Halfway caught up

I promised you everything but the kitchen sink. There's more than I knew; these are the first three packing cases.

First lot: Beaches and birds:

The duck pond at Centennial Beach. The blue tarp-covered box at the back, eating up a good chunk of the marsh, will be new concession stands/washrooms/etc.

Gull in the duck pond, with reflections of the reeds where the red-winged blackbirds nest.

This makes Laurie laugh. Can you see what it is?

Mount Baker, with Crescent Beach in the foreground.

And this made us both laugh. Someone set up a bagel tree for the crows. They hadn't found it yet.

A green winged teal, quite a distance away, in the rain.

Leaving the beach, walking back to the car, we passed my favourite purple wall, with these tall grasses (well over 6 feet) in winter drab in front of it.

Along the street behind Crescent Beach, a gargoyle guards a gate.

His little companion chuckles between the roots of a tree.

Lot 2: Critters and their stories.

A tiny jumping spider threatens the camera.

And here's my shape-shifting spider. Sort of.

In mid-October of last year, Laurie brought me a tiny, bouncy, hoppy, blonde spider, and I put her in a glass box and kept her fed. I called her Hopalong, for convenience sake. From time to time, I brought in new branches for her, checking them over carefully for insects that could serve as food, or other spiders.

Later on, she had molted, and was twice the size. Twice, I brought her smaller spiders, identical to her in all but size. She ate them. I was calling her Hoppy by now.

It took some doing; she was incredibly good at hiding in plain sight, but eventually I got some decent photos and sent them in to BugGuide, both the baby pics and the adult ones. Confusion ensued. How can a spider change species in the course of a monitored life? The baby was a Theridion; the adult was a Philodromus. After a certain amount of to-ing an fro-ing, we decided that Hoppy, the Philodromus, must have come in on one of the branches, hiding so well that even though I examined them all with a lens, I never saw her. And, of course, she had eaten poor Hopalong.

She's got her comeuppance. Last week I brought in new branches for her. I looked them over extremely carefully, finding two pinhead black spiders, and a plant louse or two. I saw her two days later, scooting down a branch; that was the last time. After a couple of days, I took the branches out and cleaned the box, looking for her. No Hoppy; instead, I found this crab spider, an Ozyptila, another of the spider clans that blend in perfectly to their background to ambush their prey. In the detritus at the bottom of the box, I found the mangled remains of a Philodromus, sucked dry.

The current resident, fat with Hoppy's juices.

Turn about's fair play, I guess.

One more story: remember this?

Not an igloo.

I found this on a drying maple leaf towards the end of last October. Then, it was just a silky ball, with no sign of entrance or exit. I put it in a sealed plastic container and left it outside to winter. I checked it a couple of times; nothing seemed to be happening until two weeks ago, when I found the ball perforated and empty.

In a corner of the container, a dead wasp lay, all scrunched up.

Previous resident of the not-igloo.

I still have to resize photos to send in to BugGuide, for identification, which I will do by Monday.

Lot 3: Practicing on Element 10.

I've been plugging away at this, challenging myself with more difficult tasks each time. Here are a few things that look like they might be useful once I get proficient at them.

A complicated photo of a trail through the bush at Crescent Beach, with too-dark areas, and burnt-out whites. I learned to manage each section separately. I'm not too happy with the result, but next time I should do better.

I'm happy with this. An adult bulrush bug, 4.5 mm long; the same species as the "cutie" nymph. This is a composite of two photos, one with the head in focus, the second with the back a bit better, but a blur where the head was. This technique has real possibilities.

I cleaned up and corrected colour and lighting on a 10-year-old photo that was too dark to see. It's a Gray Jay, near a cabin in Chase,  BC.

An experiment. The osprey was 'way over to the side and top of the photo; the trees far below. Most of the photo was empty cloud. I used the compression feature to squish the photo together, removing most of the cloud in the center. This was fun, but I don't think I'll use it much.

I did a poor job of removing the entire messy background and replacing it with the grass from another photo. Got rid of half a mallard in the process. A simple select and blend command sort of worked, but I had to finish it off with the healing tool. This will be useful once I get the hang of it.

Now, back to work. Lichens, next.

Cold weather babies

Looking under fallen, rained-on, rotting maple leaves for tiny flies to feed tinier spiders, I found a couple of snails instead:

This was the big one. 4 millimeters, eyes to back bumper.

And this pupa or egg case, under 2 mm. across, was sandwiched between two leaves. (This was four days ago; I looked at it again tonight, and the casing seems to have thinned, and I can see segments inside. I think it's a pupa. I hope it hatches.)

Almost flying-saucer shaped, then. Now it's longer, and brown at the tip. 

And the spiders got three miniature golden flies or wasps.

I'm still working on evil mussels. Story tomorrow, I think.

"Hello, world!"

I collected a bunch of leaves from the linden tree; each one has a larva or a pupa of some insect or other. Every day, I check to see what has pupated, or emerged from a pupa. This syrphid fly was still brand new, still drying his wings when I found him.

