The BugLady loves crabspiders, so she’s been thrilled to find two, new (to her) species in the last few years. One, the Whitebanded crabspider, is in the family Thomisidae, a family of, well, crab-shaped spiders, many of whom make their living on flower tops, and many of whom, in the genera Misumena, Misumenoides, and Misumenops (Mecaphesa), can be tricky to ID. We’ll meet the other one next week.
Whitebanded crab spiders (Misumenoides formosipes) (formosipes is from the Latin for “beautiful leg/foot”) are named for a white band that crosses their face, right below the level of the eyes https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1295835/bgimage (depending, of course, on whether the spider is right-side-up or up-side-down). But there’s a catch. Like the very common Goldenrod crab spider (Misumena viata), female WBCSs can change colors depending on where they’re sitting – from white to yellow and back – by secreting or excreting yellow pigment from their normally-white outer cell layer (cuticle). Turning yellow takes longer – up to three weeks – than does reverting to white. In its yellow form, it could be called the Yellow-banded crab spider https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2058436/bgimage. Other common names include Red banded crab spider and Ridge-faced flower spider.
They’re widespread, found in Ontario and much of the US, excepting the Northwest quadrant.
WBCSs don’t make trap webs; they’re ambush predators that hang out on flowers and attempt to grab any visitor to the flower that looks toothsome, even if it’s slightly larger than they are. They are frequently collected by various mud dauber wasps – stung, paralyzed, and used to provision the wasp’s egg chambers – food for eventual wasp larvae. Spider eggs and spiderlings provide food for lots of predators.
Males, especially when they are actively hunting for a mate, are nectivores, feeding on pollen and nectar, especially on Queen Anne’s lace. Searching for a mate takes up a good deal of a male’s time, so he employs a “Bird in the Hand” strategy. He locates a female before she becomes fully mature (unmated penultimate female), and he guards her until she is old enough to reproduce. He lives on her inflorescence and takes on rival males, but despite his devotion – and energy investment – whichever male is closest after she undergoes her final molt will likely be the lucky spider, although the resident male does have the home-field advantage.
Female WBCSs like Black-eyed Susans, and males search for likely flowers by their smells. His small size and light weight allow him to jump from one flower head to another or to loose a line of web into the wind and to tightrope across it after it sticks to the next flower.
Females create silk sacs holding 80 to 180 eggs, attach them to leaves, and guard them until she eventually freezes. The spiderlings exit the egg sac in spring.
Yes – they do eat pollinators, and everyone loves pollinators. But these are native spiders feeding on native pollinators, and they worked all that out a long time ago – their food habits don’t upset the Balance of Nature, and they supply protein for larger critters. Some apologists point to the fact that the presence of predators improves the defenses of prey species over time.
Go outside, look for bugs! The BugLady visited a wetland on a warm day recently and saw some Common Green Darners messing around in a stand of last year’s cattails.
2026: The pussy willows near the BugLady’s lakeshore home are in bloom. Here’s a BOTW about pussy willows from late March of 2012 – a few new words and pictures.
2012:People get excited when pussy willows whisper the spring. The BugLady loves skulking among them when they’re blooming, ogling the diversity of insects that come to visit when very few other flowers are out. Willows are dioecious (separate house), bearing their male and female flowers on separate plants. The gray, fuzzy buds are future male flowers that will morph into catkins bearing long, slender filaments (pollen-producing stamens). The thicker, “caterpillar-like” flowers – fleshier stalks with what looks like a tiny flower at the tip, are future female catkins and seeds. Pussy willow (Salix discolor), which is a prodigious pollen producer, is almost finished blooming, but other willow species are still in bud.
Remember that pollination is an accidental service performed by animals that visit the pussy willows for another purpose altogether – to perch, to set up housekeeping, to browse an important, early food source (the male flowers produce a little nectar and a lot of pollen, and female flowers supply nectar), or to browse the browsers. Mining bees and syrphid flies made up the majority of the insects that the BugLady saw, with flies (blow, flesh, and house) next. The BugLady also saw a spring azure butterfly checking out the willow flowers.
For all their attractiveness and importance to these early pollinators, pussy willows are largely wind-pollinated. Wind-pollinated flowers produce massive amounts of pollen because wind pollination is pretty random.
The BugLady found:
ANTS – Ants become active when the spring sun warms the soil they nest in. If you put all of the people on the globe at one end of a teeter totter and all the ants on the other, our feet would be dangling. There are many kinds of ants with many lifestyles and many diets.
ASCLERA RUFICOLLIS – Adult Red-necked false blister beetles feed on early spring flowers in woods and wood edges; their larvae dwell in rotting logs. Apparently, despite its name, a crushed false blister beetle produces highly irritating chemicals that will make a (false?) blister.
BROWN STINKBUG – Some species of brown stinkbug are vegetarians, but the BugLady thinks that this is one of the predatory stinkbugs. The BugLady wonders if the heavy dusting of willow pollen works as an inadvertent disguise.
