My turn to drop in for a visit.

I was looking at rocks on a hillside. Green and brown, white, grey, splotchy and mossy rocks. I turned over a blue-grey one, sharp-edged, wedged into the moss, and found this:

Ants! With white wings! Black ants and cream ants and grey-bellied ants!

They seem to be meadow ants, also called moisture ants, Lasius sp.

Winged reproductive males and females swarm in late summer and fall. (Wikipedia)

Winged blacks, one winged cream ant, small black workers, a couple of pupae.

The workers and the winged males are small; the queens can be twice their size.  I wondered about the mixed colours; it turns out that there can be mixed species in a colony, sometimes because a yellow ant queen will infiltrate and take over a colony of smaller ants, gradually replacing the original residents with her offspring.

One creamy worker, without wings, in a group of winged males.

At the centre of the colony, the pupae were clustered around two holes leading underground. Here, workers are hurrying to drag them down into safety,

Look closely; in that pile of pupae, two are over twice the size of the rest; future queens, I think.

I took these photos as quickly as I could, then very gently replaced the rock exactly as I had found it. The pupae were exposed to the sunlight less than a minute.

I've posted the photos to iNaturalist, hoping for a species identification.

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Estaba examinando las piedras en la ladera arriba del lago Echo. Piedras verdes, cafés, grises, blancas; piedras manchadas, piedras cubiertas de musgos. Levanté una, de color azul grisaceo, plana, con ángulos agudos, parcialmente enterrada en el musgo; y esto es lo que se escondía debajo.

    1. Hormigas. Con alas. Hormigas negras, hormigas color crema. Parecen ser hormigas de prado, también llamadas hormigas de humedad; Lasius sp.

Los machos y las hembras alados, en estado reproductivo, enjambran a fines del verano o en el otoño. (Wikipedia)

    2. Hormigas negras con alas, una hormiga color crema con sus alas, pequeñas obreras negras, y dos pupas.

Las hormigas obreras y los machos alados son chiquitos; las reinas pueden ser el doble de su tamaño. Me sorprendió ver hormigas de dos colores; resulta que en una colonia pueden vivir dos especies, a veces porque una reina amarilla se ha infiltrado y ha tomado el control de una colonia de hormigas más pequeñas; poco a poco va llenando la colonia con sus crias.

    3. Una obrera color crema, sin alas, en un grupo de machos negros alados.

    4. En el centro de la colonia, estaban amontonadas las pupas alrededor de dos pozos; las obreras están apurándose para esconder las pupas fuera de peligro. Entre todas, hay dos pupas más del doble del tamaño de las otras; serán reinas futuras.

Saqué estas fotos tan rápido como pude, y luego volví la piedra a su sitio, con mucho cuidado para no aplastar la colonia. Las pupas estaban expuestas al sol algo menos de un minuto.

He subido las fotos a iNaturalist, con las esperanzas de obtener una identificación de las especies. 

Consider the ant

 I had a new house guest for a few days.

Carpenter ant, Camponotus modoc.

She's* a big girl, over a centimetre long, not counting those long antennae. I saw her first here, exploring a mirror on my bedside table. Later, she was on the carpet, then on the wall; always busy, as befits a worker ant, always alone. After a couple of days, I gave her a piece of banana; there's not much to eat on my walls. She stayed with the banana for a long time. I saw her once more, and then she was gone; maybe she'd finally found the exit.

Side view.

These are the largest ants in BC. They build their homes in wood, usually tree trunks, sometimes wooden houses. There are two common species of Carpenter ants here on Vancouver Island; one with a red mid-section, C. vicinus, and C. modoc, with a black body and red legs.

*"She". Because all worker ants are adult females.

On the move

Walking the trails in the bush, I often come across old, rotting logs, torn apart. Bears, looking for these wood-burrowing ants.

"The ant season was found to occur from mid-June to mid- to late July, when berries began to ripen.  Ants and ant larvae were the main food items observed to be eaten by bears during this season.  Bears searched for ants in old logs and under stones." (E-Fauna, BC)

But the bears are so big! And the ants so tiny! How can a 200 kg. grizzly survive on these specks?

Again, from E-Fauna, BC: In most areas of the world, ants are among the most dominant of biota. But it is not in terms of diversity that they dominate, but rather in abundance, and in many areas they make up a significant portion of total biomass.

