Crawlers, jumpers, singers

And going back to the piles of "hold for later" photos: a collection of critters.

In a handful of wet mud: an earthworm and a pretty Spotted Snake millipede, Blaniulus guttulatus.

Cricket, female. The males sing all summer under my kitchen window. The cat brought this one in, freshly killed.

The two spikes at the rear are cerci, sensory organs. The long, split-ended one is her ovipositor, used to lay her eggs.

Weevil, playing dead, as they do. When the photo session ended, he wandered away.

Not a "hold". A small crane fly on my wall this week. Interesting pattern on the wings, similar to that of the hairy-eyed crane fly, but that's an eastern species. I'll send it in to BugGuide.

A tiny jumper.

And a tiny moth.

New-born thimbleberry wasps

A month ago, I collected a few thimbleberry galls, brought them home, and split one apart to look at the larvae hidden inside. (Story, here.) I stashed them afterwards in a plastic container and set them aside in a cool spot.

This week, I opened the container. And several tiny wasps have burrowed their way out.

The larvae as they were a month ago.

Another one of the galls, this week, with exit holes.

And one of the newly-emerged wasps, Diastrophus kincaidii. About 2.5 mm long.

Another one, bent over, showing off her wings.

Wasp # 3. Wasps have that tiny waist; it seems strange that it can support the weight of the heavy abdomen.

I just checked again. There were three galls, all on the small side. And now there are a dozen new wasps, freshly emerged. I left the lid off; I don't know where they'll go, since I have no thimbleberry canes nearby. Maybe they'll find an alternate host in the raspberries.

Green comma butterfly

First day of spring. I hiked up the Ridge Trail again. The ice was gone; now it was too hot, and I wished I had not worn a sweater.

Up top, the trees were busy. There were woodpeckers, tree creepers, robins, and I think I saw a grey jay. And down at the trail level, butterflies were dancing, two by two.

Green comma butterfly, Polygonia faunus

The Green Comma flies from early March to late September, with populations peaking April – May, and August. It is most often found along sun dappled forest roads, and trails, or in groves of trees in grasslands.(Nicola Naturalists)

An interesting little butterfly. Solitary butterflies didn't tolerate me coming too close; one step too many, and they took off, but then they circled around and came to rest again in the same spot. After I realized this, I just had to wait with the camera pointing at their parking spot.

When they paired up, though, they kept flying, fluttering madly a few inches apart, not resting anywhere that I could see.

When they close their wings, all the brilliant orange disappears.

Underside of the wings. And there's the comma that gives them the name.

The males have green spots on the underside of the wings. I couldn't see any on this one, but I was on the shadowed side and the colours aren't clear.

Watch your wine cellar!

From year end to year end, at least one of my windows is never shut, so I get visitors. Mostly, they're spiders. Sometimes they're spider food.

This week's specialty, besides the love-lorn spiders, has been a flock of tiny, caped moths.

White-shouldered moth, Endrosis sarcitrella, 1/4 inch long.

These moths are members of the curved-horn family, so named for those two cute "horns", which are not horns at all, but sensory mouth-parts. They are common in houses, year-round. (Our nicely heated houses are good places for the youngsters to spend the winter.)

The females lay up to 200 eggs at a time in food. Human food: the grubs eat grains, dried fruit, potatoes, wool, wine corks ...

From BugGuide: Can be a damaging pest in some areas, particularly to wine cellars, where the larvae bore into the corks and ruin the wine... unless you like Tequila :-).

The adults, in spite of those prominent mouthparts, do not eat, and live only about a month. The larva is a small, white grub with a red head. I haven't seen any here, and I keep my cereals, etc, in closed canning jars, so the prospective moth mothers are out of luck. Unless they find that bottle of wine.

Fat aphids

Every rose has its critter.

Native wild rose, and well-fed aphids, sleeping it off on a leaf.

If you look closely, there are a round, fat, very fat, short-legged beastie and a pointy-nosed critter (a fly or a weevil?) and a couple more half-hidden insects, all foraging for pollen among the stamens of the rose. So tiny! The largest no bigger than the heads of the aphids!

So  busy, so happy (after the manner of insect happiness), so intelligent, smart enough to go out and find a good rose, "knowing" its pollen will be good to eat. Sure, not as smart as you or me, but amazing, nevertheless, if you think about it.

We underestimate the brilliance of the tiny things.

Just dropping in

... to say hello.

Hanging by a thread finer than spider silk.

Amour de Cosmos Creek, Highway 19

Moth, brown and tan, with greenish eyes.

The teeniest moth ever:

Less than 1/4 inch long, resting on my  wall under a lamp.

So small, and yet so smart! As soon as I approached with the camera, he started to run; two shots, and he scooted down a crack and disappeared. I waited, but he never showed his face again.

I'll send his photo in to BugGuide.

And he's already identified; that was quick! A Diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella. Thanks, Steve!

Buggy day

Life goes on here, quietly. It's too hot to move*; even the bugs are in hiding. The sowbugs that frequent my collection of plants on the kitchen windowsill have moved elsewhere. Spiders lurk only in the darkest, coolest corners. The slugs have even abandoned the damp, broken flowerpot I set out for them, with murderous intent.

