Category: Bug of the Week

Howdy, BugFans,

Towards the end of June, the BugLady photographed this lovely little moth on her front porch.  She took a quick peek in the moth book – nada – and relegated it to the “X-Files.”  About six weeks later, she photographed an unusual caterpillar at Riveredge Nature Center and ID’d it, and in searching for the story of the second, found the identity of the first.  Love this job!

Slug moths belong in the family Limacodidae (“snail/slug form”); the larvae are called slug caterpillars, and the adults are called slug caterpillar moths.  A number of species occur here in God’s Country (the BugLady wrote briefly in 2012 about the monkey slug/hag moth, whose shed larval skin she photographed locally), but they are a group that she associates with the South.  Her first experience with them involved driving a camp counselor to the ER in Florida after a related puss caterpillar, our most venomous caterpillar, (different family, same super family) http://bugguide.net/node/view/64384, dropped out of a tree onto her.

According to An Annotated List of Lepidoptera of Alberta (2010), “The family is in need of revision, as no taxonomic works have been published since the original descriptions of species, most of which appeared more than 100 years ago.  Recent publications focus on public health issues associated with some caterpillars’ ability to sting.

There are about 50 species of slug caterpillars/moths in North America (1,700 worldwide, mostly tropical, 125 or so in Costa Rica alone).  Adults typically sit with their wings angled out like a tent, and some species curve their abdomens up.  In the words of Jim Sogaard, in Moths & Caterpillars of the North Woods, “The celebrities of this family are the caterpillars, a weird and wild menagerie of colors, shapes, patterns, textures and venoms….”  Like these – http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/larva.php?plate=02.0&page=4&size=m&sort=h (through the saddleback moth pictures).  The stocky, sometimes-spiny larvae turn into stocky, extra-hairy adults that do not eat – here’s a collection of pictures of adults (except for the last few species) http://fieldbioinohio.blogspot.com/2011/07/slug-moths-of-ohio.html.

The eggs are so transparent that you can watch a larva develop inside.  Dyer, in The Life Histories of New York Slug Caterpillars (Conclusion) (1899) says “The appearance of the eggs is that of shining elliptical spots of moisture, rather than that of any ordinary lepidopterous egg.”  They are laid on the undersurface of leaves, and that’s where the caterpillars start eating.

The caterpillars are generalist feeders (most species have at least eight host plants) that skeletonize leaves from below in their early stages and attack the whole leaf when they’re larger.  Last-stage larvae spend the winter in a state of diapause (suspended animation) in a silken cocoon that has been solidified by the secretion of calcium oxalate crystals; caterpillar species with toxic spines may incorporate some into the cocoon for added protection.  They form a pupa within the cocoon in spring.  Another common name for the family – cup moths – refers to the shape of the cocoon.

The spiny species of slug caterpillars are not spiny right out of the box.  In a paper called “Natural History of Limacodid Moths (Zygaenoidea) in the Environs of Washington, D.C.”(2010) authors Murphy, Lill and Epstein tell us that the spines don’t make an appearance until the second instar (after the larva sheds once) and postulate that this may be an adaptation that allows the extra-thin eggshell to stay intact.

The caterpillar’s head is recessed into its thorax – a slit “under its chin” allows it to feed.  “Slug” refers to the way the caterpillars locomote.  “Main-stream” caterpillars have three sets of true legs under the thorax; the rest are prolegs that support the long abdomen and are mostly powered hydraulically, rather than by muscles.  Slug caterpillars have suckers instead of prolegs, so they undulate or glide across the leaf on a “semi-fluid silk ribbon.”  For this reason, they prefer food plants with smooth, rather than hairy, leaves.

About raising slug moths in captivity, Dyer tells us that “In raising any numbers of one species it will be found useful to place them on the growing tree, covered with a large bag of cheesecloth.  This method is often attended with great loss from the accidental inclusion of parasites, especially the predaceous Hemiptera, which as eggs easily escape observation.”

Part One – the Moth

The Early Button Slug Moth, aka the Warm-chevroned Moth (Tortricidia testacea) is a posterchild for the perils of using pictures of pinned specimens to ID a moth that has a unique posture http://bugguide.net/node/view/1253571/bgimage.  The BugLady has never seen its half-inch long caterpillar (scroll down at http://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/species.php?hodges=4652) but will start looking for them under the leaves of (especially) basswood, cherry, maple and oak, but also beech, birch, hickory, and witch hazel.

Wagner (Caterpillars of Eastern North America) describes its range as “woodlands and forests from Pacific Coast to Maine south to Georgia (in mountains) and Mississippi.”