CAROPHILUS BEETLE – A sap beetle – although most sap beetles are consumers of rotting fruits and vegetables and fungi, some are found on flowers.
DISONYCHA BEETLE – The very spiffy Striped willow leaf beetle is in the huge leaf beetle family Chrysomelidae. Members of the small genus Disonycha (according to one source) mostly eat “weeds.” This one eats willow-parts.
GREENBOTTLE FLY – These members of the Blow fly family are listed as carrion feeders. Apparently, this fly was cleansing its palette.
CYNOMA CADAVERINA – Another member of the Blow fly family, with a decidedly un-wholesome name, stared at the BugLady from a willow branch. The BugLady moved on down the trail.
HONEYBEE – an important – and imported – pollinator, honeybees are on the landscape starting in late winter and early spring. Bees foraging for pollen near wetlands may warm up within the insulated comfort of a skunk cabbage spathe, which may be 30 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature.
MINING BEE – Mining bees are a mainly solitary bunch of bees; females stock brood cells with pollen and nectar for their emerging young. They are important early, native pollinators.
SWEAT BEE – Sweat bees collect prodigious loads of pollen and transport it to their underground nests. Most are solitary; a few are marginally social.”
SYRPHID FLY – Syrphid/Hover/Flower flies are bee mimics that feed on nectar and pollen.
SPOOKY TACHINID (probably) – Tachinid flies have an ulterior motive. They lay eggs, or sometimes live young, on flowers so that their young may board another insect and become a parasitoid. The BugLady thought this ghost-colored tachinid was a bit creepy-looking.
NOMADA WASP – The BugLady is amazed at the antennae on this Nomada wasp.
EUROPEAN PAPER WASP – Negotiating the thicket of flower parts on the male flower must be a challenge.
Quick and dirty dragonfly phenology (phenology – the study of Mother Nature’s calendar. Cliff notes version – things appear/bloom/disappear/migrate in pretty much the same order every year, we just can’t predict the start date). Common Green Darners lead the parade, their arrival from the south governed by temperature and by the same weather fronts that bring migratory birds north (coinciding, hopefully, with the emergence of some insect prey for both). Migrating Variegated Meadowhawks show up in early May – or they don’t. The next tier, usually airborne by mid-May, includes Common Baskettails, Common Whitetails, Chalk-fronted Corporals, Four-spotted Skimmers, and the aptly-named Springtime Darners.
Brush-tipped Emeralds (Somatochlora walshii) are summer dragonflies.
They’re in the Emerald family (Corduliidae), represented in Wisconsin by the baskettails, shadowdragons, boghaunters, a couple of smaller emeralds (Racket-tailed and American), and thirteen members of the genus Somatochlora, the Striped or Green-eyed Emeralds (https://wiatri.net/inventory/odonata/). Somatochlora comes from the Greek for “green body.” Emeralds are called emeralds because in many species, the adults, especially the adult males, have emerald-green eyes. The BugLady can testify that when you’re walking down the trail with the sun at your back and you encounter an emerald that’s flying toward you, the glow of those eyes is a religious experience https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/680153/bgimage! The most famous emerald here in God’s Country is the Federally Endangered Hine’s Emerald https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/hines-emerald-dragonfly-the-backstory/ .
The Striped emeralds are, as the Wisconsin Odonata Survey website points out “uncommonly seen, but this may be largely due to their secretive nature.” It goes on to say that “the medium-sized, dark brown striped emeralds have some pale markings on the thorax and abdomen, black legs, clear wings and brilliant green eyes. The thorax has a metallic bronze-green sheen and the abdomen is dark metallic black-green.” While some species live in the South, many are dragonflies of the North country, even living above the treeline.
Look for Brush-tipped Emeralds near bogs, fens, marshes, and lake outlets, near slow streams, and over meadows and at the edges of coniferous woods in Canada and across the northern tier of the US (though small populations are found at higher elevations in the Appalachians).
Emerald species are hard to tell apart in flight, but male Brush-tipped Emeralds have, well, a brushy tip https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/185242/bgimage that can be imagined as it flies by – as Kurt Mead says in Dragonflies of the North Woods, “the whiskered tips of the male Brush-tipped’s abdominal appendages are unlike those of any other North American species” of Somatochlora “ (though the appendages of other species are not hairless). If they sit still long enough, you can see that the metallic-green abdomen has pale yellow spots https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1566444/bgimage that can help narrow down the identification. Adult Brush-tipped Emeralds are about two inches long; males have short abdomens and females have proportionately longer abdomens than males.
Males are strong flyers, patrolling territories by flying low (less than three feet off the ground) along the edges of cool-water wetlands, abdomen arched, putting on aerial displays, chasing rivals, and looking for females. Females lack the kind of ovipositor that would allow them to insert eggs into a plant stem, so they locate an area with lots of floating-leaved and submerged aquatic plants and they fly slowly, close to the water’s surface, dipping into or tapping it with the tip of their abdomen to release eggs (200 to 500 in all). When the eggs hatch, the naiads hide in the vegetation. They sometimes oviposit into muck or wet moss.
