One of the problems with ornamental plants is how much maintenance they might require. The Girlfriend has a new rose bush that she really likes, and last year it got decimated by an early and earnest attack of inchworms – this was in contrast to another rose that came with the property, that remained almost entirely untouched. This year we were ready, and as the season started, we began routine examinations to keep the little buggers at bay. Shown here is not one of the principle inchworm hooligans, but what I believe is a Limenitis instead, the larva of some species of Viceroy or Admiral butterfly. I collected this one to pose on the azalea blossoms, because you gotta love those horns (which were completely harmless, by the way, or at least I was immune.)
The larva above, one of two such that I found, was assisting the numerous inchworms in raiding the weeping cherry tree, another ornamental that we didn’t want savaged. In that case, however, the ants were helping out an awful lot. The cherry tree came into blossom only a couple of weeks ago, and is now leafing out as well as starting to produce cherries, while the inchworms are partaking of the new leaves. Some of the leaf damage can be seen here alongside the culprit, at center near the bottom of the frame. Directly above it sits a black ant, and the two species demonstrated a paired behavior enough times to know it wasn’t a fluke. As soon as an ant would draw near, before visual contact appeared possible, the caterpillar would bail the leaf to hang beneath on a thin web strand, unable to be captured by the ant. Eventually, once the ant had moved on, the inchworm would draw itself back up to the leaf to resume eating. I never did see an ant actually capture an inchworm, and I’m not even sure that was their main goal, so you might think they were doing little to protect the tree. However, there were a lot of ants, and the ability of the inchworms to eat uninterrupted was seriously hampered by this. While dangling, of course, the inchworms remain vulnerable to any passing bird, or even being carried away by a stiff breeze. They also remain vulnerable to humans with pans of soapy water, which is how a lot of them met their demise.
The ant hadn’t even drawn close, but apparently set up some telltale vibrations along the leaf; the ant has moved out of view behind the leaves here. I’ve found that shaking the branches is often enough to trigger the defensive drop, which makes it a lot easier to find and remove the inchworms.
Unlike spiders, inchworms do not produce their web from the hind end, but from their mouths instead; this makes it easier for them to spin their cocoons when the time comes. In many cases, they raise themselves on their hind set of limbs and do a decent impersonation of a twig, which probably works a lot better when they’re perched on a branch itself and not the middle of a leaf, but when they do this, they’re usually attached to the web already, able to drop away in a flash, and I have witnessed numerous specimens sticking up into the air with a gossamer thread anchoring their head to the branch. They also travel while dangling from webbing, carried along by the wind, and on some gusty days I find myself carrying a few hitchhikers, even when I come back into the house.
I mentioned earlier about watching a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) trying to interest a female in his newly-constructed nest, and he was successful; she is now occupying the nest regularly, and I suspect eggs are soon to arrive if they haven’t already. The distance is a little extreme – this is a tight crop from a frame shot at 500mm – and the light angle is terrible, since my view is due south, so it’s hard to say how much I’ll capture, but I’ll keep watching. You know I’ll keep you updated with any decent pics, and perhaps even some indecent ones.
A pair of green frogs (Lithobates clamitans) wintered over in the bottom of the ornamental pond in the back yard and now make nightly appearances, but what startled me was the fishing spider, which joined them a few nights ago. I could tell you that the frog, at lower right in the image above, is 5cm long and the spider is 2.5cm long in body length (so much more in leg spread,) but it’s more illustrative to show scale. No nature photographers were harmed in the making of this image.
This is not the largest fishing spider that I’ve seen, but it’s not far from it either, and fishing spiders are easily the largest genus to be found in the area. I have yet to witness it using the pond for fishing, but it’s still early, especially since few water insects have made an appearance. This is a female, probably full adult, and she may be waiting to mate and form an egg sac, which I’m fairly certain they do suspended in the leaves and branches of nearby plants, such as seen here, though that’s not the same species. This year I have some water plants in pots springing up in the pond, so she should have something to work with in that regard.
By the way, you have to love BugGuide.net. While they have a remarkable community of both amateur and professional entomologists that can help identify arthropods, some of their guidelines are not exactly easy for anyone else to follow:
Additionally Dolomedes tenebrosus features an inverted “v shaped” black mark beginning at the AME extending to the edge of the clypeus enclosing a light spot on the anteromedial margin compared to Dolomedes scriptus which is dark only around each eye with a homogenous medium gray clypeus.
Oh. Okay.