Females lay eggs singly rather than in clusters, and there is one generation per year.

Part Two – The Caterpillar

At first, the BugLady thought she was looking at the caterpillar of a hairstreak or azure butterfly http://bugguide.net/node/view/560113, but it turned out to be that of a Yellow-shouldered Slug Moth (Lithacodes fasciola), aka the Ochre-winged Hag Moth http://bugguide.net/node/view/671775/bgimage.

Maps show their range as eastern North America, mostly east of the Great Plains, but according to Dyer, YSSMs range into South America.  They are found in woodlands and forests, where they eat apple, beech, blueberry, hickory, hop hornbeam, maple, oak, willow, and more.

Wagner reports that in one study, two-thirds of the YSSM caterpillars he collected turned out to be occupied by parasitoids – the larvae of a tachinid fly.  They are also troubled by braconid wasps and stinkbugs.

There is one generation in the North and two in the South.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Salutations, BugFans,

Summer reruns. Here’s an enhanced version (more fun silverfish facts) of an episode that first aired in the spring of 2009.

Silverfish, in the Order Zygentoma (formerly in the order Thysanura, with the bristletails, of previous BOTW fame), have been around for a very long time. They’re tied, in fact, with springtails for the title of “Oldest Insect Fossil” (depending on how liberally you define insects). About 400 million years.

Most insects have wings, and the ancestors of most of today’s wingless insects once had wings. Insects like silverfish are called “primitively wingless” because neither they nor their ancestors ever had wings. They do have 6 short legs and 3 body parts and segmented bodies, and although their status has been debated for a long time, they are generally considered to be a primitive insect.

Silverfish are spindle/carrot-shaped and flat (the better to squeeze through snug spots), and their antennae and “tails” (two lateral, sensory cerci and a medial filament) are shorter than their body. They’re covered with scales that give them a metallic gray “finish” (the English call them “silver ladies”) and that detach easily when predators try to grab them. They locomote pretty fast on a horizontal surface but don’t jump or climb up walls. Sue Hubbell, in Broadsides from the Other Orders, calls them the “greased pig of bug-dom.” She says that they have a “practical form that enabled them to get on in the world, suited to the changes and challenges the world has offered.” She labels them conservative and successful, socially gregarious and “eagerly cannibalistic.” In short – they’ll probably be here when we are not.

There are about 120 species of silverfish worldwide, 18 in North America. Your common, household silverfish – the one that caused the BugLady’s Sainted Granny to store her daughters’ luggage in the garage when they came home from college – is Lepisma saccharina (“sugar-taker”), the only species in its genus in the US. It lives in damp (relative humidity 75% to 95%), cool places, preferably indoors, where it feeds on house dust, bits of dried vegetation, dandruff, sawdust, starch (which it gleans from wallpaper paste and from the glues used in book-binding), and on those small insect body parts that get restaurants in trouble. Silverfish can go without food and water for weeks, and without food for a year if they have water. Hubbell says that back in the olden days, when men wore heavily-starched, detachable collars, it was common to open the collar drawer and watch multitudes of silverfish racing for the shadows (and that a lot of what has been written about them is more than 60 years old). They are eaten by spiders, house centipedes, and earwigs.

The humble silverfish possesses an astonishing sensory system, much of which can be regenerated if necessary. According to Hubbell, it is essentially deaf and has eyes that indicate only light and dark (it prefers dark), but approximately six kinds of sense receptors in its antennae tell it about the size and shape of the spaces it moves through, along with “many other things that are unknown to us in our largely visual and aural world.” She goes on to say that it possesses “an array of chemical and tactile sensitivities so varied and precise that we…… can have no real understanding of what a silverfish’s world is like.” In addition, the “slightest change in air current sets off sensory hairs” on a silverfish’s body. As its antennae navigate the dark spaces, its tail filaments drag behind, analyzing the substrate!

Scientists have discovered that silverfish can learn their way through a maze – unless their antennae or cerci have been removed.

And then there’s its ardent courtship – a dance in three parts. Advancing and retreating, with antennae and tail filaments waving and quivering, whirling their abdomens in a torrid choreography, the male and female court, part, and resume. Eventually, he spins threads from the tip of his abdomen and encloses a spermatophore (sperm packet). At his touch, the female advances into his web, picks up the spermatophore, and uses it to fertilize her eggs. She must dance each time she lays eggs.

She lays her eggs (as many as 100) in cracks and crevices, a few at a time. If she picks a hospitable microclimate, her eggs will hatch looking like mini adults (XX and grow slowly (extra slowly here in the North). If not, her young will not develop properly within their eggs and will die while hatching. Silverfish live several years and molt more than a dozen times (as many as 60 times, some sources say). They are unusual among insects because they continue to shed their exoskeletons after becoming adults. A molting silverfish is, momentarily, a helpless silverfish, and it might get cannibalized if one of its confreres discovers it thus incapacitated.

