3:00 snapshot #988: special guest star

Alex went away for a while, so we had a special guest star in the house!

100 More Species #11 Grass skipper

Grass skipper, quite possibly Peck's (or "yellow-spotted") skipper Polites peckius.

Skippers are small, big-eyed butterflies named for their rapid flight. This one obliged me by holding nice and still for a long time so that I could photograph it. Grass skippers are probably very common in the suburbs because we grow so much of their host plants: grasses. Even closely mowed lawns can provide habitat for the caterpillars, so imagine how productive our ragged and neglected back yard is!

What people have brought me this week

Depending on how you measure the seasons, it is the beginning of Summer or the end of Spring. Here in the Boston area it means an explosion of living things into people's lives. All winter long people who are afraid of or vexed by insects and spiders and slimy things can rest easy, but now there are things flying, crawling, and oozing into prominence.

A coworker brought me a red beetle in a ziplock bag. "I found this on our lily plants. What is it and why does it scream?" I answered: it's a lily leaf beetle, and you are imagining the screaming. I assume that she's imagining the screaming, anyway. Alexis has been picking tons of these things off the tiger lilies and hasn't heard any screaming yet. I'll pay close attention when I find them. Interestingly (to me) they've only been in the US since 1992, and they were first found in Massachusetts. So far the best way I know to control them is to pick them off the plants (and drop them into soapy water or some other household doom). Their eggs are red things attached to the underside of the lily leaves, and the larvae are disguised by their own droppings as misshapen clumps of bug poo.

A friend on facebook posted a picture of some spiky yellow growth swarming over a plant (and tagged it with my name, forever on my timeline). I told him it was early stage Fuligo septica, or dog vomit slime mold. He was familiar with the species, but hadn't seen it in that stage before. I've seen it once or twice before crawling on a live plant, rather than along dead wood, and it does seem strange.

Also on facebook this week: a giant leopard moth, an ectobius cockroach (a European native that lives outdoors but occasionally gets inside and scares the crap out of people who think they have an infestation) and a badly mutilated luna moth. I am honored to be the person that people come to with creature questions.

Via twitter a friend described "a cross between a silverfish and a pillbug." I struggled with this until the friend, a graphic designer by trade, sent this very accurate rendering of a common striped (or "fast") woodlouse.

Now my question to you is: if I made this kind of content available in podcast form, would you bother to listen to it?

100 More Species #12 Long-legged fly

Long-legged fly family Dolichopidida possibly Condylostylus sp. EDITED TO ADD: lets call it Condylostylus patibulatus, a species common to the northeast, which I have had identified elsewhere from my yard.

I kind of hate myself for using this as one of my 100 species. Why? Because I can really only identify it to family. Stay with me for a minute. Long-legged flies comprise a family (called "Dolichopodidae") of small predatory flies. There are something like 7000 species worldwide, 1300 in North America. In other words, if I were a very skilled and diligent fly identifier, I could do a decade or more of 100 more species projects with just long-legged flies. There are more species of long-legged flies than there are species of mammals.

I have a strong feeling that this long-legged fly is in the genus Condylostylus, based more on comparing my photo with the bugguide.net photos than anything else. These flies, and most flies by the way, are identified primarily through looking at the veins on their wings. Most of the long-legged flies I've seen have been about the size of fruit flies, so examining wing veins is something you do after your specimen is dead and the wing is detached and under powerful magnification.

When I learned what long-legged flies were--active predatory animals--I was amazed. If you spend an hour in a garden or among the tall weeds, you will see hundreds of them. That means that there are thousands of smaller prey animals, most of them so tiny that they are beneath your notice, that these flies are catching and killing. How wonderful would it be to be able to see things from their perspective for a short time, to watch these metallic monsters (which are armed with the most advanced flight ability that evolution has produced) chasing or ambushing other insects and draining them with their piercing mouthparts. Forgive me, but it would be like Star Wars crossed with Dracula.

So I'll leave the other 1299 species alone for this project, and let this under-identified specimen stand in for the entire family.

EDITED TO ADD: I would be remiss if I didn't quote bugguide.net's note on long-legged fly behavior: "Adults mate after elaborate and unique behavior, involving the males displaying their legs to the female."