And then, in one 24 hour period, I had a stream of visitors. Maybe it's cooler inside.

The first. 2 AM, just over my bed. Tiny, but pretty.

Orange underwing moth on a dusty window. Most of the dust is outside. 10AM

From another angle, with her double reflections. The sun was bright this morning; the pink and green are refracted sunlight.

A small male crane fly with the greenest eyes ever. 5PM 

Midnight, resting under a lamp. An extremely small green fly. To my eyes, it was just an elongated speck.

Besides these, that day there was an interesting pale orange moth in an awkward place, that I could not reach to get in focus. A couple of mosquitoes; not interesting. A racing house spider, trying to escape the kittens. And a humongous crane fly that the cats beat me to. The smallest kitten ate it. And the June bug.

And today, we're back to lying low. The whole area is under an alert for hot weather, and there's a smoke haze wafted over from the burning mainland. Will these fires never cease?

Special air quality statement in effect for:
Campbell River
Comox Valley
Duncan
Nanaimo/Parksville
...
The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, in collaboration with Island Health, has issued a Smoky Skies Bulletin for communities in the East Vancouver Island, the Southern Gulf Islands, and Greater Victoria regions due to wildfire smoke in the area. The current weather pattern over the BC coast is causing outflow winds to carry smoke from wildfires burning in the BC Interior towards the coast. Smoke concentrations will vary widely as winds, fire behaviour and temperatures change....
This Bulletin will remain in effect until further notice. (from gov. alert)

Higher pollution levels are expected to persist into Friday.

* I know, a temperature of 34 Celsius is not hot at all, if you're living where 40 is normal. But around here, we wilt at 30. To make up for it, we go out for long walks in pouring rain or deep snow.

Ten-lined June beetle

Hard done by: first, I sprayed her with the hose, watering the garden, then I rolled her branch around and flashed lights in her face. But she was patient through it all, barely waving an antenna at me once in a while.

Ten-lined June beetle, all wet. Polyphilla decemlineata.

I know she's female, because her antennae are stubby and round. The male's are huge, layered, and shaped like a woman's high-heeled sandal, or opened up, like a stack of spoons.

Male antenna. From 2011.

In the morning, she was gone. She was not waiting until I watered her corner again.

Flipping wings

A four-legged crane fly dropped in for a visit, or maybe a place to rest and lick her wounds. Instead, I chased her from bathroom wall to tub to window, trying to get a photo of her pretty wings.

On the window. She's missing two left legs. 

On a glass box full of shells.

I hadn't noticed before; look at the wings. She doesn't just flap them; they also rotate. In the top photo, the leading edge, the one with the stiff ribs, is towards the back. On the box, it's now towards the front.

On a glass bottle. Leading rib is towards the front again.

And then I took pity on her and let her rest. In the morning, she had moved on.

(I know she's female because of the old-fashioned pen nib tip to her abdomen, the ovipositor.)

Where have all the critters gone?

Something's odd. The house this winter has been unusually critter free.* I have seen no sow bugs for a couple of months; they used to patrol my windowsills regularly. The big spiders that preyed on them are gone. I've seen three or four micro-dot spiders in as many weeks. No flies. No stray beetles. No crane flies, moths, or mosquitoes. Not even any of the Western conifer seed bugs that usually seek out warm houses for the winter.

Yesterday, I brought in a handful of soil from the garden, and examined it with a lens. There were no pill bugs. No spiders. No springtails, even.

Looking at that last paragraph, I said to myself, "That can't be right!" So I went out and collected another handful of dirt, and looked at it under a bright light with the lens and then the hand microscope. I found two slug eggs and one lonely springtail. No mites, no worms, no mini-spiders, no globular springtails, no sow bugs, no tiny snails.

I don't know what has caused this. Not the weather; inside, there's heat. Outside, it has been freezing and everything burrows down deep, but it's been warmish for some days now, and today the sun is shining on the soil I collected; it should be swarming with happy life.

I found my first spider** of the year, though. Yesterday, the 22nd.

Just a baby still. About 2 mm. long.

*I checked my photos for last year, Dec. 2015 and Jan. 2016; I had spiders inside and out, including a batch of spiderlings, tiny snails, and a ladybug. And I remember chasing crane flies all over, but never getting a decent photo. I was feeding sow bugs to the mother of the spiderlings. The cat was busy tracking big, black beetles around the baseboards. So the critters were still here, still active even when it snowed.

**That is, first spider big enough for the camera to be able to see. It doesn't glom onto biological motion the way my eyes do.

Temptation

Weevils excel at playing dead. I barely touch one, and it immediately curls up and freezes. Then I can pick it up, move it about, turn it over, and it never twitches, not even the tip of an antenna. Unless ...

I saw this very small weevil walking along the edge of my keyboard, and brushed her* off onto a sheet of paper. Now she's "dead".**

After about 12 minutes with not a quiver from little Weev', I put a fragment of moistened prune in front of her. Her self-control wavered, and she lifted those antennae, then remembered, and froze in that position for another 10 minutes.

Total: 23 minutes of playing possum, and now, dinner!