Yes, they are considered pests (lots of folks just don’t like seeing something moving out of the corner of their eye, or the sight of critters making a break for the shadows when the lights go on, or the sight of a silverfish exiting a plate of cookies). One source points out that repeated use of chemicals to exterminate them results in tiny silverfish corpses and body parts decomposing in the carpet, which may be allergenic and which attract carpet beetles, “and the last state shall be worse than the first.”

Small miracles.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Howdy, BugFans,

Dragonflies again.  The BugLady confesses to playing hooky recently (if going out and looking for insects is “playing hooky” for a BugLady), mostly surveying and photographing dragonflies.

Dragonfly ancestors came on the scene some 325 million years ago, and the BugLady is certain that people were admiring them as soon as there were people.  They are woven into the fabric of myth and legend in many cultures and religions and have even been used for medicine and food (they may exact their revenge by transmitting intestinal parasites).  There are dragonfly pictographs and petroglyphs (http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/dragonfly-petroglyph-dragonfly-trail-gila.html), and they’ve inspired painters, poets and artisans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly#/media/File:After_Kitagawa_Utamaro_001.jpg).  And photographers.  And writers.

What’s not to like?  They come in a rainbow of colors and range in size from damselflies that are less than an inch long to hummingbird-sized darners.  As in the dogbane leaf beetle, their iridescent and metallic hues are the result of physics – the play of light on tiny microstructures below the insect’s cuticle; other colors are produced by a full palette of pigments.

Quick dragonfly review:  Dragonflies and damselflies are members of the order Odonata (“toothed ones,” because of their toothed labium or “lower lip”).  Odonates are divided into two sub-orders – dragonflies, Anisoptera (“different wings,” whose front and hind wings are different in size and shape, and damselflies Zygoptera (“same wings”), whose four wings are similar in shape and size.  Dragonflies tend to be bigger and bulkier than damselflies; their compound eyes wrap around the sides of their heads, and they perch with their wings at right angles to the sides.  Damselflies are slimmer (our smallest dragonfly is actually shorter than many of our damsels but is much stouter); they hold their wings out to the sides in a “V” or fold them over their backs at rest, and their “bug-eyes” stick out to the sides of their heads like little knobs.

Odonates practice “incomplete metamorphosis,” which means that young Odonates come out of the egg looking somewhat like the adults they will become (admittedly, the resemblance of young to adult is harder to see in a dragonfly than in a grasshopper, which also has incomplete metamorphosis).  The young (naiads) are aquatic; when they are ready to emerge, naiads climb out of the water, split the “skin” on the back of the thorax, and climb out.  They deploy fluids (hemolymph) to lengthen and harden the wings, and some are able to take to the air in as little as 45 minutes.

They eat flying insects (think “Mosquito Control”) and may feed far from water, but the shore is where the action is.  Although they are exquisitely fierce-looking, dragonflies are harmless (though a dragonfly in the hand may probe your fingers with its abdomen tip).

About those myths and legends.  In general, Asian and Native American cultures are more inclined to view dragonflies positively than Western civilizations.  Dragonflies symbolize strength, courage, prosperity, good luck, success in battle, and harmony in various Asian countries.  Interesting side note as the meadowhawk season heats up – according to one source, the Japanese believed that red dragonflies carry the souls of departed ones.  For Native American tribes, especially in the southwest and Great Plains, dragonflies represented purity, swiftness, happiness, transformation, healing, invincibility, and fresh water, and their presence was linked with the success of the corn crops (killing one was taboo in several tribes).

In Europe, dragonflies were called devil’s darning needle, ear-cutter, horse stinger, eye-poker, eye-snatcher, and adder’s servant/snake doctor (because they follow snakes around and tend to their wounds, stitching them back together if needed).  Dragonflies sewed shut the eyes, lips and/or ears of people who told lies or swore or scolded, and they were believed to be in association with the Devil to weigh/harvest people’s souls (these beliefs seem to have traveled to places that the Europeans subsequently colonized, like America).  Check Dragonfly Woman’s blog https://thedragonflywoman.com/2012/11/02/friday-5-scary-myths-about-dragonflies/ to find out about five bits of dragonfly folklore.

Here are some recent pictures.

The damsels –

Ebony Jewelwing – females have white spots at the wingtips.

