboard for my eventually presentation about my project, and so I'm thinking about starting it off with this picture as the first slide.

It's simple, which is part of the reason why I like it. I also expect my audience to not quite understand assassin bugs (or even know anything about them) when I start my presentation, so I think this will help them to understand where I'm coming from and why I chose to pursue my project.

The Summer of the Reduviidae: The Beginning

Let's just say that my summer project with assassin bugs is going well so far.

More to come soon!

Late Night Beetle Collecting

I decided to turn on the outside lights for about a half hour tonight to see if anything would fly up, and I got some good results! Right now I'll post the pictures that I took tonight, and I'll elaborate tomorrow. I caught a few of the beetles and am keeping them to hopefully identify later and get a closer look under better light conditions. It was about 52 degrees tonight, so still a bit chilly for more insects to be flying about, but once summer warms up more, there will be all sorts attracted to lights.

A Triumphant Return

I've now been back in the United States for three days now, and each day I have made time to go out looking for insects. I've missed the familiar plants and temperate weather, and on top of that, I've had a lot of success, especially today. So far I've confined myself to my backyard, but that hasn't limited what I've found.

I pulled off some dead bark from some staghorn sumac, and found some ants which had set up residence inside the plant.

They quickly grabbed the ant larvae and ferried them away from view, and ran around feverishly trying to figure out what had happened. I was hoping for some beetle grubs, but this was fine too.

I also found a firefly crawling around in the grass. It's still a bit chilly for most of the fireflies to be out, but I've seen a few. Hopefully it will only be a few weeks until they're out in abundance and flashing. Speaking of fireflies, if you haven't yet, check out Firefly Watch, a project to look at firefly abundance and gather data on fireflies. It's a project you can help out with: just register your location, habitat, and watch fireflies for 10 minutes. It's great fun, and you'll learn a lot while you're collecting data.

Next on my list was finding a caterpillar. "Awesome!" I thought, being the first caterpillar I had found.

After taking a closer look, however, I realized that this wasn't a caterpillar at all: it has way too many prolegs. I'm not sure what exactly it is, but the only other group I know of that are similar to caterpillars in their larval stage are sawflies. Well, you also have beetles, but this is definitely not a beetle grub. So I'm leaning towards sawfly, and I'll see what I can figure out.

I next found something super cool: a molted spider skin. Until a few months ago, it never even occurred to me that spiders shed their skin. Of course they're arthropods, but it just never crossed my mind. Sort of like the clover thing, I suppose.

That's pretty awesome.

I came upon a tree which had its leaves full of small holes, and soon found the (alleged) culprits: weevils. There were many all over the tree, most of them mating. I'm not sure of what species of weevil they are, nor what species of tree they were on, so if anyone knows, leave me a comment. UPDATE: Thanks to Tricia, this mystery has been solved: they're a pair of mating Tulip Tree Weevils (Odontopus calceatus) mating on a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).

Once I was nearing the end of my romp around my yard, I came upon a particularly unfortunate beetle.

Its right wing and elytra didn't look to be in the best shape, but it was persevering. I'm pretty sure it's Atalantycha bilineata, the two-lined leather wing, but I need to look at it a bit closer first to be sure. I haven't ever seen this beetle before, it's great to know that I haven't found anywhere close to all the insects in my yard yet. We'll see what tomorrow brings!

All of these pictures were from yesterday, so I'll post my pictures from today's hunt tomorrow.