All new and shiny

Ready to go.

On his way out, he checks his hair in the mirror/window, and off he goes!

There are still two pupae to match his. two ladybug pupae, a few parasitized aphids, and something hidden under a tight web. And the larva of that green caterpillar, now in his chrysalis. Maybe one of these times I'll catch one at the moment of emergence. I'll post developments as they occur.

Metamorphosis

It all started with the tulip trees.

It was a hot day, with the sun blasting down from a cloudless sky, so we were walking on the shady side of the street. On the grass under the trees.

Under the tulip trees, the grass was covered with leaves. And the leaves were covered top and bottom with a sticky liquid. They stuck to our shoes; they stuck to my fingers when I picked them up.


And every sticky surface was covered with aphids and small flies.

Section of the underside of a leaf.

On one of the fallen leaves, I found a ladybug pupa. I carried it home, leaf and all. (Some of the aphids left the leaf and crawled up my arm. They tickled.)

Asian Multicoloured Ladybug Beetle pupa. With aphid.

A ladybug larva was crawling on a fence post where I stopped to change the battery in my camera. I popped it in the empty battery bag and brought it home, too.

Hallowe'en colours.

I photographed both my catches quickly, then put the sticky leaf with the pupa outside. The larva worried me, though; it was hunching itself up in an odd position; I thought the heat from the lamp was bothering it, and set it aside to rest in a pill bottle with a damp rose leaf and an aphid or two for food.


I found out later, from BugGuide, that this is the normal pre-pupating posture. And sure enough, this morning, the rose leaf held a bright orange pupa where the larva had been.


If I had known, I would have watched it all night, if need be. Next time.

Funny how the colours morph; where the larva had orange, the pupa is black. Where the larva was black the pupa is orange.

This pupa was quite different than the previous one; smaller markings, a paler orange. This afternoon Laurie and I were comparing them; the time was just before 3:00 P.M.

I looked at them again at 5:30, and this is what I saw on the tulip leaf:


Now there's a pale, lemon-yellow dome, still wet-looking and almost transparent, on the side of the pupa casing. The adult ladybug is out!


Click on this to see it full size: you can see the split where the ladybug emerged. I don't know how it got that big dome out the small crack. The adult is not entirely free, yet; the pupa is still twitching, faintly, at the top where the split is. I can't see a head.

The elytra (the wing covers) look like a regulation hard hat. Or from the side, like a semi-transparent half-grapefruit.

Nothing much happened for ten minutes. Occasionally, a leg unfolded, then tucked itself away again. But then, the "hard hat" shifted sideways, and two wide eyes stared out at me.


More resting, with occasional small changes in position. Another 15 minutes went by. The movement in the pupa stopped. Then, the ladybug drew itself up to full height, away from the pupa, ...


... and marched down the leaf and away. 6:00 P.M.

Wow! What a big world!

It has the usual markings of an Asian Multicoloured: the W, however sketchy, on the pronotum. But I'd never seen a yellow one before, much less a yellow ladybug with no spots. Very pretty.

The pupal casing remained, standing straight up on the leaf. It is there now, although it is wrinkly and black by this time.


And the second pupa (the ex-larva) is still on the rose leaf, still that light orange. I wonder; the darker, more heavily marked pupa produced this marvel of delicate lemon custard; what will the next one be like?
.

Detective turns up a blank

It all started when Laurie's favourite potted yew turned brown. We had already lost a couple of small evergreens to borer beetles, so I searched the plant for insect life. In the detritus on top of the soil, I found a small grub, no bigger than a rice grain.

It wasn't a borer beetle, but what was it? I stashed it in a plastic box, photographed it, and went browsing through BugGuide.

The closest thing I could find was the larva of a syrphid fly, an aphid eater. A good bug to have around. But I couldn't really be sure; there were no syrphid larvae with the markings of mine.

A foggy photo, but it shows the elegant markings on the top and sides. The end towards the tip of the leaf is the head.

To confirm that it was, indeed, an aphid eater, I collected a good handful of assorted leaves from my garden, making sure that I had included several aphids. These went in the box with the grub.

I kept checking, but never saw it eating. 5 days later, I found that it had pupated.


This confirmed, to me, that it was some sort of fly. The pupa has the same two "periscopes" towards the tail that a fruit fly pupa has. I waited and watched.

10 days later, after a day when I had been too busy to check, I opened the box. The fly had hatched, unfortunately at the wrong time. It was barely alive; I gave it air and a droplet of water, to no avail. Within the hour, it was dead.

It looked like a wasp. Skinny abdomen, black with yellow stripes. I labeled my photos "mini wasp". But it was still barely the size of a grain of rice.


I went on a long detour, searching through all BugGuide's wasps. Nothing like this guy.

I went back to look at their syrphid larvae, and there was a photo of an adult fly; big eyes, a black skinny abdomen with yellow, wasp-like stripes.

So there it is; a hover fly, a syrphid, Platycheirus. And I can tell Laurie that I don't know what's bothering his yew.

Great help I am!