American Rubyspot – almost hidden at rest, the male’s ruby spots flash in the sunlight. Along with Jewelwings, they are “river damsels” – found near running water.

Emerald Spreadwing – the spines on her legs help her nab her prey.

Violet Dancer – what an amazing color for an insect!

Powdered Dancers ovipositing – females oviposit in plants below the river’s surface, sometimes completely submerging to do so.  The river is wide and the current is fast, and impossibly, there they are.

Azure Bluet – the name says it.  Naturalist John Acorn calls bluets “floating neon toothpicks.”

And the dragons –

Common Green Darner – one of the canary-sized dragonflies, it patrols above the grass tops on the prairie and over the water, and it may form dramatic feeding and migratory swarms.

Lilypad Clubtail – what amazing eyes, and it’s even on a lilypad!

Common Whitetail male – the poster child for pruinescence, it’s abdomen is dark as a juvenile.

Slaty Skimmer – very classy!  Slaty Skimmers are slowly extending their range into Wisconsin, present in only a few counties.

Blue Dasher – sometimes called the peacock of the dragonfly world.  It chases the Slaty Skimmer around the shore.

Eastern Pondhawk male – a colorful dragonfly catches an equally-colorful damselflies (a Violet Dancer).

Eastern Pondhawk female – she’s pretty intense, herself.

Calico Pennant – “pennant” because they like to sit on grassland plants, streaming off the top like a small flag.

Halloween Pennant – each of those compound eyes is made up of thousands of simple eyes.

Ruby Meadowhawk – females and young males are amber; older males practically vibrate with color.  There are several species of meadowhawks, and they’re everywhere these days, and will be with us through fall.

With apologies to J.B.S. Haldane, who speculated that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

Go outside – find some dragonflies.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Greetings, BugFans,

The protocol for BOTW episodes has always been “Start with a usable picture.”  Well…  The solitary wasp that created egg chambers in the BugLady’s wind chimes was having none of that.

She’s a Four-toothed mason wasp (Monobia quadridens).  She belongs in the family Vespidae, along with a whole bunch of solitary species (she is solitary) and some notable social species like the yellowjackets, hornets, and paper wasps (the BugLady is often asked which insects are most likely to cause us grief, and she always answers “insects that live in colonies and have homes to defend and multiple workers to sacrifice.”).  The Four-toothed mason wasp is in the Potter/Mason wasp subfamily Eumeninae.

Monobia quadridens is found throughout eastern North America, edging into southern Ontario to the north, the Great Plains on the west, and northern Mexica to the south.  Monobia is a small genus of seven Neotropical species – three in the US (two of those, just barely).  Here’s one of the others – http://bugguide.net/node/view/154157 – Wow!

This is a medium-sized wasp, with both a length and a wingspan of just under an inch; males are a bit smaller and have a white spot on their face.  Some of the books say it resembles a bald-faced hornet, and that’s what the BugLady thought it was until she saw it climbing down into a pipe on the wind chimes, a distinctly non-bald-faced hornet behavior.  Here’s a better picture of the female http://bugguide.net/node/view/939348/bgimage, and one of the male http://bugguide.net/node/view/851176/bgimage

After a 30 minute liaison with a male (rather lengthy for a wasp), the female four-toothed mason wasp starts to build egg chambers for her eggs.  She will tunnel into dirt or wood; or she will use pre-owned dirt, mud, or wood nests made by a variety of bees and other wasps; and she is also known to usurp active nests of other species, entering them and exterminating any eggs, larvae, pupae, or cocoons within.

She lays an egg at the far end of the tunnel, and then she hunts, stings, and paralyzes caterpillars for provisions until she is satisfied that the larder is full.  She seals the chamber with not one, but two mud walls with an air pocket between (“intercalary cells”).  Repeat until filled.

The eggs hatch in a few days and larvae feed on their cache of caterpillars for about a week before pupating.  Male four-toothed mason wasp have a shorter “gestation period” than their sisters, but Ms. Wasp has that covered – she can selectively lay male or female eggs, so she places the males closer to the entrance, where they can exit without disturbing the females.

It has been postulated that the hollow spaces between cells will fool parasites and also that they provide insulation, but in a paper called “The Cocooning Habit of the Wasp Monobia quadridens” published in 1919 in the Journal of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, author Phil Rau noted that whether meant as insulation or as parasite protection, the double walls of the egg chambers are inefficient (larval mortality due to freezing is high).  Monobia quadridensoverwinters as a “naked” larva rather than spinning a protective cocoon, and Rau considers whether the presence of some silk strands on the inner walls of the chamber is evidence of vestigial web-spinning behavior.  In mulling over whether the building of mini wall-covers harks back to an ancestor that spun a cocoon, Rau postulates that “a more logical explanation of the phenomenon is that it is of physiological necessity to the organism to have the body cleared of this material before transforming.”

