280 days of Urbpandemonium #81

It makes me so happy to know that many of the weird growths, scums, slimes, rusts, and carbuncles that form in nature have known identities. A good deal of them are produced by animals, and while the animals are hard to see, their presence is distinctive. These cherry leaves have formed finger-like projections, each with a tiny opening at one end. Within there are mites, the smallest of arachnids, special to living in cherry leaf galls. These mites are too small to see, but micrographs reveal that they are sausage-shaped, like the mites that live in the follicles of human faces. Weirder still, their legs have degraded from the standard arachnid budget of 8 down by 50%, and those four are gathered down at the animal's head end. Thanks as always to Charley Eiseman for writing the book on inferring invertebrates from their sign, and for confirming my identification of these Eriophyes* sp gall mites.

* "wool growth"

Cape Cod master post

I go to the Cape once a year--a coworker opens his family's house up to the zoo staff for a week. This time my 36 hour visit coincided with the Summer Solstice. Here's the bay side beach showing an awful lot of low tide.

( lots more )

Some lovely lawn parasols for no reason but they appeared

280 days of Urbpandemonium #82

A light fixture is no place to establish a colony. I mean, it has its virtues--it's under the eave protected from the rain, for example. But whatever benefits this location provides are vastly outweighed by being an inconvenience to the humans within the building.


It's a shame because the architects of this young nest were bald-faced hornets Dolichovesula maculata*, who voraciously hunt other insects to feed to their young--I have read that they even catch their closest relatives, the much hated yellow jackets. Adults feed on liquid sugar, either flower nectar or the juice of discarded fruit. Workers defend the nest bravely and energetically. One memorable time I was attacking a mature nest and the workers kept bouncing off my bee veil, directly in front of my eyes. More often then not these social wasps build their nests high in the leafy canopy of trees, and we don't even know they were there until the autumn reveals the empty nest.

* "Spotted, long little wasp"

280 days of Urbpandemonium #83

By night Stemonitis* creeps along a damp rotten log, a mass of protoplasm engulfing and feeding upon bacteria and other organic cells. It can perceive the rising sun, and moves under the log to avoid drying out. At the end of it's life cycle, it crawls back to the top of the log, and its cells transform from undifferentiated amoebae into the structure you see above. The fruiting stage is called chocolate tube slime, and the slender tubes release spores into the air to begin the cycle again.




*"Little threads"

280 days of Urbpandemonium #84

Black and yellow are the universal warning colors among animals able to see them. It looks like someone forgot the black on this bumblebee. This turns out to be one of the varied colorations of Bombus perplexus*, the "perplexing bumblebee." It's one of the least perplexing, since all-yellow bumblebees are not the norm. A bugguide contributor pointed out that it's also a male--unable to sting--and not anything to warn anyone about anyway.

* "Perplexing buzzer"