Praying mantises make great garden (and house) guests

Praying mantises are striking and well known examples of fun insects to find in the your garden. These carnivorous insects will eat pretty much any other insect and even small birds and mice. Anything they can fit into their mouths. The way they look at you and tilt their head really makes you glad they aren’t 6 ft tall because they would eat you too!

Last summer I kept seeing one in our yard. It is Stagmomantis californica, the praying mantis native to the Western United States. This one pretty much owned the garden and I’d find it all over the place, waiting for prey.

There must have been at least two around and because in the spring I when out to prune the check on the nectarine tree and found this praying mantis egg cluster, called an ootheca.

I figured I’d keep an eye on it and watch the nymph come out when there were ready. But then I forgot and the nectarine grew a lot of leaves so you couldn’t see it anymore. One day in May I remembered to check on it. Once I located the ootheca, I saw there was something dangling from it.

It seemed like the emerging nymph was stuck. So I gently moved it by the attached silk to a paper towel in a bowl. Then again, forgot about for a hour or so. When I came back there was a fully formed little praying mantis in the bowl! (Not the best picture but I want to show you how little it was.)

I looked away for five seconds to fix the camera settings and the little nymph disappeared! I looked all over the kitchen and couldn’t find it. However, after a couple weeks I did start seeing other nymphs around the yard, like this one hanging out on the yarrow.

Then last week while we were getting ready to go out the door, a praying mantis ran up the wall!! I cannot prove it is the same one that escaped in the kitchen, but I would put money on it. We caught it and released it into the garden. Now there are three that I can distinguish and see regularly: a brownish one, a green one, and a green one with a pink band. The green one with the pink band is the one that lived it’s early weeks in the house. I hope at least one is a female and that we end up with a new ootheca to watch next summer.

Want more photos?

I take a lot more insect photos than I’ve used here on this blog. I made a corresponding Instagram account to put more of them out. If you are on Instagram and want to see, you can find them @get_buggy.

The life stages of lady beetles

Spring brings renewed plant growth and with that comes an influx in aphids. Aphids are serious agricultural pests and came be problematic in your garden as well. But often they will be controlled by natural enemies, mainly other insects that eat them. I have covered some of those a while ago here. This year in our new garden I have seen a lot of a popular insect predator, the lady beetle. Lady beetles, commonly called lady bugs, are the quintessential insect representatives. They are in the beetle family, defined by their hard outer wings.

Most of us recognize the adult lady beetles with their red shell wings and black spots. Not all lady beetles have spots but that’s a different topic.

Adult lady beetle

However, you can also see lady beetles at different stages of development, especially in the spring with all the aphids around.

There eggs are often found on the underside of leaves where aphids are present. The female beetles look for places with lots of aphids to lay their eggs so that once the larva hatch they will have enough food to eat. Their eggs are yellow ovals, laid on end.

Lady beetle eggs among aphids

The juvenile lady beetles that emerge from these eggs do not look like the adults. To me, they look like tiny little alligators because their abdomens are look like an alligator tail. They start out quite small, about 5 mm. Despite being small, they start eating aphids straight away.

Newly emerged lady beetle larvae and eggs

They are voracious predators and can eat aphids that are bigger than their heads.

1st instar lady beetle larva eating an aphid

Fueled by aphids, they molt several times and become larger (and often develop spike like structures on their backs). The ones in the picture below are about half an inch long.

 

3rd instar lady beetle larvae

After demolishing hoards of aphids, the lady beetle larvae will pupate. If you are seeing the larvae around, you can likely find a pupa as well. They look like a mash up of an adult and the larva. Inside the pupa, the larva is changing into an adult.

Lady beetle pupa

Which brings us back to the adults.

Lady beetle eating aphids

 

From the inside out

I cannot believe that I haven’t written about this yet because it’s really one of my favorite things: parasitoids. Have you ever watched the movie Aliens? I actually haven’t but it’s still one of the best way to explain parasitoids. Parasitoids are like the aliens in Alien, they eat things from the inside out.