The BugLady got some Hail Mary shots of a female Brush-tipped Emerald (probably) who was considering a small lake inlet for ovipositing.
Adults hawk small, soft-bodied, easy-to-eat insects from the air (including mosquitoes) and consume them in flight. Females fly above small woody clearings and along roads and trails. They may forage for food away from water, but they remain attached to their natal wetland. The naiads ambush any aquatic critters they can, including tiny tadpoles and fish, and they’re preyed on by bigger aquatic insects, fish, and frogs. Spiders and birds catch the adults.
It’s barely spring, officially – way too early to be thinking about butterflies, right? Nope. The first butterflies of the year have already been reported on the Wisconsin Butterflies website (https://wisconsinbutterflies.org/butterfly) (which also serves your Tiger beetle and Robber fly needs).
Our first butterflies are usually the anglewings (commas and Question Marks https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/anglewings/) and the Mourning Cloaks https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/mourning-cloak-revisited/. Why? Because they go through the winter as adults, tucked up into a sheltered spot (called a hibernaculum). These are the species that are seen by people tapping maple trees in the Sugarbush during the warm days of late winter. When the cold returns – and it always does, except in the bizarre spring of 2012 – they seek shelter again. They are able to be abroad in early spring, before the wildflowers bloom, because they feed on sap from sap drips, juice from rotting fruits, and minerals from animal droppings.
Mike Reese has built a wonderful community of butterfly-lovers who make reports to the Wisconsin Butterflies website; and while it is more anonymous, the Wisconsin Odonata Survey website (https://wiatri.net/inventory/odonata/) contains a treasure trove of information. Where do all those reports come from? Us – they are two examples of Citizen/Community Science projects here in Wisconsin! Register with the site, keep track of the butterflies and/or dragonflies/damselflies you see on your walks or in your back yard (you need to take a nose count of the butterflies but not of the dragonflies), and then log on to record what you’ve seen. Both sites accept pictures.
The Journey North organization offers another Community Science project called the monarch larva monitoring project https://mlmp.org/.
The BugLady checked the (highly searchable) website of the Wisconsin Odonata Survey (https://wiatri.net/inventory/odonata/) to see if anyone had reported a Common Green Darner yet. They are early migrants from the southeastern part of the country, traveling north with the warm weather, and they’re often the first dragonfly species of the year. Here’s an episode about them from nine years ago. New pictures, a few new words.
2017
A Common Green Darner was reported near La Crosse (WI) on March 24 of this year, and a few others have been seen since then (and even though the winter of 2016-17 has been “Winter Lite,” the BugLady is ready for spring and dragonflies). The BugLady wrote very brief biographies of the green darner in 2010, in BOTWs about spring dragonflies and about dragonfly swarms, but there’s much more to the Common Green Darner story.
They are in the darner family Aeshnidae, a group of large, powerful dragonflies (“darner” because their long, darning needle-like abdomen has led to folk tales about their sewing people’s lips or ears shut).
Most of our Wisconsin darners are in the famously-confusing mosaic darner genus Aeshna. Common Green Darners (Anax junia) (“Lord of June”) are one of two species of Anax darners found in the state. Common Green Darners are, well, very common, not just here but across the country. And Central America. And Hawai’i. And Canada. And there are populations in Tahiti and the West Indies. And strong winds have blown individuals to Great Britain, China, and Russia. The other Anax, the stunning Comet Darner (Anax longipes) is a rare visitor and even rarer breeder in Wisconsin https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1865910/bgimage.
Common Green Darners are big, with a 3” long body and a 3 ½” wingspan, and their striking “wrap-around” compound eyes may be made up of as many as 50,000 simple eyes apiece. Their wings often show a golden tinge in flight. They practice sexual dimorphism – both males and females have a green thorax, but males have a predominantly blue abdomen with a purple stripe, and females have a maroon/rust-colored abdomen with a darker stripe. Tenerals (newly-emerged adults) may take a week or more to solidify their adult color patterns and have female-ish coloration in the interim, and a chilly darner is a darker-colored darner. Both males and females have prominent cerci (claspers) at the abdomen’s tip. Common Green Darners have a characteristic bull’s-eye spot on their “forehead” that Comet Darners lack. They can move each wing independently, which lets them hover, and even fly backwards. They perch vertically, frequently in low vegetation, so they usually spot the BugLady long before she spots them.
The long, slim, immature green darners (naiads) are found in still or very slowly-moving, shallow waters, preferably without sunfish and bass (nice set of naiad pictures here http://bugguide.net/node/view/238726/bgimage). Adults frequent the air above those habitats but may be seen far from water.
Two populations of common green darners – one migratory, the other resident – form tag teams in the air over Wisconsin. Migrants from the south arrive early, often in late April, as their prey (small, aerial insects) start to appear. They are the offspring, or the offspring’s offspring, of the darners that flew south in the fall (no, they apparently do not return to their natal ponds). “Shivering” their wing muscles to heat up the thorax allows them to be active in cool weather, and they also bask in the sun. This is so effective that temperatures as high as 110 degrees have been measured inside the thorax (which challenges the whole definition of cold-bloodedness). The picture of the female with the battered wings was taken in early July, suggesting that she was a migratory female who was reaching the end of her trail.