And, of course, the reason woodpeckers dig holes in standing trees and snags; they're looking for ants.

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Tuve visita en casa por unos dias.

Fotos: una hormiga carpintera, Camponotus modoc.

Es una hormiga grande, midiendo más de un centímetro, sin contar las antenas. La vi por primera vez explorando un espejo en mi mesa de noche. Más tarde, andaba en el piso, luego en las paredes; muy atareada, como suelen ser las hormigas obreras, y siempre a solas. Después de unos dias, le di un pedacito de plátano; no hay mucho alimento de hormigas en mis paredes. Se quedó con el plátano por largo rato. La vi una vez más, y luego no apareció, tal vez por fin había encontrado la salida.

Estas son las hormigas más grandes en la provincia. Construyen sus galerías en madera, comunmente de árboles, a veces en casas de madera. Hay dos especies de hormigas carpinteras en la isla: C. vicinus, con el centro del cuerpo rojo, lo demás negro, y esta, C. modoc, que es negra con patas rojas.

Caminando en el bosque, muchas veces encuentro troncos viejos, podridos, que han sido destrozados. Por los osos, buscando esas hormigas excavadoras.

"La temporada de las hormigas se extendía desde mediados de junio hasta mediados de julio, cuando empezaban a madurar las bayas. Las hormigas y las larvas de hormigas fueron los alimentos principales que se observaban siendo comido por los osos en esta temporada. Los osos buscaban hormigas en troncones viejos y debajo de las piedras." (E-Flora,BC)

¡Pero los osos son tan grandes! ¡Y las hormigas tan pequeñas! ¿Cómo es que un oso gris, que pesa 200 kilos, se pueda sostener con esas motitas con patas?

Otra vez, de E-Flora, BC: "En la mayor parte del mundo, las hormigas figuran entre la biota más dominante. Pero no es por su diversidad que dominan, sino por su abundancia, y en muchos lugares constituyen una porción importante de la biomasa total.

Además, esos pájaros carpinteros que hacen las excavaciones grandes en los árboles, lo que buscan son esas hormigas carpinteras.

Coming right along.

Outside my kitchen window, the mock orange and the hydrangea show off new leaves; beside the carport, the perfume of purple hyacinths greets me and the bleeding hearts, tall now, have new flower buds. Inside, a column of tiny ants marches from a crack in the baseboard, and climbs into the cat's dish. Spring is officially here.

I checked out Tyee Spit, hoping for Indian-plum flowers. Not yet; not even buds so far. But there are others:

Oregon grape, Mahonia nervosa.

Pussywillows, Salix sp.

Purple dead nettle, Lamium purpureum. "Dead", because it doesn't sting. A member of the mint family.

Coming right along.

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Afuera de mi ventana, las hortensias y el filadelfo (Philadelphus sp.) estrenan hojas nuevas; al lado de la cochera, el perfume de los jacintos morados llena el aire y en los corazones sangrantes (Lampnocapnos sp.), ya grandes, las primeras flores empiezan a abrirse. Y en casa, una columna de hormiguitas sale marchando de una grieta en el  rodapié y se interna en el tazón de la gata. Es oficial; estamos en primavera.

Fui a Tyee Spit, en busca de las flores de "Ciruelo de indio", Oemleria cerasiformis, uno de los primeros arbustos en florecer; pero no, ni siquiera encontré botones. Pero había otras flores:

Fotos:

1. Uva de Oregon, Mahonia nervosa. Produce bayas moradas, buenas para jaleas.
2. Las flores de sauce.
3. Ortiga muerta purpúrea, Lamium purpureum. "Muerta" porque no irrita la piel, como lo hacen las ortigas "verdaderas". Pertenece a la familia de las mentas, o yerbabuenas.

Suficiente para ahora.

Caves in bark

Three dead trees standing together are pock-marked, top to bottom, by small caves, pinhole-sized to a few inches across. And each cave has a floor of fine sawdust.

Ant housing development?

Zooming in. Caves behind caves.

Cave or tunnel entrance?

I've visited the trees several times, looking for residents. What I've found, so far, I'll post tomorrow.

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Tres árboles muertos al lado del rio llevan una serie de cuevas chicas, desde unos milimetros hasta tal vez 10 cm de diámetro. Y cada cuevita tiene su piso cubierto de un aserrín fino.

