20 April 2013
With warm weather, migrating birds, and new leaves come the leaf eaters like these tentworms building their tent on a choke cherry sapling in Schenley Park.
I noticed the first tents Friday morning after Thursday’s very hot weather.
I wonder what this weekend’s cold weather will do to them…
(photo by Kate St. John)
Last Saturday at Raccoon Wildflower Reserve I heard the sound of ducks in the woods but I wasn’t fooled. I knew they were wood frogs.
For most of the year wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) keep a low profile. In the summer they hide under leaves to avoid being eaten. In the winter they’re literally frozen “frog-sicles” under the leaf litter, but in early spring they emerge for an orgy in the nearest vernal pond.
The male wood frogs float around and call to attract the females. When the crowd really gets going they sound like ducks. The first time I heard them I searched in vain for the flock of ducks making so much noise at the edge of a damp field. Hah! Wood frogs. They sound like this:
When the lady frogs arrive the orgy begins. Multiple males grab a female and ride around on her back. The pond becomes dotted with clumps of frogs.
After they mate the female wood frogs lay masses of eggs in big globs like this.
Then the orgy is over. The adults disappear into the woods and the sound of ducks comes to an end.
Nature is playing April Fool.
(photos by Marcy Cunkelman)
Have you ever seen pepper on snow? Did the pepper jump when you approached?
Last weekend Marianne Atkinson found black sprinkles on the snow near her home in Clearfield County, PA.
The “pepper” is hard to see in her first photo. Here’s a closeup.
These are snow fleas (Hypogastrura nivicola), a springtail species that earned its name because it appears on top of snow on warm winter days and, like all springtails, it jumps like a flea to avoid danger.
Springtails as a group are very interesting creatures:
Snow fleas themselves are extra special. They are active in winter because they have a protein in their bodies that works like anti-freeze.
Sometimes it’s the little things that are the most fascinating.
(photos by Marianne Atkinson)
Cuttlefish are masters of disguise.
What happens when you try to confuse one?
(video from YouTube)
This Red-eyed Treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) looks like he’s ready for the holidays with bright red eyes, green skin, orange toes and blue sides.
How does a frog this colorful manage to hide? He would be easy prey except for his camouflage capability.
When young these treefrogs have brown skin that make it easy to hide in the Central American rain forest.
As an adult he tries to match the leaves. He flattens himself against a green leaf, pulls in his orange toes and positions his legs to hide his blue sides. Then he closes his red eyes.
Poof! He’s a leaf.
When awake, he contributes to a vibrant world.
(photo by Charlie Hickey of a Red-eyed Treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) at Vara Blanca, Heredia, Costa Rica, November 27, 2012. Click on the image to see the original)
There’s a bird I want to write about but his lifestyle includes such unusual words that we’ll have to learn a new vocabulary before I can introduce him. The bird eats copepods and is fond of polynyas.
What the heck is a copepod (CO peh pod)?
The word “copepod” actually describes the animal it names. “Cope” is from the Greek word for “oar” and “pod” is Greek for foot. So a copepod is literally an Oar-Foot.
Copepods are tiny, usually transparent, crustaceans with oar-like antennae. They live in wet places: oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, swamps, bogs, and even in the water in caves. They are very small, often microscopic, typically only 1-2 millimeters long (0.04 to 0.08 inches). They have huge populations among 13,000 known species. The vast majority live in the ocean. Click here for a video to see them move.
As animals, copepods are at the bottom of the food chain so they ultimately support lots of marine life including creatures as big as whales. They’re the primary food source of the dovekie, the bird who spawned this article, and are especially plentiful in polynyas.
A polynya (po LIN ya) is a big hole of open water surrounded by ice. The word comes from the Russian word for hollow. Two photos below show polynyas in Antarctica.
This polynya in the Ross Sea, shown below, has green phytoplankton that provides abundant food for copepods during the Antarctic summer.
Some polynyas are permanent, others are seasonal. Off the coast of Canada, the North Water Polynya opens every spring between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. When it does, new sunlight entering the water causes a microalgae (phytoplankton) bloom, the copepods swarm to eat it. Dovekies arrive to eat the copepods.