Parasites, predators, and parasitoids are three types of ecological interactions that involve one organism eating from another. You have probably heard of parasites, like lice and fleas. In biology and ecology, a parasite is an organism that benefits from another organism (the host) while providing no benefit in return. Unlike predators, parasites do not usually kill their host. In evolutionary terms, parasites evolve to keep their host alive as long as possible so that they can continue benefiting from it. Lice, for example, do not kill us – even though they are very annoying. Parasites can live on the outside of their host, like lice and fleas, or they can live inside their host (like intestinal worms).

You’ve also likely heard of predators. Predators eat their prey pretty soon after killing it. Lions are predators of water buffalo. Frogs are predators flies. Damselflies are predators of mosquito larvae. There are lots of common examples. The key is that the prey is killed and (mostly) eaten.

Parasitoids are somewhere in-between parasites and predators. They are like predators in that they eventually kill their host. But they are like parasites in that they live with their host of a long time. The parasitoids you are likely to encounter in your yard and garden are insects that attack other insects.

Parasioids play a big role in controlling herbivorous insects. The most common parasitoids are wasps. Not the type of wasps that sting, like yellow jackets or paper wasps. These wasps have modified stingers that deposit eggs inside or on other insects. There are so many types of these wasps, from really tiny ones that attack insect eggs to much larger ones that probe dead wood for beetles living inside. But for now, I am going to focus on the ones you are most likely to see in your yard: aphid parasitoids.

Aphids are very common in gardens, ornamental plants, and agriculture. If you want to know more about aphids, this post has more specific info. Aphids are attacked by a variety of parasitoids. Some are specialists, meaning they only attack a few species of aphids, while some are generalists, meaning they attacking many species of aphids. A female parasitoid will use the chemical sensors on her legs and antennae to determine if she wants to lay an egg in the aphid (shown in picture below).

If the aphid is deemed suitable, she will use her ovipositor to inject an egg into the aphid. The ovipositor is a little hard to see in the picture below. I’ve circled it in red. Fun fact, wasps can control the sex of the eggs they are laying by fertilizing them or leaving them unfertilized. Fertilized eggs become female wasps and unfertilized eggs become male wasps.

Once a female parasitoid has laid an egg inside an aphid, the larva will hatch and then feed inside the aphid through several growth cycles. The aphids will appear normal in the early stages. But as the parasitoid gets ready to pupate (transition from larva to adult), they will kill the aphid and turn it into a cocoon. These often are a different color than the live aphids and have a ballooned out shape and a harder shell. You can spot them pretty easily once you know what to look for.

Here are two pictures of parasitized aphids.

Aphids and aphid mummies on a kale leaf

Then once the adult is fully formed, it will chew a whole in the aphid shaped cocoon and emerge into the world. You can see the exit holes if you know what you are looking for.

Parasitoids are really important for controling the numbers of other insects, like aphids in your garden. Without parasitoids aphid populations would exploded and damage plants. I see this every year with my roses. The aphids will start first and then I’ll start seeing parasitzed aphids and the aphid population will stabilize without causing damage to the roses. You can actually order aphid parasitoid wasps from insectaries to release in your garden. Just be sure to do a little research on the type of aphids you have so that you can choose a parasitoid that is likely to attack those aphids.

There is a whole field of agricultural entomology all about using parasitoids to control crop pests but I’ll save that for another post.

What happened to the firewood?

I wrote most of this post a while ago before while we were still in Colorado and before life got really busy. I really want to get back into more regularly writing about the insects I encounter in 2020, and I am going to start by getting this one finished before I move on to California insects.

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We got some maple firewood from our neighbor last summer and added it to our stack on the porch. Then around November, I noticed a strange sound while we were sitting on the porch near the wood pile. Upon further inspection, I found piles of what looked like sawdust all around the wood.