But given all that, I’m inclined to say this is a female Dolomedes tenebrosus, because it’s referring to the ‘face’ of the spider. “AME” is “anterior median eyes,” the front center ‘main’ eyes of a spider, while “clypeus” is a facial plate more or less where the upper lip would be in humans, and in this case “anteromedian margin” means right at the upper edge of this plate. So it refers to the dark marking around the eyes seen here:
This image, unlike the hawk above, is full-frame; moving carefully while the spider was dazzled by a bright flashlight on a tripod, I was able to get in very close with the 80mm macro and extension tube. A short time back I’d picked up a clamp that had a tripod-socket in it, and this has been invaluable for such pursuits – I highly recommend finding one, like this. It should soon see use in holding the USB microscope too.
By the way, I said I had to move carefully, not because of any aggressiveness on the part of the spider, but because she is shy as any of them, and would take shelter in a crevice whenever she felt threatened, as had happened twice before.
The smaller green frog, seen above, had been trapped in position when I moved between it and the pond, so it had simply hunkered down and played possum, but the larger frog was in a better escape position and hurtled into the water as I approached. Immediately after getting the ridiculous closeups of the spider, though, I found it watching from the surface of the water, and went in for a ridiculous closeup of the frog (but less than half as close as the spider.)
I doubt that I might see anything happen, given that all species involved are nocturnal yet change their behavior when observed by the bright lights I need to observe then, but the fishing spider might well be a prime food source for the frogs – it will be interesting to see if she remains. I expect to see frog eggs soon too.
In fact, from more than one species. The Copes grey treefrog shown twice earlier has been hanging around on the deck, less than a dozen meters from the pond, so if that’s a female, she may be depositing her eggs there as well. I’ll close with one more photo of that one, when she (?) presented a mellow pose on the edge of a potted plant.
I should probably just let this sit as it is, but I can’t resist giving my own impression, which is that she is waiting patiently for you to admit to that obvious lie you just told. Perhaps this says far too much about me…
Does this count? I have to admit I’m not sure, since they were growing in a patch of lawn in the same garden, and I can’t vouch for whether they simply appeared there on their own or were planted – I’m leaning towards “natural,” for whatever definition of that vague term you like. I have not identified these yet; you know, most of our more specific names for colors actually come from flowers, so trying to narrow the search choices down from “blue” or “purple” is hard to do without skewing the results towards something that you know isn’t right.
During the same trip, the pollinators were still pretty scarce, but one (yes, unidentified) bush was attracting most of those to be seen; this is a tight crop of one frame while a European honeybee (Apis mellifera) displays its pollen collection. Now, a curious thought as I’m typing this. Most of the stinging insects, as well as numerous other species, display the high-contrast, aposematic coloration (usually black and yellow) to make them memorable to species that might eat them; combined with the stinger, these are evolved traits that protect them from predation. Curiously, the coloration on honeybees is much more muted, and at the same time they are the only species with a barbed stinger that typically lodges in the flesh of whatever they sting, getting ripped out and resulting in the death of the individual bee. I suspect that the lack of more distinctive colors is related to this trait, preventing the genes from the more brightly colored individuals from passing along, but I’m not sure this follows directly. I suppose I could look up what educated people have to say about it… 
I’m going to consider these cultivated, given their location, which was in a planted area in the 
If one looked close, some of the leopard frogs that resided in the garden could be found, as well as a handful of tadpoles, but this is an American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus,) usually hard to spot because they’re both secretive and primary nocturnal. None of the amphibian species were sounding off yet, save for one isolated call – they were simply basking in the sun, absorbing energy after their winter hibernation. There was nothing I could get into this image to show scale very well, but if it helps, I would have recommended keeping small children and lap dogs away from this specimen, notably larger than my fist. Given the very small size of the pond it was within, this is likely the only frog species to inhabit it, since bullfrogs will readily eat other frogs, as well as just about anything else. However, it was successfully avoiding two massive snapping turtles that also inhabit the pond – it’s a little surprising the balances that can take place even in very small habitats. It’s also quite possible that the presence of both species successfully prevented the increase in population between them, each preying on the offspring of the other. Either way, dabbling one’s fingers in the pond is not a recommended activity…
Were either of those species responsible for the foreshortened state of my next subject? It’s impossible to say, though in this area, birds are far more often the culprit. Since the garden is a 