Larval four-toothed mason wasps may be carnivores, but their parents are vegans, found on flowers, sipping nectar, accidental pollinators.  The caterpillars that are collected by Mom and consumed by the larvae are micromoths from a variety of families.

Four-toothed mason wasps appeared in one of the first insect field guides in this county, a small volume by Frank Lutz called Field Book of Insects, published in 1919.  It’s in a color plate labeled “Insects to be Handled with Caution.”  Why?  The venomous sting of the female is comparable to that of a bald-faced hornet (in other words, you’ll know you’ve been stung).  Fairly unique among wasps, the male Monobia quadridens will use his pointy (but stinger-free) abdomen to defend himself (although he lacks venom), delivering a jab that Rau describes as a pin prick.

In the southern part of their range, four-toothed mason wasps have two generations a year (“bivoltine”); the BugLady isn’t sure if they have two here in Wisconsin or one (“univoltine”).  The wind chimes will have to overwinter outside this year, and the “Ode to Joy” will sound a bit flat for the foreseeable future.

Kate Redmonds, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Salutations, BugFans,

Protean Shield-backed Katydids evoke adjectives like “earthy” and “organic,” and “elemental” (along with “lunker”).  This utilitarian katydid looks like it saw the dinosaurs, and maybe it did.  Katydids (family Tettigoniidae, subfamily Tettigoniinae) are in the order Orthoptera (“straight wings”) (grasshoppers, crickets, et al), and the Orthopterans have been around for 300+ million years or so, compared to dinosaurs’ 233 million years.  Orthoperans survived the meteor strike 65 million years ago; dinosaurs did not.

As a group, Shield-backs are drab insects with very long antennae and a pronotum (a structure that covers part/all of the top of the thorax) that is flattened and flared like a shield. They make noise (stridulate) (but not very musically) by rubbing together rough areas on their wings.  If you make noise, you need to hear noise, so they have “ears” (tympana) located on the front legs, near the “knee.”  There are 123 species in North America, and they are a mostly-Western bunch, with about 10 species in the East.

Surprising Shield-back Katydid Fact #1: Besides being called Shield-backed katydids, the subfamily Tettigoniinae is also known as the Predaceous katydids!  In fact, lots of species of Orthopterans eat meat to some degree (Bambi is an omnivore, too, a story for a different day).  Shield-backs do eat plants, and some are agricultural pests, but they are also scavengers on dead insects and are active predators, including on their brethren.

Surprising Shield-backed Katydid Fact #2: The Mormon crickets that threatened to ravage the Mormons’ crops in the summer of 1848 are actually an almost-3”-long, flightless species of Shield-backed katydid.  According to Wikipedia, “Although flightless, the Mormon cricket is capable of traveling up to two kilometers a day in its swarming phase, during which it is a serious agricultural pest and traffic hazard.”  In gratitude for their delivery, which came in the form of a big flock of California Gulls, the Mormons erected the Seagull Monument (more apologies to birders, everywhere) in Salt Lake City.

Surprising Shield-backed Katydid Fact #3:  Expect to be nipped if you handle them (probably won’t break the skin). In England they are nicknamed “wart-biters.”

PROTEAN SHIELD-BACKED KATYDIDS, aka Short-legged Shield-bearers (Atlanticus testaceus) are found east of the Mississippi, from Kentucky/Virginia north around the Great Lakes and New England and into southern Canada.  They used to be lumped with the Southern Protean Shieldback (Atlanticus pachymerus), a distinct species that is now believed to replace them in the South.  They are found in open woodlands, woodland/grassland edges, fence rows, and brushy fields.  Young nymphs seem to seek the sun than adults do.

Based on their sheer bulk, it’s hard to imagine the chunky, inch-long PSBKs airborne.  In fact, because of their reduced, almost vestigial wings, the only way they get off the ground is by climbing.  Where do they go on foot?  Researchers captured, marked and released 231 of them and found that they moved as far as 550 feet (average 120 feet) over a period of a few weeks, but their peregrinations seemed random.

These are the first katydids to mature and initiate a chorus in summer, and it is suspected that they may get a jump start by overwintering as nymphs, though some sources say that it is the egg that overwinters.  They may sing from June through early fall, but their song is high-pitched and hard to pick out http://songsofinsects.com/katydids/protean-shieldback (click on the sonogram at the bottom).