This is a classic sign of wood eating beetles. Normally, this can be quite a problem, say, for example, if they start coming out of your wood slab table. But this was just firewood, and I love insects so I decided to investigate. The logs were covered in small, round holes. The sound we heard was the larvae chewing through the wood.

These are the holes the beetle larva make as they eat through the wood. They push digested food out of the holes, making the sawdust piles. When they are ready to pupate, they will pack a tunnel full of the sawdust material and make a cocoon like structure. Then adults will emerge in the spring.

We split some logs open to find the larvae and found these guys. Their large heads allow them to make tunnels in through the wood that the rest of their body will fit through. In the process, they create the sawdust that alerted me to their presence. Technically, it is not sawdust but frass (insect poop), but it looks like sawdust.

From the consistency of the frass and hairs on the legs, I think these are beetles in the family Lyctidae. But they could also be in the family Anobiidae. Often these two families are collectively called powderpost beetles.

While I enjoyed these beetles in my firewood, infestations of powderpost beetles can be damaging. We burned all the firewood over the winter to prevent adult beetles from emerging in the spring and attacking other wood items. If you see sawdust and exit holes inside your house, it would be wise to call an expert to come evaluate the situation as these beetles can be very destructive to furniture and sometimes to the house structure. And if you are getting wood furniture, particularly slabs of hardwood and hardwood flooring, check with your supplier about how they manage beetle risk.

Clearly, wood boring beetles can travel in firewood. These beetles only traveled over the fence from our neighbors house. But if they have given the wood to some in Kansas or taken the wood camping in Rocky Mountain National Park, these beetles would like have escaped into new environments. Moving firewood is one of the main ways that invasive wood boring beetles, like the emerald ash borer, spread. It is very important to not move firewood around, especially if there are invasive beetles in the area!

Pond creatures

Our house came with a pond, which, as an entomologist, made me nervous. Because, well, mosquitoes live and breed in standing water. Technically only the larval stages live in the water, but mosquito larvae turn into mosquitoes! And mosquitoes ruin nights on the porch and outdoor dinners.

Female mosquitoes are the only ones who bite. They are looking for blood because they need to feed before they can lay eggs. Interestingly, it is not the mosquitoes bite that makes your arm swell and itch. That happens because people’s immune system react to the bite with inflammation and itching.

Anyway, backyard ponds can be a large source of mosquitoes. So I was nervous about the pond, even though it is pretty.

The first summer we put in about 15 small goldfish, which actually thrived. They more than tripled in size over the summer. I assume that they were getting fat on mosquito larvae because we didn’t see many mosquitoes in the yard. Same for the second summer. But the third summer was different. We changed the pond liner and the fish store was having some issues with their fish stock. We weren’t having any luck with the fish, and I was sure that the mosquitoes were going to get out of control.

But they never did. When I finally went to investigate, I found out why.

The pond was full of damsel fly nymphs! There may also be some dragonfly nymphs but it’s hard to tell without catching them. For more about how to tell them apart and some biology see my older post about this https://getbuggy.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/dragonfly-damselfly/. These nymphs are vicious underwater predators (of things their size, no need to worry about your toes), and we had hundreds of them living in the pond.

They were constantly patrolling the all surfaces in the pond. And nothing was getting past them!

Once they’ve gotten their fill of mosquitoes and other underwater creatures, the crawl up on a rock and split their exoskeleton open to become an adult. Going from what is around the yard, I believe that most of the nymphs become these pretty blue damselflies.

They are also predators as adults. They are like the cheetahs of the insect skies, hunting insects in flight and attacking quickly. So they continue their hunt for insect prey out of the pond, which would help with any adult mosquitoes that come to the pond to lay eggs. And other insects. Actually, now that I think about it, they might be eating bees but I guess that is nature.

Dragonflies and damselflies are part of the insect order called Odonata. This order is very old, evolutionary. There were Odonates flying around when there were dinosaurs! In fact, they are thought one the insect lines that first evolved flight.

While dragonflies and damselflies are not usually not on the list of beneficial garden insects, I’ve come to greatly appreciate them this summer!