The migrants mate and die by early summer, leaving their eggs in the water, just as the naiads of the resident population emerge as adults, leaving their empty shells (exuviae) on shoreline vegetation. These residents live a month or two as adults, depositing their eggs in late summer as the migrant adults emerge. Resident naiads overwinter under the ice in a state of suspended animation called diapause and take 10 or 11 months to mature (possibly more, in the chilly waters “Up North”), while the migrant naiads need less than half that time in the warm waters of summer.
Mating commences when a male clasps a female at the back of her head in mid-air (one source said that she can reject his advances), and then they retire to a perch to mate. Females oviposit in the open, in woody and herbaceous plant material below the water’s surface, with the male typically retaining his grip on her head.
The books say that these are the only darners that oviposit in tandem. The books also say that a couple flying in tandem may be strafed by rival males. The attendant male doesn’t have many options; he may flap his wings at the intruder, shake his abdomen, land in vegetation, and even bite his challenger. According to Paulson, in Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East, females may curl their abdomen under and close their wings when under attack. The BugLady once photographed (badly) an unattached male as he dive-bombed a second male whose abdomen was deeply submerged (presumably with an ovipositing female at the other end of it).
The BugLady once found a female stuck in an especially dense and sticky, dragonfly-eating patch of blanket algae. Did the female attempt to perch on the algae as she oviposited and get her wings stuck, only to be abandoned by her mate? Or, alternatively, did she get thirsty and then get stuck? Dragonflies “drink” by immersing their abdomen – water enters through the exoskeleton (the BugLady was able to fish her out with a stick).
The naiads are active predators that will eat anything they can grab using their foldable “lower lip” (labium) – zooplankton, other aquatic insects (including dragonfly naiads), tadpoles, larval salamanders, and fish fry are all fair game. In his wonderful write-up of the Common Green Darner, Kurt Mead (Dragonflies of the North Woods) muses that “If dragonfly larvae were eight to sixteen inches long, as they probably were 300 million years ago, we would dare not swim in fresh water for fear of being attacked” (read the whole account at http://www.mndragonfly.org/html/behavior.html) (there was a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere in those days, and some invertebrates grew to lunker size). Despite their spiny exteriors and their ability to shoot forward by expelling a spurt of water forcefully from the rear of their abdomen, they are eaten by frogs, fish, and by other aquatic insects. There’s even an “aquatic” parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in those of the green darner – Aprostocetus polynemae apparently walks down a twig or leaf stem into the water to find dragonfly eggs.
Adults catch insects in the air and may eat them in mid-flight or on a perch. They can also pick prey from a leaf or from the ground, and they’ve been known to stake out bee hives, to the distress of the bee-keeper. At least one ambitious Common Green Darner killed a hummingbird, and this fact is mentioned in every darner write-up, though the BugLady suspects it’s pretty uncommon. Adults are preyed on by robber flies, birds, spiders, and by other dragonflies; the people who monitor the fall raptor migration tell us that the southward movement of American Kestrels syncs with that of the darners, and that kestrel migration is fueled by darners.
So, Common Green Darners migrate. Like birds, they respond to a suitable weather front – cold fronts for the southern flight and warm fronts for the far less conspicuous northern trip. The journey south may take several weeks of stop-and-start flying (averaging 7 miles a day but capable of far more, depending on the wind), and they may be accompanied by black saddlebags and variegated meadowhawk dragonflies. Late summer/fall migration is dramatic, huge swarms may take hours or days to pass a fixed point. Bluffs on the west edge of Lake Michigan are great places to catch the show at eye level.
The Common Green Darner is the State Insect of Washington – so much more exciting than Wisconsin’s honeybee (and you thought the state insect was the mosquito!).
As always, don’t eat them – they carry parasites.
Unfinished business – in response to the recent BOTW about deer flies, a few French scholars pointed out to the BugLady that she had misspelled the term “je ne sais quoi” as “jean es se qua.” She had consulted Monsieur Google about the correct spelling, and she had, alas, believed him.
It’s almost time for Snowbirds to head back north to rejoin us here in God’s Country for the final days/weeks/months of winter. The BugLady read recently that the number of days below freezing in March here in God’s Country has drastically decreased in the past 25 years, and March is increasingly considered a spring month rather than a winter month (but when the BugLady was a kid……..). The temperature may be moderating, but March still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and most of them involve snow.
BugFan Tom supplied the pictures of this big, beautiful spider that inhabits the South from Virginia to Texas (and beyond, to Argentina and Peru). Thanks, Tom.