Researcher S. K. Gangwere studied both the feeding habits and the circadian rhythms of PSBKs and discovered that they are “incompletely nocturnal” – that is, although they are most active from dusk until the “wee hours,” they are not completely at rest during the day.  Gangwere paints a lovely picture of PSBKs moving about their landscapes, sometimes walking, sometimes hopping, twirling their antennae, resting under leaves and debris, and enjoying late-morning snacks.  Males will gather at the base of plants and stridulate a bit in late afternoon.

At sunset, their activity level increasess, and they abandon the ground and climb into the vegetation.  Males feed and stridulate, females feed, and she may mate if a male occupies the plant she’s on.  Activity starts winding down after midnight (though, as Gangwere says, “they remain alert and their antennae continue to twirl”).  They descend and tuck in well before dawn and remain still for six or seven hours.  Elliot and Hershberger, in The Songs of Insects (a great book that comes with a CD) call shieldbacks “the linebackers of the insect world” and say that “Protean Shieldbacks are easy to approach, but their habitats are typically dense, and reaching a singer can be exceedingly difficult, unless you’re a professional contortionist.”

About feeding, Gangwere tells us that based on their mouthparts, they are adapted for a carnivorous lifestyle, but their diet probably consists more of plants, which are more readily available than animals.  He calls them “a carnivore by preference but an omnivore by necessity.”

The individual pictured is a male – if it were a female, it would have an impressive, sword-like ovipositor aft.

Alert BugFans may have noticed that one of the BugLady’s nemesis bugs is sitting on the PSBK’s head in one shot.  Thanks to Dan, an authentic entomologist, for the ID – a biting midge in the family Ceratopogonidae.  And perhaps a future BOTW.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Greetings, BugFans,

The BugLady got a very special request from almost-5-year-old BugFan Jolene, who is curious about “ant flies” (aka flying ants).

The BugLady will try to answer her questions, keeping in mind that ants are a huge group (12,500 species ID’d so far, globally, and maybe that many more awaiting discovery; 700 species in North America, 30 of them non-native.).  There are very few “always-es” or “nevers” as far as the life styles of ants are concerned, so the BugLady may generalize a bit.  Turns out that this is a pretty timely request, considering that tennis at Wimbledon was interrupted recently by ant flies https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/05/flying-ants-distract-players-at-wimbledon.

It’s been a while since we visited the ants.  They’ve had supporting roles in a number of BOTWs and starred in others, beginning with Ants (101) in 2008 http://uwm.edu/field-station/ants/, then Western thatch ants http://uwm.edu/field-station/western-thatch-ant/ and then an episode about the mound building Ants of CESA http://uwm.edu/field-station/the-ants-of-cesa/.  As charter BugFans may recall, the BugLady has had her moments with ants, and she is sure that somewhere in the mind of the Collective, they remember.

A little about life in an ant colony:

Ants (family Formicidae) are social insects that live in colonies made up mostly of sterile, female workers (sometimes many thousands of them) that do different jobs that support the community.  A worker may rotate through a number of tasks in her life; she starts “inside,” doing digging/maintenance or caring for the nursery or garden or queen, but when she’s reaching the end of her life span (which could be as long as one to three years), she is more likely to be “assigned” a more dangerous “outside” job like soldier or forager.  Why?  Because, actuarially speaking, she’s considered more expendable as younger ants join the workforce.  No sentiment in an ant hill!

There is also a queen (or queens – see the thatch ant episode above), and, once a year, drones (fertile males) and virgin queens.  Royal ants are not produced until the colony reaches a certain level of maturity/stability/population density, and then they are produced (usually) annually.  In many (but not all) species, the queen is the only one who can lay eggs.  In some species, she may live for 20 or more years, but (generally) unless there are multiple queens, the colony dies when the queen dies.

Without further ado, here are Jolene’s questions:

Why do some ants get to fly but others don’t?

Most of the ants in an anthill do not have wings and will never have wings and will never leave home except to look for food nearby.  But, once a year, the nursery ants feed some of the young ants some special, extra food that lets them grow wings.  They get to fly far from home and start new anthills so there are more ants.

Do ant-flies have a special job in their family?

All the other ants in the anthill have jobs, but the ants with wings (usually) don’t work – the worker ants take care of them and feed them.  The ant flies’ special job is to be a royal ant “prince” or “princess.”

Are their classmates jealous of their wings? 

Ants know what to do without thinking – they have amazing instincts – and they can even learn from other ants (and, as BugFan Linda points out, “Every animal knows more than you do,” a Koyukon Indian proverb from northern Alaska). Ants do their jobs and don’t make a fuss about it and (probably) don’t get jealous.

Do they get to have the wings their whole life or do they have to give them back?