Fotos: las cuevitas, rodeados de musgo.

He vuelto varias veces a este grupo de troncos, tratando de descubrir quienes son los arquitectos y los residentes de las cuevas. Mañana subo fotos de lo que he encontrado hasta ahora.

Ant scramble

'Way back in 2012, when we still lived in the Lower Mainland, I turned over a board in the vacant lot across the street, and discovered a colony of scurrying ants. I took photos and posted them on the blog that week, and went back a couple of times again to check on them. The last time, I took photos and a video.

Ants, pupae, and larvae in the blaze of unwanted sunlight.

Then my old software couldn't cope with the video, and I was busy, so I put it all aside for "later".

It is now later.

The ants scurried about grabbing pupae and larvae, hauling them here and there, seemingly with no notion of where to hide them until they found a hole leading underground. And of course, another dozen ants with their pupae were trying to cram them down the same hole, sometimes pushing out the one ahead of them in line. Somehow, somehow, they managed to get all the youngsters to safety. And then I carefully replaced their board roof, so they had to haul them all up the tunnels again.

The second and the third times I visited, the colony was thriving, so they coped with those brief episodes of glare and panic well. I wonder, though, if they didn't afterwards have ant nightmares.

On that first post, all those years ago, I wrote this:

Ant adults are like the stylish women of my grandmother's youth; their waists are too tightly constricted for good digestion, my grandmother's and her friends' with those tightly laced whalebone corsets (Nana, a teenager at the turn of the 20th century, boasted that she had an 18-inch waist; no wonder women had fainting spells!), the ants with a threadlike petiole that won't allow solid food to reach the digestive organs. Mature ants can only eat liquids.
The larvae are not so restricted, having no waists at all. So the worker ants bring them solid foodstuffs, which are pre-digested by the larvae, and harvested by the workers in liquid form. The system works, keeping the workers motivated, and the larvae well fed.

Some of the larvae are small; others are as large as, or even larger than the adults.They may be destined to be future queens.

The larvae have no legs but are capable of some minor movement, such as bending their head toward a food source when fed. During this stage, the level of care and nourishment the larvae receive will determine their eventual adult form. When resources are low, all larvae will develop into female worker ants; however, if the parent of a sexually reproducing colony has a plentiful supply of food, some of the larvae will receive better nourishment than others, and develop into winged, sexually mature female ants destined to leave the colony. (Wikipedia) 

A queen ant may live up to 30 years. I wonder if that old board is still lying in the vacant lot, with its busy city underneath.

Busy redheads

Among the early meadow flowers at Oyster Bay Shoreline Park.

Three ants, black-bodied, carrotty red-headed.

These plants were under a hand's breadth high. I was sitting and leaning low to the ground to look at the flowers, and was distracted by these moving orange spots.

The leaves are hare's-foot clover, Trifolium arvense, which will be in bloom in the meadow by the middle of the month.

They never stop running.

Two, comparing notes.

The flowers, in bloom, June 2017

Grumble and wonder; IRFD 2015

Urbanization is hard on rolling stones. Or flippable rocks. I set out full of optimism to turn over a few familiar rocks in my neighbourhood. But they're gone, or locked away: the builders and developers and pavers have moved in. The vacant lot across the street, which last year was a square block of rocks and weeds, and a killdeer nest, and another block of incipient forest full of twitterings and rustlings, has been bulldozed and fenced. The alleyway behind the church, once the passageway to gently mouldering farm buildings, now leads to more fences and developers' signs. Our street has been widened and sidewalked; the ditch where I used to watch for skunks is no more. Even Cougar Creek Park has been "cleaned up" and hemmed in with housing estates. Our road in has been re-routed and lined with "No Parking" signs.

On the far side of a schoolyard, past the newly-grassed lawns and playing fields, past the neatly-trimmed treed area, back against the fence where nobody goes, I finally found a half-dozen forgotten rocks. And a few small beasties still sheltered there.

The beetle was under the third rock I turned. A small spider raced over my hand as I flipped the fourth, and disappeared under the grass. And then I hit paydirt under a small rock, almost too small to be worth flipping, I thought.

Very small, very pale, orange and tan ants. This is on the underside of the stone itself. The ant at the top right seems to be toting a shred of a pupal cocoon.

Here, they're wrestling a cocooned pupa into a crack in the stone.

