While in Arizona I went on a night outing to Carr Canyon in hopes of seeing owls.  Though we merely heard owls, we saw some amazing bugs.  The scarab beetles made the trip worthwhile.

The Glorious scarab (Chrysina gloriosa) was stunning with golden stripes on a green body …

… but my favorite was Beyer’s scarab (Chrysina beyeri) at top, a bright green beetle with violet legs.  Notice how big he is!

Their beauty helped me understand why people made jewelry with stones carved like beetles (scarab pin below), but I was wrong to assume that beauty motivated the jewelers.

The original scarab amulets were made in Ancient Egypt.  The top of the stone was carved in the shape of the Sacred scarab beetle (Scarabeaus sacer), a symbol of the sun god Ra.  The flat bottom was carved with hieroglyphs and used as an impression seal.  When mounted on a ring, the scarab was held by a swivel so the seal could be rotated up.

Though an insect was sacred to the Egyptians, the beetle they chose is not a beautiful bug.  It symbolized the sun god because, just as the sun rolls across the sky every day, their scarab rolls balls of dung.  The Sacred scarab is a plain black dung beetle.  Click here to see.

The jewel-like beetles I saw in Arizona live only in the western hemisphere.  If the Egyptians could have seen the sunlight colors on the Glorious scarab’s legs and wings, perhaps they would have chosen him instead.

p.s. In Arizona I saw two of four Chrysina beetles that occur in the U.S.  The only Arizona Chrysina we missed was LeConte’s (Chrysina lecontei).  Yes, LeConte again.  😉

(two photos by Kate St. John, two from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the Wikimedia photos to see the originals)

27 July 2015

We normally see butterflies visiting flowers but they also flit from leaf to leaf.

Adult butterflies are on a mission to reproduce.  They sip nectar along the way, but the males are looking for females and the females are looking for host plants on which to lay their eggs.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae will eat the host leaves and grow into ever-larger caterpillars.

Each species has one or more hosts for their larvae.  Monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves.  Red Admirals eat nettle.  Gulf Fritillaries eat passionflower vine.

Butterflies “taste” with their feet, so when the female is ready to lay an egg she flits and lands on leaf after leaf.  Standing there she asks herself, “Does this taste good?”  If so, she lays an egg.

Sometimes butterflies are fooled. To a West Virginia White butterfly (Pieris virginiensis) the invasive alien garlic mustard tastes like her host plant toothwort so she lays her eggs on garlic mustard and her hatchlings die of starvation.

Tastes can be pretty subtle, too.  Monica Miller (my go-to butterfly expert) told me that if a food plant touches a nearby leaf, that leaf might taste good enough to be mistaken by a butterfly.

Here, a female Gulf Fritillary lands on her host plant (tasting it) and a male comes to court her.

And here’s what she was aiming for:  She laid an egg on the passion vine.

Watch butterflies “taste” with their feet and you may see one lay an egg.

(photos by Edward Rooks via Wikimedia Commons. Click on each image to see its original)

A week ago this moth stood out at Oil Creek State Park with an impressive brown pattern on his white wings.

I sketched the moth in my notebook while Karyn Delaney took its picture (above). When I got home I found a tool to help me identify it: Discover Life’s moth ID Guide for Pennsylvania.

My search of the moth’s basic characteristics produced 62 answers (!) but I clicked through each pop-up until I reached one that was similar but not the same.  The yellow-orange head was a useful clue.

LeConte’s Haploa moth (Haploa lecontei) is known to have a variable pattern.  The photos below compare a plainer version to our own (super-magnified).  BugGuide.net has this closeup of one that looks like ours.

I’ve heard of LeConte’s sparrow and LeConte’s thrasher (though I’ve never seen them) and wondered if this moth was named for the same LeConte.  Indeed it is.

John Lawrence LeConte was a famous 19th century entomologist from Boston who traveled the U.S. in search of bugs.  Beetles were his specialty but he identified many other species as well.  According to Wikipedia, he “described approximately half of the insect taxa known in the United States during his lifetime.”  He was greatly admired in the scientific community.

When scientists name a new species they sometimes use a person’s name, either the name of someone they admire or someone connected to the discovery. Audubon admired LeConte and so named the sparrow, LeConte himself discovered the thrasher (someone else probably named it for him), and this moth was named for the same LeConte.

Click here to read more about beetles, LeConte and scientific names in Marcia Bonta’s Beetlemania blog.