Royal ants just have wings from the time they come out of their cocoon in the ant hill until the time they fly into the air on Flying Ant Day (more about that in a sec).  They mate in the air and then the females start looking for a good spot to start digging their own anthill.  It’s pretty tough to tunnel into the dirt with a big set of wings dragging behind, and the wings would get shredded, and she doesn’t need them anymore, so before she starts digging, the young queen will break or chew her wings off and never have wings again.  The males die and don’t help with the new anthill.

Do all ants have ant-flies as part of their family?

The BugLady isn’t sure. There are some kinds of ants where the workers can lay eggs.  Sometimes they live in colonies that have queens, but sometimes their colonies don’t even have queens.  Maybe if there’s a queen, there are princes and princesses, but if there’s no queen, there aren’t.

Flying Ant Day:

So, what signals ants to, as one author puts it, “erupt from the ground?”  Phenology, for one thing – species fly at distinct points in the summer/fall and at different times of day; each species’ schedule separates them from other species and helps to prevent males from wasting energy chasing an unsuitable bride.  Weather, for another – many species wait for a warm, calm, humid day, preferably after rain.  They fly better in damp air, and wet soil is easier to excavate.

Females fly away from their natal hill, and they fly fast, and they don’t release their “come hither” pheromones until they’ve put some distance between themselves and home (and the princelings that they share a gene pool with).

It didn’t take much poking around on the internet to discover that “Flying Ant Day” is an internationally noted phenomenon (Googling “ant nuptial flight” will result in a fascinating list of “related searches” at the bottom of the page, too).  Find out about the UK’s National Flying Ant Day here, http://www.mirror.co.uk/science/flying-ant-day-2017-it-10742632, (cookie alert) including information and a podcast about The Royal Society of Biology’s citizen science Flying Ant Survey and a bit about drunken “seagulls” (apologies to birders everywhere) that apparently find ants delicious and are “stupefied” by the ants’ formic acid content (imagine living in a country that takes a national interest in such things).

And a little more about life in an ant colony:

When the young queen lands, she has probably mated with several males (ensuring some genetic diversity for her offspring) and she will store and use the sperm for the rest of her life, fertilizing hundreds of thousands/millions of eggs.  She digs an initial tunnel, makes a chamber, lays her first eggs, and cares for them herself.  Because she tends this first brood alone and her foraging may be limited, the workers she rears are smaller and weaker than future workers will be.  When they emerge, they take over all the chores.

The mortality rate for young queens is huge, due to predators that are attracted to the nuptial flight, weather, failure of the first brood, marauding rival ants, etc.  Several sources said that maybe a single one of the potential queens a colony produces in its lifetime might survive!

Side note – No matter how cleverly you word your Google search about ants, a myriad of exterminator sites pop up, giving you interesting details and fun facts about ants right before making their big, chemical pitch.

Also, there are some really committed groups of ant fans out there, and lots of instructions for starting your own ant farm.  Some people track Flying Ant Day in order to take home a young queen and start an ant farm.  Remember, depending on species, ant hills in the wild have populations from the hundreds to many-thousands.  And nuptial flights.

For lots more information in very readable form (though it seems to be a translation and sometimes reads like one), try: https://www.antkeepers.com/facts/ants/.

Thanks, BugFans Jolene and Caitlin.

Note – The Riveredge Nature Center Dragonfly Survey is right around the corner.  Join us on July 22 from 10 AM to 3 PM (come for all or part of the day).  No experience necessary – wear good walking shoes and bring binoculars if you have them and munchies if you need them.  Call Mary Holleback at 262-416-1224 for more info or to register.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady added a new porch light bug recently – a Northern Pearly-eye.  Butterfly.  At 11 PM.

The porch-light Pearly-eye is not the first one that the BugLady has seen after dark – she has photographed them on oranges (put out for the birds) after sunset and at 1 AM under her yard light.

On the topic of nocturnal butterflies, the internet is, understandably, largely mute (of course, the BugLady is keyword-challenged) (and there is a film by that name).  In Mariposa Road, Robert Michael Pyle says that the Northern Pearly-eye “might be the closest thing to a nocturnal butterfly in the United States,” and there was a tantalizing paper called “Nocturnal Butterflies of Panama” by Annette Aiello, who reminds us that day-flying Lepidopterans are a very small minority indeed (butterflies make up fewer than 10% of species of Lepidoptera).  She goes on to say that our knowledge of butterflies is expanding, and that a family of Lepidopterans in Panama that was once thought to be moths in the inch-worm family (Geometridae) turned out to be nocturnal butterflies!