Aphids in the sky and underground

It’s spring! Well today is the first day that feels like summer, but it’s spring. In places where plants die back in the winter, spring is a full of new growth. And lots this new plant growth seems to miraculously get covered in aphids. Where do they come from?

While some of them may already be in your plants, hitting as eggs, some literally fall out of the sky. It’s a strategy for finding new habitats. It’s amazing really. Aphids drift on the wind, high up in the atmosphere until they fall down to earth. A collection of insects at 30,000 ft found a substantial amount of aphids (and a certain type of spiders).

The chance of landing on your rose might seem infinitesimal, but there are millions of aphids floating around in the atmosphere. If only one lands on your rose, you’ve got aphids. As I discussed in a previous post (https://wordpress.com/post/getbuggy.wordpress.com/51), aphids reproduce by cloning themselves. So just one female can populate the whole garden over the summer.

But aphids are not just on the surface and in the air. They are also underground! Just like there are aphids that attack leaves, there are aphids that attack roots. They suck the juices out of the plant in the same way (see https://wordpress.com/post/getbuggy.wordpress.com/51 for more details on aphid feeding), but they do it underground.

Root aphid on a root

This is particularly sneaky because you don’t know that they are draining resources from the plants. Plants with root aphids can have reduced vigor, wilting, and fewer flowers/fruits.

Then when it gets crowded down below, they can come up and feed on the leaves. So then you have aphids everywhere.

Root aphid on a leaf

So what should you do about root aphids? There are several fairly effective, non-toxic ways of treating root aphids. One is the same treatment that I like to use for fungus gnats (https://wordpress.com/post/getbuggy.wordpress.com/325), predatory/beneficial nematodes. There are several species or combinations of species available on Amazon and in many garden stores. They should all work fine. They do need to be stored in a certain way and kept cold during shipping to be alive and effective.

Another way to deal with root aphids are entomopathenogic micro-organisms, mainly Beauveria bassiana. B. bassiana is a fungus that attacks insects. I’ve had the most success with a product called Mycotrol (http://www.bioworksinc.com/products/mycotrol-eso.php). The fungus spreads out through the soil and gets inside the insects. B. bassiana and similar organisms are part of the soil. It’s one of the reasons that maintaining healthy soil is so important. Because while I love aphids, I (and you probably) don’t always want them on my plants.

Happy spring!

 

Why do some insects have really fluffy antennae?

Have you ever noticed that some insects have smooth antennae while some seem to have fluffy antennae? Maybe or maybe not. But I do!

Well, here’s an insect insider fact. Most (maybe all) of the insects you see with fluffy looking antennae are male. As in many other animal species, some insects species have sexual dimorphism, which is a fancy way of saying that males and females look different. This can take many forms such as female velvet ants (pictured below) don’t have wings but males do.

Antennae are sexual dimorphic in many insects. In order to talk about why, we need to cover some other stuff about insects. In addition to, or sometimes instead of, using just vision and hearing to navigate the world, most insects can sense their environment through chemicals. This is call chemoreception. Humans use chemoreception too, mainly through taste and smell. But for insects it’s a much bigger part of how they perceive the world and operate within it. Ants can taste the ground they are walking on through chemoreceptors in their feet. Same with butterflies. Herbivorous insects often track chemicals in the air to find the plants they need to eat. Queen honey bees suppress reproduction by female works by putting out lots of a certain chemical. And so much more!

One important way that insects often use chemicals is to find a mate. These chemicals are called pheromones. Females release pheromones that males can use to track them down. This is where the big antennae come in. It’s easier to pick up the pheromones of a female if your antennae have lots of surface area to collect and perceive molecules. The ‘fluffy’ male antennae are really highly branched, providing lots of surface area to sense incoming pheromones. Just look at the surface area of this male midge’s antennae! (I think the overwintering pupae are starting to transform into adults because we’ve seen a couple of them around the house in the last couple days.)