(photo with the green leaves Virginia creeper by Karyn Delaney. Photo on brown background from Wikimedia Commons)

p.s. LeConte’s haploa moth resembles the Confused haploa moth (Haploa confusa). Is it confused or are we?

Guess what I found sipping nectar last Sunday …

With my head so full of birds I couldn’t remember this butterfly’s name so I took a lot of bad cellphone photos (below) and looked it up when I got home.

This striking black butterfly is a Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), native to Central and North America, Europe, Northern Africa and Asia.  That’s why the beautiful photo above is from England.

The species is not winter-hardy so most of North America must be recolonized each spring by southern migrants, says butterfliesandmoths.org.   Monarchs aren’t the only butterflies who make long journeys.  Red Admirals migrate from South Texas and I’ve seen them fly north over Lake Erie to Canada.

The generation that migrates looks brown where this one is black so they don’t stand out as much.  Their underside is not as pretty either but provides camouflage (click here to see).

We don’t often see Red Admirals in flower gardens because they prefer to eat tree sap, fermenting fruit and bird droppings(!).   The females look for nettles where they lay their eggs on the tops of the leaves.  The caterpillars eat nettles to survive.

Take that, you stinging nettles!

(excellent photo of a red admiral butterfly in England by Zorba the Greek via Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original.
Poor quality photo of red admiral on bottlebrush buckeye by Kate St. John)

17 June 2015

They’re back!!!

Yellow poplar weevils (*the newspaper called them billbugs) are everywhere and they’re freaking people out. Are they dangerous? Are they ticks?

No.  They’re harmless.  They don’t even bite.

Read all about them in last year’s blog post: Invasion of the Billbugs

(photo by Kate St. John)

p.s.  Ben Coulter and Monica Miller have identified this weevil as Odontopus calceatus, a.k.a. Yellow Poplar Weevil, not Curculio as I read in the newspaper last year.   Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper!

If snakes give you the creeps close your eyes.  I’ve placed my poor quality photo at the top so you have time to stop looking.

Last Saturday near Duck Hollow a cyclist stopped to tell me there was a big snake by the trail.  He said he could tell by my gear that I was interested in nature and would want to know.  (I must look like someone who approaches snakes.)

I’m glad the cyclist told me.  The sunning snake was four feet long and very twisty as if it had wrapped tightly around a sapling and was unable to straighten out.  I know almost nothing about snakes but guessed by the shape of its head and round eyes that it wasn’t venomous.  Why twisted?  I posted my photo at the PA Herps Facebook page to find out.

Pam Fisher identified it as a black rat snake and said that snakes sometimes make their bodies twisty to break up the visual pattern.  For this snake though, his camouflage trick attracted attention.

I don’t look for snakes so the ones I find really have to stand out.  For more than 20 years I’ve visited Jennings Prairie to see the birds and wildflowers but have never seen its famous endangered resident, the Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake.

Dianne and Bob Machesney have visited Jennings much more than I have and they’d never seen the rattlesnake either until…  On June 4 they found a rattlesnake sunning, close enough for a zoomed in photo.

Dianne wrote, “After all these years, this is the first time we saw an Easter Massasauga Rattlesnake in the wild. The field had recently been mowed and she was sunning herself.  The milky eyes mean she is getting ready to shed.”

Perhaps cool mornings in early June are the best time for seeing snakes in the grass.

You can open your eyes now.  😉

(poor quality photo of a black rat snake by Kate St. John.  High quality photo of a Massassauga rattlesnake by Dianne Machesney)

This indigo-colored beetle looks beautiful but I was careful not to touch him last Sunday at Linn Run State Park.  It’s a good thing I didn’t … and here’s why.

At an inch and a half long this beetle was hard to miss. Thirteen of us watched him walk on the leaves.  Loree Speedy suggested he was a Blister Beetle.

Wissahickon‘s bug expert, Monica Miller, confirmed he’s one of the many species of Oil Beetles (Melos) in the Blister Beetle family (Meloidae).  His true identity requires a coleopterist’s help but her guess is Meloe impressus.  (I like the idea that “This Meloe impressed us.”)

Blister Beetles earned their name because they excrete a poisonous chemical from their leg joints, cantharidin, that causes blisters on our skin.

Yes, he’s an amazing color, has short wing covers, knobby antennae.

Just look. Don’t touch.

(photos by Kate St. John)