A cluster of cocoons on the ground underneath the stone. No ants are with this bunch, but there's a pretty green springtail at the top.

I wonder about ants. When they're stressed, they race around frantically, pulling and dragging their babies, (eggs, larvae, and/or pupas) trying to get them under cover. But it's almost as if they were moving randomly; an ant will drag a cocoon one way, forget about it, and go off in the opposite direction, talk to another ant, and race away to pull at different cocoon, going the wrong way half the time. And yet somehow, the cocoons manage to get hidden away; A Random Walk with a twist in it somewhere.

I replaced the stone before the ants finished dragging away their cocoons, so they wouldn't have all the work of hauling them back out again.

The next rock, a bigger one, hid one racing beetle, and one big spider who sat there, trying to be invisible.

I don't think I've seen this pattern before.

I got too close, and she was gone in a flash; I didn't even see her run.

At home on shifting sand.

I'm still sorting photos from the last two weeks, going backwards in time, more or less. These are the remainder from the walk on the Boundary Bay shore dunes last week.

The dunes make up a large part of Boundary Bay Regional Park, and a narrow strip continues south to Beach Grove, separating the fenced residential area from the beach itself. In the park, we find scrubby brush, mosses and grasses, rabbits, wasps and dragonflies, and many birds, from the ever-present sparrows and crows to the osprey, hawks, and eagles that hunt overhead. On the strip along the waterfront, the trees and shrubs mostly disappear, giving way to large-headed sedge, beach pea, sea rocket, pale montia, red sorrel, more moss, and a variety of grasses.

Large-headed sedge, Carex macrocephala. This early in the year, the heads still show some green; later they will be a dark brown, stiff and scratchy.

Lupins are native to this area.  They like well-drained soil, and lots of sunshine, so they do well on the sandy foreshore. They are another pea, like the little (for now) lathyrus that are starting to bloom around this one's feet.

The climate on this spit of land dangling off the bottom edge of the Fraser delta is warm almost year-round, and most of the residents are enthusiastic gardeners. Most of the plants stay at home, but some find the shore too enticing to resist. They jump their fences and take to living wild.

A patch of irises establishing a beachhead. The whitish flowers in front are sea rocket.

Yellow iris. Going by the water droplets on the petals, a neighbour is encouraging it in its attempted takeover. The tall stem and berries are from an asparagus plant.

Not a welcome invader. Scotch broom, one of several thriving bushes. Another big patch is behind it, on the left.

While I sat on a log, waiting for Laurie to go back to the car to drop off his jacket, this little redhead came along to see if I had any crumbs. I left a bit of bread for him and his tribe.

Ant, sand, and sedge.

And on the sandy path back to civilization, we passed this swarm of tiny, tiny ants.

Part of the swarm

Zooming in. They were so active, and so small, that I could hardly distinguish one from the next. They seem to be quite long-waisted, and have a white stripe across the abdomen Could be Tetramorium, probably an import.

Homies and immigrants, country and city dwellers, working out a life together. Very Canadian.

2012 critter sampler

December 31st! Already? I'm still doing end-of-summer catch-up!

Alex Wild is curating "Best of 2012" science and nature shots on Scientific American. I was reminded, again, by BugGeek, who posted her collection. Beautiful shots; I've seen them all before, and will review them again tomorrow. Not tonight, because it's hard to blog when you're green with envy.

I looked over my photos, picking out the favourites, not to submit, but just as a year-end summary. And there were too many! I cut them down to just critters; still too many, and I kept remembering more. But I've finally trimmed the list down to a dozen favourite critters, not without difficulty.

Here's the collection: Critters only:

Ant nest uncovered, with the adults rushing to drag the larvae down the holes, out of sight.

Aphid in a moss forest

Caterpillar in morning sunlight

Garden snail, feeding on glass.

Grainy hand hermit, in human hand

Harvestman volunteer

I had trouble choosing my favourite of all the spiders. I have to smile at this fat mama, who does NOT like lime and pepper chips.

Life's an adventure. Hermit crab in aquarium.

Lazy moth in jar lid and morning sunshine.

Spider #2 Long-jawed orb weaver, on hosta leaf.

This was an exciting find; a molting ghost shrimp.

Ok, I give up; I can't choose just one or two spiders! Spider # 3, Ozyptila, the spider-eater's spider eater.