What about dovekies? Read more here –> Birds On Ice: Dovekie.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the captions to see the originals)
Have you ever seen a colorful, shiny beetle and wondered what it was? I have.
There’s a group of beetles called Jewel Beetles that eat trees but are very beautiful. Among them are the rainbow green Emerald Ash Borer and (perhaps) a solid green iridescent beetle I see in the spring whom I’ve dubbed The Emerald Green Bug because I don’t have a beetle guide.
But that problem is about to be solved.
In early 2013 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the University of Guelph Insect Collection and the Canadian Invasive Species Centre are going to publish a beautiful 411 page, 6×9″ Field Guide to the Jewel Beetles of Northeastern North America.
The guide covers 164 jewel beetles in eastern Canada and the northeastern U.S. including all of Pennsylvania.
One of the books authors, Morgan Jackson, describes the guide here on his blog and includes a cool slideshow of the emerald ash borer page. I can tell the book is for bug lovers and entomologists yet it looks easy to use for generalists like me who are curious about the natural world.
And the book is FREE, absolutely FREE!
Click on the book cover or here to read Morgan Jackson’s blog and see if this is the book for you. His blog tells you how to get your free copy.
I’ve already ordered mine. Next spring I’ll know the real name of that “Emerald Green Bug.”
(cover of Field Guide to the Jewel Beetles of Northeastern North America, linked from Morgan Jackson’s biodiversityinfocus.com blog)
Before the rain began on Saturday I took a walk in Schenley Park to check on the birds.
In addition to a flock of thousands of robins and starlings near Anderson Playground, I found American goldfinches foraging high in a stand of red oak trees. They seemed to be picking things off the backs of the leaves. At ground level I heard the sound of raindrops ticking on the dry leaf litter — but it wasn’t raining. The goldfinches were dropping the shells.
I collected a leaf and took its picture. Here you see the brown bumps the goldfinches were cracking open. They look like tiny acorns.
In fact, they’re galls. When I searched the web to identify them, I learned from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Entomology that there are more than 700 species of gall-forming insects in the US and Canada and 80% of them use oaks (read about it here).
Galls form when tiny insects lay their eggs on live leaves (not these dried brown leaves). The eggs emit chemicals that stimulate the leaves to grow covers around the eggs. This protects the larvae until they’re ready to emerge — unless a goldfinch finds them.
Were these galls made by cynipid wasps that are very common on oaks? I thought so at first(*) but …
On 12 Dec 2012, Charley Eiseman at BugTracks corrected my original theory about the galls. He wrote: “I believe these are actually among the few oak galls that are not caused by cynipid wasps – they look to me like the work of Polystepha globosa, a midge (Cecidomyiidae).” This link has more information about the midge.
Thanks to the goldfinches I learned something new.
(photos by Kate St. John)
(*) My original theory was that these were cynipid wasp galls, made by very tiny wasps that are harmless to humans. They lay their eggs on oak leaves. Each species uses a different site on the oak (root, twig, leaf) and specializes in particular species of oaks. The most amazing cynipid wasp is the one that becomes the jumping oak leaf gall.
I had no idea Asian lady beetles came in so many colors and patterns.
Yes, they’re annoying, but in this composite close-up they’re actually pretty.
(photo by @entomart on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
22 October 2012:
This week the weather will be so warm it’ll feel like early September when the monarch butterflies migrate, but most of them are in Texas now safe from killing frosts. (You can watch their migration progress here.)
In August 2009 several of us from WQED visited Marcy Cunkelman to see her wonderful garden and learn about raising and tagging monarchs for the migration study.
Intern Christa Majoras recorded a video while we were there. The unedited footage sat dormant while Christa was away at school but she’s back now as an employee (yay!) and she’s edited Marcy’s monarch video.
I’m happy to show you what we learned from Marcy! Enjoy this look back to the month of August when the flowers were blooming in her garden.
Many thanks to Marcy Cunkelman for hosting us and sharing her knowledge and to Christa Majoras for filming and editing the video.
(garden host and teacher, Marcy Cunkelman. video by Christa Majoras)
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