The brightly-patterned females may be more than two inches long with a five-inch leg span, (males are much smaller https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/76955/bgimage). A spider this big (probably our largest orb weaver) that makes big webs necessarily gets noticed and collects lots of names, like Banana Spider, Golden Orb Weaver, Calico Spider, Golden Silk Spider, and Giant golden Orbweaver, and people who walk into the webs while hiking probably have other names for them. MUCH has been written about their golden silk https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/566860/bgimage – more about that later.
The Golden silk orb weaver (Trichonephilaclavipes) was formerly known as Nephila clavipes. Nephila means “fond of spinning” and clavipes means “club-footed,” possibly a reference by Linnaeus to the dark tufts of hair on six of the female’s legs. Recently, it and a dozen other genus members were moved to the genus Trichonephila – the Golden orb weavers. Historically, GSOWs were the only member of that genus in North America, but in 2014, an East Asian species called the Joro spider found its way to Georgia, and it’s been spreading out through the Southeast https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2490331/bgimage.
Look for GSOWs in open areas in woods or edges, preferably near wetlands or coastal areas.
Male GSOWs spin trap webs until they reach maturity, but then they set off to find a mate. When they find a female’s web, they quietly move onto its periphery and feed on some of the prey she catches, and a female’s web may host a number of males. Dewdrop spiders https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/dewdrop-spider/ and Spiney-backed orb weavers https://uwm.edu/field-station/bug-of-the-week/bug-othe-week-spinybacked-orbweaver-a-spider-for-snowbirds/ also live on the web’s outskirts and share in the bounty. An amorous male will approach the female while she is distracted by a meal, and he signals by vibrating both the web and his abdomen (he’s cautious, but there’s not a lot of sexual cannibalism in this species). Males don’t produce much sperm, and they replace it slowly, so they favor newly-molted females who have not mated yet. After he mates/attempts to mate, a male may move on to a new web.
Females place two or more egg sacs, each containing a few hundred eggs, on surfaces near their web https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/914280/bgimage. Hatching may be triggered by environmental cues in their damp habitats. The spiderlings stick together for about a week after hatching https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/917323/bgimage, and then they disperse. By late summer, the tiny spiderlings of spring have reached full size and are making conspicuous webs.
This is a big spider that builds a big, strong web (up to six feet in diameter) that is capable of snagging some big prey, like moths, fast-flying horse flies, dragonflies (which are both GSOW eaters and eat-ees), butterflies https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/844364/bgimage, beetles (this one is June-beetle-size) https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/218713/bgimage, cicadas, and grasshoppers. Though they trap both small and large prey, they prefer to eat the bigger insects.
The webs are sturdy enough to capture birds. Daniel M. Brooks, in an article titled “Birds Caught in Spider Webs: A Synthesis of Patterns” published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology (2012), wrote that a review of international literature and list servers found 69 accounts of birds trapped in webs. Nephila species, especially GSOWs, accounted for half of the reports of mostly hummingbird-sized birds (though a small dove was reported, and the author personally observed a Swainson’s thrush tangled in a web), and while some were able to free themselves, a significant number had been killed and wrapped by the spider.
The asymmetrical, orb-type web is usually located between two and eight feet off the ground (but may be at treetop height). When prey is abundant, GSOWs may cache as many as 15 wrapped insects in a “barrier web” – a debris-strewn area along one side that serves to warn/block predators and help keep the web clean. One source said that the organic waste held in the barrier web may attract insect prey by its odor.
GSOWs’ main predators are wasps that collect them to provision their egg chambers, and birds.
Unlike many species of orb weavers that replace their webs daily, eating the old web to harvest its protein, GSOWs repair damaged webs. Researchers believe that the yellow tint, the intensity of which the spiders can control, may attract bees, and it may also help to camouflage a web in the shade. A number of females may make webs close to each other https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/826303/bgimage.
This is some serious silk!!! Nephila/Trichonephila silk has a high thermal conductivity, is stronger, by weight, than steel (it’s being studied with hopes of replicating its extreme strength), and it has some interesting medical applications. Wikipedia reports that it may be beneficial in surgeries involving the nervous system because it may guide and encourage neuronal regeneration.
Wikipedia also reports that hunters in New Guinea make fishing nets from the silk.
FUN FACT ABOUT SPIDERS: the tips of the legs of spiders that wander around and don’t make trap webs point outwards, and the tips of the legs of trap-web-spinners point inwards.
FUN FACT ABOUT NEPHILA/TRICHONEPHILA SPIDERS: The genus Nephila is not only the oldest-known surviving spider genus (165 million years), but it includes the largest-known fossil spider.
Way back in 2010, when the BugLady wrote an episode called “Big Beetle – Tiny Beetle,” the tiny beetle was a generic Tumbling flower beetle. There are a whole bunch of (unrelated) beetles that share the common name “flower beetle” – hermit, bumble, shining, soft-winged, and more, along with the long-horned flower beetles. Tumbling flower beetles are interesting little critters, so here’s an enhanced biography – new words, new pictures.
