The Urban Pantheist

This summer has been unusually dry--we've had something like 2 inches of rain the entire summer (we average over 3 inches per month). As a mushroom guy, I've found it quite depressing. One day I woke up and the yard was a bit damp. I quickly moved from place to place to try to find live revived by the moisture. This may be Mycena corticola.


The north facing side of the shingle roof of our shed is thickly decorated with British soldier lichen.


A nearly hexagonal raft of infinitesimal bubbles on our bird bath.


Ants in general don't seem to be suffering in the drought, at least it seems many species are doing fine.

I stood with another naturalist (actually a bona fide scientist who I admire and feel honored to hang out with sometimes) waiting for a third to arrive, when we noticed this wasp. Neither of us felt threatened, as she was extremely busy digging about in the sand. The sand was left over from the winter road treatment, and so was shallow and not very hard packed--not great for the wasp's purposes. She dug in one area and then another, occasionally picking up a pebble larger than her head with her mandibles and placing it away from her work zone. She was trying to find a place to dig a burrow in which to lay her eggs. Once she found one (she'll have better luck over at the baseball infields across the street) she'd then go find caterpillars and sawfly larvae (which humans often mistake for caterpillars, so I guess, close enough?) sting them to paralyze them, and stuff them down the hole with her eggs.

This genus of moth is Ammophila which means "sand-lover," and the silvery dashes on the thorax indicate that this is probably A. procera.

The last two in the project were flies pretending to be wasps. Hard for this one to pretend to be anything but what it is--the largest wasp in the northeast, or at least the longest. That thread protruding from her abdomen is her ovipositor, and it brings her length to about four inches. This is the giant ichneumon Megarhyssa macrurus. She'll stab that thing into a rotting stump right into the body of a pigeon horntail larva and deposit her egg. Her baby then feeds on the horntail baby and, as they say, the beautiful cycle of life continues.

Despite her warning coloration and her terrifying (to many people) appearance, the giant ichneumon is not at all harmful to humans.

Looking like a wasp is an adaptation assumed by many different species of flies. Looking like a really huge wasp is more rare, but this Mydas fly Mydas clavatus has it down. It has a wasplike flight and measures a full inch in length, making it one of the largest true flies around. Its larvae feed on beetle grubs in the soil, and adults visit flowers for nectar. It may look scary but its one of the most beneficial insects in the yard.

Until the drought killed them, our nasturtiums were a food source for many. This bejeweled true bug (hemiptera) is unidentifiable, but was probably drinking plant juice.


Likewise these candy-stripe leafhoppers were using their beak-like mouthparts to jab holes in the plant and sip its fluid.


And then underneath the leaves these black aphids were also settled in to drink.


Enter the cavalry: ladybeetle larvae specialize on soft-bodied plant-feeders like aphids.


Off they go to eat some aphids--ultimately the plant succumbed to the combined stress of drought and bugs, but it was fun to record the events.

If you haven't taken a look at Why Animals Do The Thing you should.

"We're here to yell at the bad stuff, explain the confusing bits, and pull out the cutest, coolest, most unknown content - all while putting animal behavior in its own proper context. "

This blog (mostly written by a friend of mine, full disclosure) is an exhaustively researched collection of articles, debunkings, and answered questions. I started showing it to everyone I know when it featured the best description and explanation of the Harambe debacle at Cincinnati Zoo.

There's a lot of debunking of Animal Rights Activism, explanations of pet animal behavior, and answers to questions like "why do lactating elephants appear to have human breasts?"

Eastern prickly pear (Opuntia humifusa) is a surprising sight for most people who don't expect to see a cactus in New England. This plant seemed abundant on this Cape Cod visit, but is state listed as Endangered.


Considering the long dry period we've been experiencing this summer, the last thing I expected to see was mushrooms. Instead I was greeted with these fresh but very sturdy polypores--in fact a species I had never seen before, Cryptoporus volvatus, produced by a fungus that feeds on dead conifer wood.


I don't have an identification for this dragonfly, but I could tell she was female, because she kept dipping the end of her abdomen into the water--a sign that she was releasing eggs.


And on a little black cherry tree, these fingerlike projections are galls that protect minuscule Eriophyes mites.

As we walked the high tide line in Wellfleet, we couldn't help notice the large number of dead horseshoe crabs. At first I assumed some had to be molted shells of growing animals. But no, every crab I encountered was a full carcass.
( more deads )

A calliphorid fly (bottle fly) warms up on a leaf.


The reproductive parts of a daylily beckon luridly.


Japanese honeysuckle ready for a chance encounter with a hummingbird.


A tiny grasshopper nymph (subadult that hasn't molted into a winged adult) just hours or days old, ready to eat soft tender vegetation.

A common grackle caught and killed a fledgling house sparrow, brought it to our yard to dismember and feed it to its own chick.