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.

Cyanide millipede

Among the browns and greens of the leaf litter on the forested slope of Watershed Park, a yellow dotted line appears, moving slowly from one rotting leaf to the next. Don't touch him; he will release toxic cyanide if he's annoyed. It has a pleasant, almond scent, but it will irritate your skin. Let him be; he's busy turning last year's leaves to this year's soil.

Harpaphe haydeniana

This one has 19 or 20 segments, but I couldn't count his feet. Males have 30 pairs, and females 31, for a total of 62 feet. Not the thousand that its name implies.

Wakey-wakey, little ones!

While I was looking for springtails, I rousted a bunch of other animals out of their cold-weather naps. There were slugs, of course; dozens of them. Sleepy sowbugs by the handful. And a few unexpected critters:

On the dry back of an old, crumbling planter box, this small spider was out hunting, still awake in spite of the below-zero weather.

She's another to identify. Ozyptila, a crab spider. Notice the interesting dotted lines on the sides of her thorax.

It was hard to imagine this delicate creature wandering around in the cold.

A lizard bark louse nymph, about 2mm. long, with undeveloped wings. The adult's will be longer than the body. I love the glassy legs.

Here's one on the rotten wood of the bottom of the box.

Blaniulus millipedes. Update: I forgot to add this: look for the tiny white critter at center left. I didn't see that until I was cropping the photo.

These were sound asleep, but as soon as they warmed up a bit, they uncoiled themselves and started to explore.

Every deep crack sheltered a few of these beetle mites.

I have to add at least one sowbug. Check out the antennae; they look as if they're made of metal pipes!

The cold snap has ended. It is now raining hard on top of the snow. The slugs will be waking up, hungry enough to eat the remains of my garden, in the morning.

Polka-dotted prize

Poking around the yard, avoiding getting started on some real work out there, I discovered a group of tiny white millipedes on the bottom of a dead leaf:

Blaniulus gluttulatus, the spotted snake millipede?

This one is about 5.5 mm. long, or 1/4 inch, and looks as if it were made of glass, with red polka-dot decorations and milky head and tail.

The long "sticks" are pine needles.

Close-up of the spots.

I found them, or their close cousins, on BugGuide: juvenile spotted snake millipedes, an introduced species from Europe. BugGuide has photos from across America, from Massachusetts in the east, to Washington State, just south of here. The adult grows up to about an inch and a half, and may be up to five years old.

These millipedes are mainly subterranean (How do they stay so sparkling clean?); I only found them because I was turning over leaves that were half-buried in the topsoil and duff. They can become a pest in gardens, because of their diet of live plant matter. They like potatoes, carrots, and other root crops, including bulbs (my daffodils?).

The red spots along the sides are defensive glands:

Millipedes also use a variety of chemical defenses. Many have special repugnatorial glands that produce ill-smelling and/or caustic fluids that ooze through openings along the side. These fluids, which are mixtures of hydrocyanic acid, iodine and various quinones, can stain and irritate skin. Insects confined with a millipede may be killed by these substances. (From Millipedes of Colorado)

I like that word, "repugnatorial"!

Some of the millipedes on the leaf were about half the size of the one above.

Such a cutie!

On these, the spots were yellow.

But if those are eyes, then it will be another Balanius, maybe a native. B. guttulatus is blind; it has no eyes.

And my procrastinating habits have been reinforced, once again!

T'was brillig in the tulgey wood

*Definitions

The Watershed Park in Delta is a mixed forest, evergreens and deciduous trees, crawling down a steep slope between upper Delta and the low, flat farm lands beneath. It is not over-managed; occasionally, someone cuts up trees that have fallen over the paths. Dozens of trees are dead, providing well-used woodpecker feeding and perching spots. Logs not on paths molder and rot; shelf fungus and turkey tail fungus colonize them end to end.

The space beneath the trees harbours both native and invasive plants. The natives: salal, evergreen ferns, salmonberry, red huckleberry, our trailing blackberry, an abundance of mosses and mushrooms. Along the sunny bottom path, stinging nettles, touch-me-nots, and bog plants such as Labrador tea make a dense green wall. The invaders include Himalayan blackberry and English ivy; this year, I noticed a large patch of spotted dead nettle, which is capable of over-running even the ferns.

Spring and fall, after a few rains, we go mushrooming there.

This time, we found few mushrooms; maybe we're too early. Or too late; the weather has been unseasonably warm. We weren't disappointed, though:

Rotting snag, with frass and slime mold

Perhaps because of the warm, wet weather this winter, we found that a surprising number of the trees and snags were losing great slabs of bark; it was cracked and rotted, separated from the tree itself.

Inner side of a flap of bark: frass and small grey slime molds

Some of the old stumps were so rotten that they fell apart, or even fell over, with a touch of a finger. And behind the crumbled bark, and inside the mushy remains of the stumps, small critters feed on the molds and wood. We explored a few of these stumps and snags.

Innards of a still more or less intact stump

Insect tunnels. Can you find the wood bug?

There were wood bugs everywhere; they fell off every piece of bark we moved, out of every crevice we opened. Climbing over a log, I grabbed a branch to steady myself; it crumbled in my hand. And from its stub, a stream of wood bugs poured, like water from a tipped glass. Most were gone by the time I'd crossed the log and clambered up close to the tree, but the hole was still pretty full:

Woodbug convention centre?