The psychological principle called “The Law of Closure” explains that when we see text with partial or misspelled words, our brains tend to serve up the missing information, often without our even noticing its absence (which is why over-familiarity with a text makes for bad proof-reading). The incomplete becomes complete. That being said, the BugLady must confess that whenever she sees the name of the Tumbling flower beetle family – Mordellidae – her brain always fills in the name of a kind of lunch meat, Mortadella. BugFans may come to their own conclusions/diagnoses about that.
Tumbling flower beetles, so-called because of their method of locomotion, are also called Pintail beetles, because of their pointy anatomy. There are more than 2,000 species of Tumbling flower beetles distributed over six continents, with 200-plus species in North America, and 68 of those in Wisconsin. They seem to be in continuous taxonomic limbo – there’s been a lot of shuffling and more is expected to happen. They can be a very confusing bunch – to tell the difference between some of the species, you have to count the ridges on the hind tibia and tarsus (leg and foot). All of the species in North America belong in the same subfamily (Mordellinae), and speaking of names, there are some very fine genus names like Mordellistena (the largest genus), Hoshihananomia, and Yakuhananomia.
These small (about ¼”), active, caraway-seed-shaped beetles always remind the BugLady of a flea on a flower. Tumbling flower beetles are wedge-shaped (tapered toward their pointy rears), and are covered with short hairs that are silky and slippery and that may give them an iridescent shine. They have long, flattened, hind legs (the better to tumble with, my dear) and hump-backed bodies, with heads angled down almost under the first segment of the thorax (sort of a “pre-somersault” position). Their elytra (wing covers) are shorter than their abdomen.
In an article in the journal PSYCHE (1987) Deyrup and Eisner write that “The Mordellidae are small, wedge-shaped beetles commonly found in one of the most dangerous of all insect habitats, the open inflorescences of plants.”Food and habitat-wise, Tumbling flower beetles tend to be generalists. Adults feed on nectar and pollen (their hairy bodies make them effective pollinators), and some nibble on the flowers a bit.
The larvae, concealed within plant stems https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2083164/bgimage, leaves, galls, dead trees, or shelf fungi, feed on dead wood, the pith of herbaceous plants, and woody fungi, and larvae of a few species may be predaceous. Most sources agreed that although they like sunflowers, the larvae aren’t considered an agricultural pest. Downy Woodpeckers find the larvae in plant stems, and crab spiders capture adults on flower heads.
Do they tumble? Oh my, yes! When alarmed, which seems to be often, they bail, letting go of the flower and tumbling or jumping off. Part way down, they may spread their wings and fly (they are good flyers) or they may fall all the way to the ground, where they are impossible to find. They jump by pushing off into a spiraling somersault using one of their extra-long back legs, and they rotate clockwise or counterclockwise in the air, depending on which leg they pushed off on. Sources say that these gymnastics help the beetle position itself for flight.
Deyrup and Eisner again: “Their chief protection against the many predators that frequent flowers is a series of convulsive leaps followed by rapid flight, as acknowledged in their common name, “the tumbling flower beetles.” Their escape from a predator’s grasp is facilitated by their wedge shape and covering of smooth, backward-pointing hairs, while their movement and purchase among stamens and floral hairs may be assisted by rows of tibial and tarsal setae strongly reminiscent of the combs of fleas. These escape mechanisms, while undoubtedly effective against many predators (including entomologists), have the disadvantage that they involve abandonment of the feeding site.”
Adults emerge in late spring, romance ensues, and females lay eggs in decaying wood or in living plant tissue (there may be as many as 40 larvae in a single sunflower). Tumbling flower beetles often find themselves in the company of other Tumbling flower beetles and are said to be aggressive toward them. They overwinter as larvae in their food plant, and there’s only one generation per year.
An article about Tumbling flower beetles on the Beyond Pesticides website states that “the tumbling flower beetle’s ancestors were some of the earliest insects to utilize flowers for food and habitat. In doing so, these ancient pollinators began an important collaboration between flowers and beetles which continues today.”has mated and less interested in a territory where he’s been beaten by a rival.
(The BugLady also snickers at the weather folks who report that visibility is limited to only five miles or two miles instead of ten. Most people don’t live where they can actually see five miles, and most of us aren’t flying an airplane. All we need is enough visibility – maybe a quarter mile in each direction – to be able to pull through an intersection safely. But that’s a different soapbox).
INSECT SPECIES – There are about 100,000 species of insects in the US, and almost one-fifth of those species can be found in Wisconsin! Most live out their whole lives without producing a single blip on our collective radars, and formal insect surveys are a recent phenomenon, so it’s hard to say what the population trends are for many species. https://news.cals.wisc.edu/2002/06/03/study-reveals-how-little-we-know-about-wisconsins-insect-diversity/
The BugLady saw a fly sitting on the outside of her cottage the other morning.
The BugLadye routes between those places. A male will be more faithful to a territory where he has mated and less interested in a territory where he’s been beaten by a rival.
2026 – When the BugLady wrote this episode in February of 2013, she kicked it off by griping about the weather – a favorite, February, indoor sport. This year, we’ve had many days of below average, below freezing, and below zero temperatures. How cold is it? Three weeks ago, one of her water pipes froze and burst, and when she tossed the sodden beach towels out the door into the yard, they froze instantly. They’re still stuck solidly to the ground.