Midges are flies in the Chironomidae family. Some midges bite, but many are non-biting midges like the one pictured above. Female midges lay their eggs on water. Each egg mass can contain up to 3,000 eggs depending on the species. The eggs sink, and then the larvae hatch and bury into the mud. They feed on organic matter in the water and mud. After about 2 weeks, they emerge from the water as adults. Adult midges do not feed and have only 3-5 days to live once they emerge. So finding a mate quickly is important!

I don’t have any good pictures of male moth antennae, but they are also often fluffy in appearance. BugGuide has a bunch of comparisons to look at though. Here is a link to one of male and female Luna moths. As you can see, the male’s antennae are much more branched!

Studies have shown that males in some moth species will track female pheromones over long distances. Their ability find females this way is essential for the survival of the species. This can be exploited by humans who don’t want certain insects in certain places. For example, researchers have developed methods to control pest moths, like codling moth in apples, by releasing lots of female pheromones from traps. The males follow the scent to the traps and are unable to reproduce.

Lots to think about next time you happen to look at ‘fluffy’ insect antennae!

No, the spiders will not eat all the people

I talked about this a little in my original For the Love of Spiders post, but researchers have just published an article about exactly how much spiders eat. It’s a lot. In a paper in the Science of Nature researchers Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer estimated how they eat and, thereby, how big a role they really play in our ecosystems. In their estimate, spiders eat 400–800 million metric tons of prey each year! As the Washington Post put it, that is more than the weight of all humans on the planet. One, that’s a lot of prey. And two, that’s a lot of spiders! (Also, no spiders could and would not eat all people, it’s just a comparison of weights.)

There are  more than 45,000 species of spider that have been described and many many more that have not been described (as is generally true for all insects). Spider density and, therefore, prey consumption are greatest in forests and grasslands. Spiders, however, only play a minor role in agricultural systems. The authors speculate that this is because agricultural fields are disturbed, meaning mostly that large plants are not able establish. But, seriously, there are still so many spider in my garden and most of the production fields I’ve been in. There are so many of them, and they are so cool!

What are their prey? And what would those prey animals be doing if they weren’t eaten by spiders?? According the literature review conducted in the paper, the top groups eaten by spiders are Diptera (flies), Hemiptera (true bugs like assassin bugs), Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, and ants), Collembola (very old insects), Coleoptera (beeltes), Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies), Orthoptera (crickets), and Araneae (spiders).

If these weren’t eaten by spiders, they could be doing things like buzzing around your head at a picnic and eating decomposing leaves. Although population growth followed by starvation would probably kill many of them even without predators.

I am going to take advantage of this occasion to put up all my pictures of spiders and spiders eating stuff that I have posted yet. I don’t have as many as I should really, but I like them anyway. I am going to go in order of frequency of prey. Flies are very common so it makes sense that they are a main prey item. Here is a picture of a spider eating a hover fly in my garden.

Hemiptera, the true bugs to an entomologist, include sedentary insects like aphids, which make easy prey for hunting spiders. I’ve never actually captured that on camera or video, but I’ve seen it happening. Bees and wasps are also very common and often visit flowers for nectar. A flower is a good place to be grabbed by a spider, as is happening in the picture below.https://getbuggy.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/for-the-love-of-spiders/.

I don’t have pictures of spider predation of Collembola, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, or Orthoptera. I’m actually pretty surprised that I don’t a have photo of spiders eating moths since moths are often caught in webs. Here is a spider of a web though. Orbs spiders, like the one pictured below, are common web predators in gardens and forest. Despite the fact that they look scary, they are harmless.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Don’t let the spiders eat you!

A brief foray into another type of invertebrate

This blog is pretty much about insects because that is what I am interested in and what I love taking photos of. However, we’ve recently had a pretty crazy experience involving another type of invertebrate, and it was just too weird not to put up here.

A little over a month ago, we got a salt water fish tank (clearly a dog, two cats, and 6 chickens is not enough pets). We got the tank on Craiglist from a person who didn’t have time anymore to deal with it. It was a fully set up  6-8 year old, 30 gal tank with two fish, two snails, a shrimp, lots of mushroom coral, a torch coral, and two smaller unidentified corals.