More wood bugs.

Then there were the millipedes:

Millipede on frass on inner side of bark.

A pair of  millipedes. The crumbs are the remains of millipede meals; dead wood.

I saw several woven white egg casings; I assumed they were made by spiders:

These were about 1/2 inch long. But what is that black thing underneath?

Hacklemesh Weaver spider. With egg case; or is it a shelter?

I saw one of these in a pile of sawdusty frass, but it scooted down a hole before I got a decent photo. I hadn't even seen this one; it was on the shady side of the tree, and the photo was too dark until I lightened it 'way up. I've never seen a spider like this before, with blue tints and pink - pink! - joints on the legs. And what seems like far too many legs.

I sent my few lousy photos (this was the best of the lot) to BugGuide. And overnight, Lynette Schimming managed to identify it for me, at least down to the family. Yay, BugGuide! And thanks, Lynette!

It's a Hacklemesh Weaver spider, of the family Amaurobiidae.

Most amaurobiids occur in cryptozoic habitats on the forest floor, in and under decomposing logs, in leaf litter, and under rocks. Some... are found in the bark cavities of standing trees and others have been recorded from rocky grasslands, buildings and caves. From BugGuide.

The "many legs" are really the regular 8, but the spider holds them tightly together over it's back (so did the first one I saw), so that they look as if they crossed over each other. (See this one, from Colorado.)

One other bug; another that we didn't see until we looked over the photos. On a shelf mushroom, one of a crowd on a rotting log, we found this cute globular springtail:

Quite large, for a springtail.

Oh, frabjous day!

*Definitions of title vocabulary, from Jabberwocky, here (Wikipedia).

Bioblitzing the creepy crawlies

Years ago, I read a book by David Bodanis, The Secret Garden: Dawn to Dusk in the Astonishing Hidden World of the Garden, and was enthralled by this vibrant, busy, teeming world that we so heedlessly pass through. I have since spent many a peaceful evening examining the inner parts of tiny plants and the beasties that live on and under them.

So it was inevitable that I would start and end the Bioblitz with my eye to the magnifying lens.

This, however, is my first attempt at photographing what I am finding. Not the best photos, but definitely better than my scrawled notes and sketchy drawings.

These are all inhabitants of the soil around my back door; most too small to see with the naked eye; some, even with the 40x hand microscope are just little dots with legs. You'll see what I mean here:
The larger beetle-like thing* here was barely visible without a lens. Up on the left, there is a tinier beetle. I found quite a few of them; I could see them walking around, sometimes see that they are green, sometimes even see the two antennae. Nothing more.

About that larger one; they hop, like a grasshopper, whenever they are disturbed. There were many of them in a couple of pine cones. (*Later: these have been identified as springtails, Orchesella cincta. See note below photo on Flickr.)

This one was big enough to track without a lens. I caught him and photographed him on a paper towel. About 1 1/2 cm. (5/8 inch).
A millipede. Very tiny.
A pale brownish mite.
A centipede, the "large" variety. A bunch of smaller ones were impossible; too fast, too pale, too tiny.

A spider on a clay pot.
On the bottom of that pot, collembola, springtails. Isn't this one cute? I love these things; so busy, always, so shiny white, even in a bucket of mud, so irrepressible. (See note by Frans Janssens.)
Miniatures: red, shiny mites. These guys are really, really tough; put a piece of Scotch tape on them to hold them still while you go for a better light, come back and find them walking around in the glue. Pour alcohol on them, to disolve the glue; they slow down a bit, then recover and go on about their business as if nothing had happened. (Other beasties would die instantly.) I don't know if they get a hangover.
And macro-biota; an earthworm, trying to get out of the light. I left this in the larger size, so you can click on it and see the "ribs"; it looks rather like one of those outlet hoses for your dryer.
Not photographed: something that scuttled out of view very quickly. Baby slugs. Sowbugs. And, in the water in the bottom of that pot, some tiny swimming worms, about the length of the springtails, but much skinnier, of course.

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Flickr Blogger Bioblitz Photo Pool

Notes along the way: Bioblitz homework

Later tonight, animalia from my lawn.

But for now, bits and pieces picked up as I organize and fill out my notes:

• Centipedes have one pair of legs per segment. Millipedes have two (mostly). They move them in sequence, so it looks like a wave moving down the body. So the one I found in the vacant lot was a centipede. One closer to home (and smaller) was a millipede.
• Sow bugs and pill bugs are not the same. Pill bugs form a ball when disturbed; sow bugs do not. (And I always called them all wood bugs, rolled up or not.)
• Google images works, unless you don't know what you're looking for. It helps to have at least a genus name.
• It was Montia exigua. Was. Now it's Claytonia exigua. At least I found it.
• Carex macrocephala is red-listed.
• Something weird: I am not in the least squeamish about assorted bugs and beasties, but whenever I see a photo of a millipede on someone's finger, I shudder involuntarily.
• Bug Guide is a great source. Of bug id, naturally.
• "Although they look white to the human eye, many springtails are beautifully colored. Since they are so small, people can't see the colors without a microscope." From The Field Museum.