This rerun contains a few new words (because who can look at a 13-year-old manuscript and not tweak it?), but all new pictures, because the Eastern Amberwing is a wondrous creature to photograph, even when it’s hovering just out of range.
2013 – The weatherman keeps saying “Mixed precipitation” and it’s making the BugLady plenty crabby, so she’s going to think about dragonflies, instead. Here’s a little bit of sunshine on the wing.
Several BugFans have asked the BugLady how she selects the stars of BOTW. First, she needs a decent picture to spin the tale around, and Eastern Amberwings have posed prettily (some of them). This tiny dragonfly has some interesting stories to tell.
At a hair under an inch in length, the Eastern Amberwing (Perithemistenera) is the second smallest dragonfly in Wisconsin (the very-uncommon Elfin Skimmer is a bit smaller and is not yellow). Some damselflies, like this Spreadwing https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/39074, are longer than Amberwings, but damselflies are slim and dragonflies are bulky. Their flashy wings make them look bigger than an inch to the BugLady. The male EA’s wings are pure gold; the female’s wings are brown-spotted on a sometimes-amber background (she resembles a tiny Halloween Pennant, of previous BOTW fame). Males and females have yellowish legs and have rings around the segments of their abdomens. The abdomens of both are thick (the female’s looks especially swollen).
Because of their coloring, their rapid, erratic flight, and the way they twitch their wings and abdomens when at rest, EAs are considered wasp mimics. Their wasp “disguise” may save them from aerial and terrestrial predators, but the BugLady found a website instructing fly fishermen on how to tie an EA fly, so apparently fish are willing to take a chance.
Where do you find them? Over most of the US, east of the Great Plains and south into Mexico. Here in God’s Country, they fly in mid-summer, but they grace the landscape year-round in the southernmost parts of their range. Look for them near quiet or very slowly-moving waters (the BugLady often sees them in the bays and inlets along the shore of the Milwaukee River). Look for them, too, far from water, hunting at grass-top-height over weedy fields or perched on vegetation at a woodland’s edge.
Where do you find them, entomologically speaking? In the order Odonata (the dragonflies and damselflies) and in the family Libellulidae (the Skimmers). Perithemis apparently is a reference to Themis, a figure in Greek mythology, and a number of other Skimmer genera incorporate Themis’s name. According to Berger and Hanson in Dragonflies, tenera is Latin for “tender,” “delicate,” or “soft” and implies youth (a dragonfly is called a teneral during the first few days of adult life).
They are “perchers,” and unlike most dragonflies, may be seen sitting on flowers (they are not considered pollinators, despite the picture caption in one photo site). On hot, summer days, they may lower their wings to shade their thorax and point their abdomens skyward to reduce direct contact by the sun’s rays. Eastern Amberwings find food by patrolling or by perching and watching; they catch insects in flight, but they generally perch to eat them. Females often raise their abdomens while in flight.
The aquatic young (naiads) eat tiny fellow-aquatic invertebrates, and unlike the more specialized naiads of other dragonflies, they use all parts of their habitat, hunting at any depth in their pond’s water column. For their carnivorous ways, Eastern Amberwings and other dragonflies are given a thumbs-up by a Florida pest control service, which says, “From the tiny Eastern Amberwing, to the flamboyant Halloween Pennant, dragonflies are some of the most important and charismatic beneficial bugs. They’re indiscriminate predators of many pest insects, including mosquitoes, flies, ants and wasps…… Next time you see one zip across your yard, consider saying thanks to the dragonfly for helping to control the pest population.”
Eastern Amberwings sure know how to court a gal. A male flies low over the water, patrolling a territory of choice egg-laying turf (weedy aquatic sites) about 20 feet wide and defending it vigorously – darting out at intruders and displaying with those spectacular wings. When a female approaches, he follows and courts her, swaying back and forth, abdomen raised. If she’s agreeable, she follows him home. He hovers over his territory while she evaluates it, and if she likes it, she gets him along with it. After mating, she lays eggs – usually alone, but sometimes under his watchful eye. The blob that she releases from the tip of her abdomen explodes as it enters the water, releasing as many as 150 eggs over the water’s surface. In his zeal to protect his “investment,” the male sometimes grabs an intruding male and flies in tandem with him, keeping him away from the female.
It’s not surprising that a critter that’s as flashy, as unmistakable, as widely distributed, and that has so many interesting behaviors has attracted the scientific community. A number of different studies have demonstrated, at least, that Eastern Amberwings have attitude. Here are some of the things that have been discovered about them:
Site fidelity – Once a male finds what he thinks is a high-quality spot to lay eggs (an oviposition site), he protects it by day (he leaves at night to roost in a tree). He will defend it for days, especially if he has mated there. If he deliberately changes territories, he “moves up” to a higher quality site. He can be evicted from his territory by a feistier male.