And I compliment the dog next door when she sits for 30 seconds, waiting for her treat.

*Many species of the Broad-nosed weevil sub-family are parthenogenetic on this continent; in other words, all the individuals are female.

**She's covered in spider web. Looks like she fooled the spider, too.

Minimalist moth

A threadbare moth spent a couple of days hanging out on the Mexican tiles behind my kitchen sink. She looked so worn down that I couldn't find it in my heart to shoo her away.

Probably a yellow underwing moth.

Stripped down like this, the structure of the feathers and wings shows through. Some feathers are hair-like, or furry; others are like little square tiles.

Detail of shoulders and forehead.

The wings are papery, thin, almost transparent, yet still strong.

Detail of wing structure, with a few square feathers. The small dark patch near the bottom is nearly always there in the yellow underwings.

From the hints of pattern still visible, I think this one, found last fall back in Delta, is a match:

Yellow underwing, Noctua pronuba.

My, what big eyes you have!

Beautiful wings

On a crane fly:

Tipula sp.

I looked these up on BugGuide, and found several with the same patterns (this one, for example), but BugGuide only identifies them down to the family, Tipulidae, or Large Crane Flies. It doesn't really matter; other LCF know where she belongs.

She's female; the males' abdomen ends in a club, while the females have this sharp, pointed ovipositor for laying eggs.

On a moth:

What are you thinking, little one?

On BugGuide, I found several different species of cutworm moths, Apamea, all present in the Pacific Northwest, all similar to this one. Apamea cogitata seems to be the best match. And I like the name; it means "Thoughtful Apamea".

And on a cricket:

Gryllus sp., female, as shown by her long ovipositor. She was trapped in my sink and tired of trying to climb the walls, so she sat still for me.

Every evening this summer, boy crickets chirp hopefully out on the lawn, holding those short, leathery hindwings up at an angle and scraping the serrated edges together. The curve of the hindwings against the body makes an echo chamber, amplifying the sound; females may hear the male's song up to 75 metres away!

Crickets are difficult to identify; most species look more or less alike. They are most easily distinguished by their song.

In a given area, it is usually possible to learn the various species through experience, by learning which songs go with which crickets at what time of year.  ... This is a group where it is actually usually easier to identify a specimen by hearing it than by seeing it! (BugGuide)

But the females don't make music; they don't have the equipment. So to identify a female, you have to find her mate, and get him to play you a song. I found a male tonight, hiding behind my favourite chair; tracked him down by ear. But once on stage, he refused to play any more, and scuttled away under the baseboard.

Conundrum

Question: why does gumweed trap insects if it doesn't plan to eat them?

Sticky gumweed bud, Grindelia stricta, with recent capture and bleached skeletons.

Here in BC, we have 12 carnivorous plants. Among them, the sundews use glue to trap the insects. Gumweed's glue is probably as efficient as the sundews', and more copious, but it has no use for the insects it kills.

Maybe some things just happen that way.

Dusty

An earwig walked down my lampshade.

And the light shines through.

Later, she was checking out my screen. I recognized her again by the broken antenna.

Earwig females have smooth, slightly curved forceps (those pincers at the rear); males' forceps are wider at the base, with a tooth just before the strong curve. (See BugGuide photo.)

The name earwig, which literally means “ear creature,” originated from the widespread superstition that these insects crawl into the ears of sleeping people. Moreover, many individuals believed that once the earwig gained access into the human ear, it could bore into the brain. Actually these insects do not crawl into the human ear. (Penn State, Dept. of Entomology)

I heard that when I was a kid. I didn't quite believe it, which saved me a bit of worry; we had earwigs everywhere.

Emerald on a Chinese mountain

It's hot, even after dark. I opened an unscreened window, just a crack, to get a cross-breeze, and barely an hour later, this moth had moved in and was resting on a painted paper scroll my grandfather brought back from China in 1927.

Common emerald moth, Hemithea aestivaria

I love his feathery headdress. Here it is, full-size:

The rest of the feathers are mostly green; these are turquoise.

I think he's a male, according to BugGuide.

Females have simple antennae. Males antennae are simple in the outer 1/4, but in the hand you should see short pectinations, perhaps serrate, basally. (Comment by Bob Patterson, Bug Guide)

Pectinations are projections like the teeth of a comb.

Toothy

On warm days, condensation drips down the outside of the aquarium and moistens the countertop. A big ant stopped for a drink.

Ant, about half an inch long.

When I tried to lure him away from the black tank bottom, he started to run and never stopped until I gave up chasing him.

Where the bee sups

The weather has been warm the last few days, so I was chasing bees. They were chasing pollen, and too excited about the new goodies on the trees to stay in any one spot for more than a few seconds. And they had company, which I was too busy following bees to notice until I looked at my photos.

Honeybee on hawthorn, with bags full of pollen. And a tiny fly on a leaf.

Another bee, also carrying shopping bags.

And another bee. With at least two other critters; can you find them?

Metallic fly; looks artificial.

Bumblebee in pink rhododendron.

Same bee, I think. And a tiny beetle. By the shape and size, I would guess it's a carpet beetle.

It looks like the buggy season is starting.