There was also about 10 lbs of live rock. Live rock, which it not actually alive, houses all sorts of tiny beneficial organisms that act as a biological filter in the tank. These days much live rock you might buy is made in ‘captivity’, meaning that it was not harvested from the ocean. But this did not used to be the case. Our tank had been set up with this rock 6-8 years ago, and it’s safe to say that this rock came from the ocean. How do I know that? Well, the rock was not the only thing from the ocean in the tank. And I am not talking about the fish, which I knew were there of course.

One night I happened to glance at the fish tank on my way out of the living room and saw a blur of motion that disappeared into a hole in the rock. I thought I’d seen legs and nothing in the tank should have had that many legs… so I got a flashlight and tried to look into the hole. I could just make out something that look kind of like shrimp antennae, but the shrimp was in a different part of the tank. After some internet research, I thought maybe we had a large bristle worm… but they don’t have antennae like appendages so I wasn’t convinced.

Every morning I’d creep into the living room to see if I could get a glimpse of the thing before it knew I was there. And eventually I did! It was, indeed, not a bristle worm. It looked like a large underwater centipede. SO MANY LEGS. Further internet research seemed to indicate that what we had was actually an Eunice aphroditois, also known as a bobbit worm. This realization was quickly followed by a plan to get it out of the tank before it started eating the fish and coral. And also the realization that I had TOUCHED it’s house when arranging the fish tank! I haven’t put my hand in the tank without gloves since.

Like many many ocean creatures, we don’t actually know all that much about E. aphroditois. The have been found in relatively shallow to somewhat deep water (10m to 40m). They are ambush predators that bury themselves in rock or sand. They sense fish and other prey with the five tentacles on their head (the things that I thought looked like antennae). They catch fish with their sharp jaws and drag them back into their burrow. Here is a cool, if somewhat overdone, video of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bzyAlspNI (not one I took). The worm has a powerful bite and can cut fish in half. Some sources say that they can cause permanent paralysis to humans (I touched it’s house!). They are believed to be broadcast spawners, but no one is really sure about what the eggs look like or where they develop. Some scientists also believe that what we call E. aphroditois is actually a number of different species (differentiating species can be really really hard). This means that identifying its exactly behaviors and life cycle is even harder because there could be multiple species with different traits.

Removing a bobbit worm from a tank is hard. So we blocked out 6 hrs on Saturday evening for the challenge. Luckily some lovely friends wanted to join in the process, which certainly made it more fun. We put it’s rock in the a bucket of tank water in the dark basement because the worms only come out when it’s dark. We created a red light flashlight to use because the worms cannot see red light.

We started by trying to lure it out into a trap with shrimp bits. It came out about 4 inches but wouldn’t go into the trap. Then we tried to lure it into a lasso. It would go through the lasso and grab the shrimp bait but it was too fast to catch. Even if we had caught him, they are really hard to get out of their holes because they dig their back legs in. People have created very elaborate pulley systems to pull them out of their rock holes. That seemed impossible in our case. So we then resorted to our final option: break the rock apart with a chisel.

Somewhat amazingly we managed to keep it alive through out the process. We got it back into salt water in a Tupperware pretty quickly. Actually once it was partially exposed, we got it out by putting it’s head in the water. It then slithered out.

And then in full nature-nerd mode, we watched it for a while. Here is a video of it https://youtu.be/mjfVXKYw0W4.

It is pretty creepy (and very crawly!) but that’s kind of my style. It was a rainbowy shimmery color and had so so so many leg appendages. Really a very cool creature.

We might have kept the worm if we wanted a second tank (and it didn’t possibly cause permanent paralysis). But instead we gave it to the Denver aquarium. To me, it’s a reminder that there are so many animals/plants/organisms out there that we do not know much about. The world is an incredible place, and there is a lot of exploration left to do!