Heterospecific pursuit – Besides chasing each other, male Eastern Amberwings chase after any flying insect that could be mistaken for another Eastern Amberwing (that’s heterospecific pursuit). They’ve been observed pursuing large horse flies and small skipper butterflies, but they ignore larger dragonflies. Researchers concluded that following a horsefly was simply a case of mistaken identity of a similar-sized insect, but there may be something about the skipper’s coloration that pushed the Eastern Amberwings’ buttons.
The cost of doing business – Defending a territory is “expensive,” and the more “close neighbors” an Eastern Amberwing has, the costlier it is for him. Having more neighbors results in more intrusions. More intrusions mean more energy spent chasing intruders or simply darting around being territorial. Expensive? Yes, but non-territorial males rarely get to pass on their genetic material.
Home field advantage – Unlike those of some other Skimmers, Eastern Amberwing’s territorial disputes may escalate, but they are non-contact sports. If the aggression does not build, the territory-holder tends to win, but if the conflict escalates, victory often goes to the younger Eastern Amberwing. Males who had fewer interactions overall tended to have more energy and win low-key conflicts. The territory-holder may win other face-offs because he psyches out the competition or because the intruder decides he doesn’t like the territory enough to fight for it.
Spatial learning – Dragonflies can remember the locations within their habitat where they find food, breed, and roost, and they know the routes between those places. A male will be more faithful to a territory where he has mated and less interested in a territory where he’s been beaten by a rival.
BugFan Dave shared these spectacular pictures of a very cool beetle that he found last summer – a ground beetle in the family Carabidae, a huge family with 40,000+ species. It’s in the subfamily Scaritinae, the “Pedunculate ground beetles,” so-named for the constriction – peduncle – between the wider thorax and abdomen. The wonderful “MOBugs” blogspot (“Missouri’s Majority”) suggests that they should be called “Scary pincher ground beetles.” It’s in the genus Scarites (skar-EYE-tees), a genus that numbers about 190 species worldwide with seven or eight (or nine) species in North America, most of them with very small, very southern ranges.
More about the ID of this beetle in a sec.
SCARITES – THE GENUS
Scarites beetles are often found under loose rocks and bark, boards, mulch, leaf litter, and debris, on forest floors, on or burrowing into moist, sandy soil, in gardens, in residential areas, and at the edge of agricultural fields. They’re common, though, alas, the BugLady’s never seen one – she needs to turn over more logs. Their mandibles and general air of invincibility cause some people to mistake them for stag beetles https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/1209374, which are in a different family.
They are shiny and black, with spiky legs and an armored-looking head. The elytra (hard wing covers) are ridged/grooved, and a couple of “creases” on the shield that covers the thorax form a “T.” Males tend to be larger and “toothier” than females, with a slightly more bulging head. Some sources describe the larvae as looking like “fast-moving millipedes with large jaws” https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2485075/bgimage.
Like many ground beetles, they are fierce and speedy predators that shelter during the day and hunt at night. Pedunculate ground beetles – La mère, le père et les enfants – eat a variety of surface and soil-dwelling invertebrates like earthworms, slugs and snails, caterpillars, maggots, ants, etc. It’s also reported that they eat insect eggs and that they scavenge on dead insects, including dead Scarites, and that they may eat some plant material. They’re considered beneficial around gardens and agricultural fields, though they don’t discriminate between pest and non-pest prey. At an inch-or-so long, they’re big enough so that researchers have attached transmitters to their abdomens to track their activities in agricultural fields! Some ground-foraging songbirds eat them.
In fact, several Extension publications offered tips about attracting Scarites beetles to your garden, creating a refuge by leaving a portion of lawn bare and/or un-mowed and/or brushy (all of which benefits solitary wasps, too), and, as always, by limiting/eliminating pesticides.
The BugLady couldn’t find much about their biographies other than the fact they overwinter as both larvae or adults, and the fact that when they’re alarmed, they will fall over, pull in their antennae and legs, stiffen, and play dead. One blogger reported a strange, but not unpleasant odor when he handled a “dead” one. The mandibles appear to be Defense Option B.
THE LONG-JAWED PEDUNCULATE GROUND BEETLE (Probably)
The two most common, most widely-distributed genus members in North America are the Big-headed/Pedunculate ground beetle (Scarites subterraneus) https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/906988 and Scarites vicinushttps://www.bugguide.net/node/view/919285/bgpage, which most sources said has no common name but that one source called the Long-jawed pedunculate ground beetle. The two are tough to tell apart, even by experts. The BugLady is going to take her usual taxonomic leap and say that this is Scarites vicinus, based on her reading of the shape of the three antennal segments (antennomeres) – slightly elongated vs round https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/163900. Scarites vicinus is also larger than Scarites subterraneus, with a broader head, and the shield on the thorax is “rounder.” All of which can be somewhat subjective – the eye of the beholder. There’s more information available about the Big-headed ground beetle than there is about the Long-jawed pedunculate ground beetle.
They’re found in a few mid-Atlantic states, a couple of Gulf states, and some Great Lakes states – and South Dakota.