A search for “crepuscular butterflies” (dawn and dusk) proved only minimally more successful.  Most trails lead to the Pearly-eye’s family (family Nymphalidae, the brush-footed butterflies) and to its subfamily Satyrinae, and then to members of its genus (which is either Lethe or Enodia, depending on whose book you read).

Northern Pearly-eyes are generally described as shade loving butterflies of forest glades and edges, not found on flowers in sunny meadows.  Weber, in Butterflies of the North Woods, says that they “may be active early a.m. or late p.m. when they court,” and several sources said that they may come to light at night.  Quod erat demonstrandum.

Day-flying butterflies face a variety of predators, but being afoot at night isn’t much safer; many bats would consider a Pearly-eye a tasty morsel.  Like some families of moths, butterflies in the subfamily Satyrinae have hearing organs – swollen, fluid-filled, enervated veins on the underside of their forewings.  The Pearly-eye folds its wings at rest, which exposes the “ears,” located at the base of its wings (in fact, the BugLady has never seen a Pearly-eye with its wings spread and would probably not recognize it if she did).  Day-flying butterflies may be able to detect the sound of a bird’s wings, and Pearly-eyes may be able to hear the clicking of bat echolocation.

Find a brief biography of Northern Pearly-eyes here: http://uwm.edu/field-station/wood-nymphs-part-2/.

Field note #1 – Small moths in the genus Petrophila covered flowers blooming along the river on a recent walk.  A delicately beautiful moth, it has a big secret.  See http://uwm.edu/field-station/two-lined-petrophila-moth-rerun/.

Field note #2 – When the BugLady was out on the prairie after a rain last week, she found a bunch of Blue Mud Daubers visiting the water reservoirs of cup plants (more about that in a future BOTW).  To find out why, see http://uwm.edu/field-station/black-and-yellow-mud-dauber-family-specidae/

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Salutations, BugFans,

A century ago, give or take, Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott founded the Technicolor (a trademarked name) Motion Picture Corporation and applied for a series of patents on the evolving processes for producing motion pictures in color (it’s pretty interesting, and far beyond the scope of any physics class the BugLady ever took – beam splitters and color filters and subtractive color prints, and smoke and mirrors, and multiple “monochrome” films in primary colors run simultaneously on special projectors to produce saturated colors in combination, and in later incarnations, films laminated together to create a final, color print).

With a lower case “t,” technicolor refers to something that is vividly colorful.

The BugLady submits that Mother Nature has had the whole thing figured out for a good long time (the dogbane leaf beetle, for instance, whose changing colors emanate from the play of light on tiny, tilted plates above its pigment layer, has something pretty sophisticated going on, and so does any bird that is blue).

Go outside – be dazzled.

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/

Howdy, BugFans,

A lovely article about jumping spiders, though you have to wade through a few ads to read it.  It contains a juicy vocabulary word – new to the BugLady, and one that she will have difficulty injecting into a conversation unless she takes up rock climbing or spelunking (equally unlikely).  “Abseiling” (most definitions are for the noun or verb, not the adjective), from the German verb for lowering/descending vertically, in a controlled fashion, by rope, rappelling.

It’s also about the inquisitive nature of science, about Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”

The BugLady found this jumping spider on the fertile stalk of a cinnamon fern this spring.  The “green grapes” are the spore-producing structures of the fern.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/jumping-spiders-can-see-the-moon/529329/

Kate Redmond, The BugLady]

Greetings, BugFans,

Anyone with siblings has heard/said “Mom always liked you best.”  Out of all the bugs she has seen, photographed, researched, and written about, the BugLady likes Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus) best.  The first brood of Tigers is sailing around her skyscapes, along with a good number of Giant Swallowtails (a Giant Swallowtail sitting on a candy-pink peony is just, plain over-the-top).  Breathtaking!

Some tigers are dark, designed to fool predators into thinking that they are Pipevine Swallowtails in places where the two species overlap.  Wisconsin is not one of those places.  Pipevine Swallowtails are poisonous because their food plants are poisonous.  Although the pipevine plant is not native to Wisconsin (some related plants are found in gardens here) and Pipevine Swallowtails are rare in the state, some female Tigers are the “dark morph.”

Brood I has it tough –they weather the winter and early spring as a chrysalis, hitched (stitched) to the base of a tree trunk, exposed to bitter cold by the lack of snow and chilled by long, cold, wet springs.  Many die.  And yet, here they are – looping through the air and instigating Brood II.  Brood II has it relatively easy and will emerge in time to enjoy the cup plant and Joe-Pye Weed in mid-August.  And the beat goes on.

Tiger Swallowtails are the definition of “perfect.”

The BugLady