280 days of Urbpandemonium #114

Like its relative the Japanese beetle, the Oriental beetle is a hated pest of turfgrass. Not so much at our house since we treat our lawn with something between benign neglect and half-hearted maintenance. But people interested in a nice carpet of unbroken grass blades don't like the white C shaped larvae that grow into this beetle. They live in the soil, nibbling on the roots of the grass, killing sections of grass, leaving unsightly dead patches. The grown beetles don't make themselves any more welcome, feeding on roses and other ornamental flowers. Accidentally introduced from Asia, this invasive species is being battled with a natural enemy: a commercially available nematode that preys on the Oriental beetle grub.

I wrote that almost exactly 4 years ago, referring to the insect in this picture:

Looks pretty different but both are Exomala orientalis*. The species varies on a light to dark spectrum between the two extremes shown.



* Very outside, from the east

Fall River Mushrooms

Say I never did post anything from our visit to Fall River, did I? Fall River is one of those small cities in America that has seen better times. It's not without it's charm, but is not the tourist destination fishing town that it once was and could be again. Anyway, I found some mushrooms, including these boletes.


And nearby, this Amanita. These are both mycorrhizal mushrooms, meaning that they are produced by a fungal networks that are symbiotic with the plants in the area. The only plants in the area was a small group of eastern white pines. I don't often see mushrooms symbiotic with pine,(usually it's oaks) so this was kind of exciting for me.

280 days of Urbpandemonium #115

Little brown jobs--naturalist talk for smallish, dull-colored, hard to identify organisms--often have no common name. The fact that this one has even the lackluster name of "brown stink bug," means that it has some reason to draw attention to itself. That reason is economic damage. This unassuming insect combines a broad appetite with an impressive reproductive capacity. The result is that Euschistus servus* is known to people who make money from growing food plants, because it ruins them. Besides "catfacing" peaches and putting spots on pecans, brown stink bugs also "may damage soybean, corn, cotton, alfalfa, sorghum, ... and tobacco." This one was probably helping itself to our raspberries. I fed it to the chickens.

* "Euschistus"= New Latin, from Greek euschistos easy to split, from eu- + schistos split, divided. I assume this is a taxonomy joke, about the reassignment of the genus and splitting of species, but that's just a guess. "Servus" literally means "At your service!" but has the sense of "slave."