There are too many species of wolf spider to identify any individual in situ, especially when it might require examining the stripes on the underside, so these will simply be classed in the family Lycosidae. The one seen here was caught too far from its protective burrow, so it simply hunkered down with its legs drawn close for protection when I loomed in for the portrait. As nasty as they might appear, they’re quite shy, but notably I only got these images because these two, both appearing to be males, were less wary than the large female I approached numerous times, one who retreated into her burrow before I could ever get her in the viewfinder. The gender might actually have something to do with this, the males having to weigh discretion against not actually finding a female to mate with. Much as we might like it to be otherwise, there are very few species where the males can just wait for the females to come calling…
This one I spotted initially when I didn’t have the camera in hand, perched on the pole supporting a bird feeder. After chasing the wolf spiders, I came back past to find it still in the same position, reluctant to move even as I positioned myself underneath for the portrait. The reason for this can just barely be made out if you look close, since it had already captured a meal and was lethargically gnawing through it. This is another male – the ‘
While I was out, I naturally chased whatever other types of compositions might appear; this one I liked because it’s slightly subtle, though it could have easily been more so. Taken at the nearby pond, this great blue heron (Ardea herodias) has been a resident all winter, and we’ve played stalking games several different times now. It appears to be a juvenile, and it was rather antsy today – or more so than normal – because there was a gas leak over the weekend and the area is filled with construction vehicles and workers shouting things to one another. When I approached too close for its liking, the heron took flight but only went a handful of meters up into a tree, so I played around with those compositions as it watched me warily. A slight change of position and a different focal length brought out a better portrait, and in both images you can see sparse evidence of more buds, out of focus in the foreground.
The other bad move was visiting on the weekend, since that’s naturally when the kids descend in frothing hordes maddened by the sight of lepidoptera, while the narrow walkways are dominated by young mothers piloting strollers and repeating the same admonishments to their progeny. But that’s when I had the free time. At left, a bamboo butterfly (Eryphanes polyxena) appears to have been vandalized by some yard ape wielding a permanent marker, but I’m fairly certain this is only its natural pattern.
So far, I have not confirmed my suspicions on this next one, so what I am about to impart may be completely wrong (unlike, you know, all other content on the blog.) This diminutive butterfly is a zebra mosaic (Colobura dirce,) and the coloration at the trailing edge of the wings drew my attention, forcing me to take note of the rest of the pattern. From a short distance back, those pale orange patches and the dark spots gave the impression of the head and thorax of the butterfly, since this is a pattern that can be seen on many different species, and the stripes on the hindwings mimic the branching veins originating from the joint where the wings spring from the thorax – you can even see the faux legs. When I stopped a staffmember and asked her about this, she wasn’t sure about the nature of this camouflage, but did indicate that this species virtually always perched head downwards, unlike most butterflies and moths. My suspicion is that the position and coloration causes a predator to stab at the end of the hindwings in the belief that they’re the head; wings tear away easily if a bird snags one, not to mention often being discarded anyway as being non-nutritive, so the obvious tactic would be to nail the head or upper thorax when attempting to capture the butterfly. The real abdomen stops well short of the end of the hindwings, however, so any bird that pecks there will only damage the trailing edge of the butterfly’s wings at best, not in the least debilitating. Like I said, I haven’t found any source that confirmed this yet, but that’s my amateur naturalist interpretation.
The same staffmember that directed me to the atlas moth came over later to guide me towards a species I’ve never seen in there before, despite it appearing on their ID guides for years: a clearwing butterfly (Greta oto.) This species was borne in the opposite direction, developing such a lack of a pattern that it became transparent, little more than a vague outline against the background – and tiny to boot. This one was inclined to stay deep in the foliage and away from decent light, but I managed to get an angle that illustrated the nature of the wings despite its uncooperative attitude (though I can’t say that I blame it – see above about kids.) The white patch at the leading edge of the forewings is easy to mistake for a reflection from the transparent wings, but it’s actual coloration. What purpose this might serve is lost on me; the whole point, I would think, is to disappear against the background, so additional color and contrast works against the idea, and the only reason I can conceive of to appear like a reflection would be to mimic water spots on a leaf – which doesn’t really work when the wings are held upright all the time.
I tried not to neglect my fartsy compositions – one does not live by biology alone. Actually, that’s completely not true; biology is the only thing one lives by. Regardless, I still made the attempt to produce ‘pretty’ pictures and not ‘illustrative/educational’ ones, though my skills at the former aren’t necessarily well-developed. When an orange longwing (Dryas iulia) perched against some unknown mottled leaves in bright sunlight, I framed for the art print. Or what I imagine one to be, anyway. Listen, just let me have my naïve misconceptions – I don’t come to your site and snicker like that…