Spider #4, Mother toting her eggs.

Would have been #12, if I hadn't snuck a couple of extra spiders in there. Plume moth on outside wall.

And tomorrow is 2013! I never thought we'd get here. May it be a good year, the best year so far, for all of us!

Ant rescues sugar, I rescue ant photos

Ant with sugar cubes . . .

Trying to get a grip on it to haul it home.

This one was too big.

What a difference a bit of software makes! These photos were taken with the old Canon A720, back in 2008. I was using Piknik, if I remember correctly, to crop and lighten up, but that was it. The photos turned out dark, noisy, and brown, except for the one where the lighting was ideal. I found them tonight (looking for sky photos for Skywatch, but I'm always too distractable) and thought I might have a look at what Photoshop Elements could do. A few basic tweaks: levels, saturation, spot remover, and sharpening: and they're totally different!

Not a Skywatch post. Our skies these days are hopeless; grey on grey, with overtones of grey.

The honeydew eaters

Linden trees, says Wikipedia,

"... are subject to the attack of many insects."

It's all the trees' doing; the sap flows richly and freely in its veins, easily tapped into, nutrient-rich, sweet and fragrant. Aphids harvest it, and serve it up to a throng of other insects.

Linden tree branch, with yellow jacket

Aphids, varying ages, and a molted skin.

The aphids that feed on linden are the Eucallipterus tiliae, the Linden Aphid. The new hatchlings are white or pale green, red-eyed. They develop their characteristic dark spots and stripes as they go from molt to molt. Some adults are winged.*

The thing about aphids is that they eat more than they use, and "spill" the excess. (The proper word is "exude", and the honeydew they produce is an exudate.) The nectar coats the leaves, dripping from branch to branch; the leaves become sticky. Sometimes the whole tree glistens and sweet rain falls to the ground beneath, feeding a black fungus in the grass.

And so the food chain goes, from the lawn to the tree to the aphids, to the ants that farm them and the ladybugs that prey on them, to the horde of winged critters feasting on the lot, and back to the ground to start the next cycle.

Ant on a twig

I cheated: two sizes of ants run up and down the trunk, along the branches, across the leaves. Run and run and run and run. I was having trouble getting one where I could focus on it. So I mashed a raspberry with a bit of water and sugar, and painted a stripe around the trunk, where they couldn't miss it. Five minutes later, the large ones were lining up for the treat.

Dessert bar

Ladybugs don't wait for the aphids to produce honey. They take their juice "on the hoof", with fresh aphid meat.

Medium-sized ladybug larva. The orange deepens as they grow.

Younger larva.

And a nineteen-spot adult.

Of course there are always flies.

Very small fly, unidentified.

Accidental fly. I was chasing the yellow jacket, and didn't notice the silhouette of a common fly on the back side of a leaf until later.

There's a small mob of tiny biting black flies, rarely photographed because I'm so busy swatting them before they bite, and usually being too slow.

I don't know what's hiding under this silky tunnel. Probably a pupating moth.

The wasps - dozens of them as long as the sun shines - flit from leaf to leaf, sipping nectar off the leaf surfaces, and looking for a good home for their babies, inside a caterpillar or spider.

Black and yellow mud dauber, I think.

I caught this wasp with the butterfly net, and had to chill him to calm him down. He woke up almost as soon as I brought him out; within a minute he was on his feet and heading for the door. This photo catches him just stretching and yawning.

The female wasps will build a series of one-egg mud nests. With each egg, they will deposit a paralyzed spider, then plaster over the entrance. The larva will hatch and eat the still-living spider.

The orange wasp, again. She's a ichneumon wasp, Theronia atalantae fulvescens.

These wasps prey on several moths and butterflies, notably the pine butterfly, a relative of the cabbage white. I may have seen these about and mistaken them for cabbage whites; they are very similar. The wasp also takes tussock moths and tent caterpillars.

In all the time I spent examining the tree this year, dodging wasps the whole time, I saw only one spider, and one very small caterpillar. It looks like the wasp babies are well provided.

And a tiny wasp, unidentified. It may prey on the larvae and larva food of the larger wasps.

The bark is juicy, too. I don't know what makes these tooth marks. Squirrel, maybe? An ant in the lower right corner shows the size.

Lichen on a small branch. Just because.

*Last year's post about this same tree, with larger aphid pics, is here.