Reports from the Field

Bug o’the Week – And Now for Something a Little Different – Eastern Skunk Cabbage
by Kate Redmond

Greetings, BugFans

The BugLady visited one of her favorite wetlands the other day, looking for spring. It’s early days for flowering plants around here (and for insects, other than flies), but our two earliest wildflowers – pussy willows and skunk cabbage – are happily doing their thing. It will be a little while before the flowering plants in the wetlands start to bloom, but mosses and liverworts are putting on a show ahead of that, and soon the fern fiddleheads, lichens, liverworts, and horsetails/Equisetum will join the chorus. Nothing beats the smell of a wetland!

Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) (Symplocarpus foetidus means “clustered fruit that is fetid,” and isn’t that awesome!) is a member of the Arum family, Araceae (culinary cabbages aren’t). There are more than 3700 Arum species worldwide, mostly tropical, and the members of the family that grow in and around our area wetlands – skunk cabbage, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and wild calla (plus arrow arum in a few parts of the state) – are some of our oddest-looking wildflowers.

04.12.23

Bug o’the Week – Speed-dating the Spiders – Black Widows
by Kate Redmond

Howdy, BugFans,

The first thing you should know about Black widows is that they need better PR. Widow spiders are so-named because the female (allegedly) eats the male after mating. It’s called “sexual cannibalism,” and the protein meal is supposed to boost the chances of successful egg-laying. But, this is a behavior that was first observed in the lab, where the male had few escape options, and it’s suspected that it happens far less frequently in the wild.

04.05.23

Bug o’the Week – Cruiser Dragonflies
by Kate Redmond

Greetings, BugFans,

The Cruiser dragonflies, aka River Emeralds or River Cruisers, are not shrinking violets – they are powerful dragonflies that have a reputation among dragonfly fans as the most difficult of the dragonflies to net (maybe because they’re highly maneuverable and they can hit flight speeds of up to 40 mph). Older books include them in the Emerald family Corduliidae, but they are now listed in the family Macromiidae, a small family with 9 species in two genera in North America, and about 120 species worldwide.

Look for Cruisers around shallow, sunny rivers, streams, bays, channels, and lakes with good water quality. They’re found from coast to coast except in the Rockies and Northern Great Plains.

03.29.23

Bug o’the Week – Flies without Bios II
by Kate Redmond

Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady is always ambivalent about photographing flies, even when they pose nicely. There are a whole heck of a lot of species of Diptera (“two wings”) out there – 17,000 in North America and 150,000 worldwide (some estimates of the eventual total go as high as a million species) – so unless it’s a really dramatic fly, there’s a pretty good chance the picture will end up in the “X-Files.”

The “Without Bios” series celebrates insects whose profile is low – insects that are neither big enough nor bad enough nor beautiful enough to have been studied much, if at all.

03.15.23

Bug o’the Week – Coral Hairstreak Butterfly
by Kate Redmond

Howdy, BugFans,

Hairstreaks (and Blues and Coppers and Harvesters) are members of the Gossamer-winged butterfly family Lycaenidae (“Gossamer-winged” being a nod to the iridescent sheen on the wings of many family members).  Numbering nearly 5,000 mostly tropical species worldwide – 30% of butterfly species – Lycaenidae is the second-largest butterfly family (the Brush-foots outnumber them).  The BugLady associates hairstreak butterflies with butterfly weed and hot, sunny prairie days.  

03.08.23

Bug o’the Week – Cyrano Darner Dragonfly
by Kate Redmond

Howdy, BugFans,

It’s time for a dragonfly.  In fact, it’s past time for a dragonfly.  The BugLady has not seen this species yet (BugFan Freda has, and she contributed her pictures.  Thanks, Freda) but she’s looking forward to the end of the rain/sleet/graupel/freezing rain/snow season and to the return of the green so she can look for one.

03.02.23

Bug o’the Week – Horsehair worm Redux
by Kate Redmond

It’s a good thing that the common usage of the term “bug” is so inexact, because once again we are stretching its boundaries to/past the limits.

Horsehair worms are in the Phylum Nematomorpha (which is different from the Nematode worms). They’re skinny and long; this individual was maybe five inches long, but some species grow to one or two feet long. They have a hard, chitinous covering. They come in opaque yellow to tan to brown to black colors. They’re wiry and cylindrical, with little tapering at either end (unlike the nearby Nematodes).

01.25.23

Bug o’the Week – Cockroach 101
by Kate Redmond

The BugLady has been wanting to write about cockroaches for a long time (she has fond memories of the “X-Files” episode about them). She asked BugFan Tom if he had any pictures he could share, because she’s rarely seen one (expect when she spent a summer in Coastal Florida, where they call their lunker cockroaches Palmetto bugs), and her attempts at photographing them have failed miserably. He suggested that she has lived a sheltered life, indeed, and his friend, BugFan Joe, subsequently sent this picture. Thanks, Joe. This overview includes info about cockroaches in general and about cockroaches as the Bugs We Love to Hate. Maybe someday there will be a Cockroaches 102, exclusively about native roaches (send pictures!). Meanwhile, BugFan Joe’s picture of a Smokey Brown Cockroach will stand in as Everyroach.

01.23.23

Bug o’the Week – Carolina Leaf-roller Cricket – a Snowbird Special
by Kate Redmond

A while back, BugFan Tom sent these pictures of a Carolina leaf-roller cricket from the Deep South. Carolina leaf-roller crickets (Camptonotus carolinensis) are in the family Gryllacrididae, the Raspy crickets, a family we haven’t encountered before. And with good reason – although there are about 600 species in the family, all but one live elsewhere (with one-third of the known species, Australia is especially Raspy-cricket-rich). There’s only one genus in the family in North America, and only one species in that genus.

01.11.23

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