The Urban Pantheist

The London Natural History Museum calls this insect the "urban bluebottle blowfly." Its native range is very nearly the entire Northern Hemisphere, and can also be found anywhere else on earth there are humans and dead animals. In warm climates they are most conspicuous in winter, when other flies are rare or simply less active.

I am fairly certain that badnoodles' identification of this species for me has solved the mystery of the "really big black housefly" that I've encountered in various situations. In one animal facility where I was a volunteer, a plumbing malfunction led to a build up of water contaminated with monkey feces in a basement. Big black flies, twice the size of houseflies, became a persistent presence in the facility for a few weeks; the monkeys made a sport of catching them and eating them. I hasten to add that badnoodles describes them as "strict carrion breeders," and so it may have been another fly in that instance. The blue iridescence of this species is more subtle than some other bottle flies, and in flight looks black. Orange markings on the face help distinguish it from closely related species. This individual was caught indoors, and may have been seeking a place to overwinter.



Calliphora vicina is the focus of more attention than many flies, due to its importance in forensic entomology. Depending on temperature, the development of the larva progresses at a very predictable rate. The circumstances and time of a human death can be more accurately determined by experts using the presence of this urban species.

Phidippus audax

In the course of doing the 365 Urban Species Project, there were a few organisms that I had in mind to blog about, that I didn't encounter, or photograph well enough. High among these Phiddippus audax, my favorite arachnid. I don't pick favorites very often, but this is a very charismatic spider. Jumping spiders in general, with their big forward-facing eyes and little forelimb gestures, are pretty endearing. They are some of the only spiders that really seem to acknowledge humans, turning to face us when approached, putting up those front legs in a threatening manner, and then jumping away (or sometimes toward us) at the last moment.

Phidippus audax also has those great big green fangs and three white dots that look like a face staring up from the abdomen. Regional variants have orange spots, and there are some related species that look similar, but P. audax is the most commonly encountered throughout North America. It also seems to have a particular preference for man-made habitat, or perhaps the kinds of insect prey that man-made habitat attracts. I used to call it "the window-sill spider" because I found it on an office window ledge catching flies so often. The individual on my icon had claimed my parked car as territory, and the one in these photos had set up shop inside a yellow jacket trap. This spider is sometimes given the common names "daring jumping spider" or "bold jumping spider" but I find those lacking and prefer the scientific name in this case.



(The consensus seems to be that Audax is pronounced Ow-dux. A spider guy on youtube said "Oddux," and I tend to say Oh-dacks, which is probably the least correct of all.)

Reishi Ganoderma lucidum


Identifying mushrooms is difficult, perhaps I've mentioned that before. Many species look similar to one another, and many field markings are variable. In G. lucidum what appears to be a bracket fungus, growing directly from a tree here, can have a long stalk. It can be relatively more red, or banded like a candy corn, or more white. It can be broad and fan-like, or narrow and branched like antlers. All of this would be mere curiosity for naturalists if this mushroom wasn't among the most important medicinal fungi in traditional Asian medicine.

The shape and perhaps the color, as well as other attributes are thought to enhance one property or another. Fortunately scientists are starting to look into it, and are finding anti-tumor and other protective qualities. Whether the shape of the mushroom influences its ability to cure disease is not known, but it is known that the shape is influenced by the conditions of the mushroom's growth. Longer reishi mushrooms and stalked fan-like brackets tend to be produced in warmer areas. In Boston we tend to see stalkless brackets on trees and misshapen blobs growing from hidden roots. One of these latter mushrooms was treated with great suspicion in New York City recently. Hacked from its spot where it was growing on subterranean Callery pear roots, it grew back; well, of course it did--removing the fruiting body does practically nothing to the fungus that produced it.

Reishi (I'm using the Japanese name because it is short and easy to say) can be a beautiful and durable mushroom. If you don't grind it up for tea you can dry it and keep it as an ornament. It readily grows in cultivation and you can buy kits to do so. (You can also buy capsuled reishi supplements and even reishi-infused chocolates.) In North America, a close relative G. tsugae grows from conifers. DNA research seems to indicate that the two North American species are closer related to one another than they are to the G. lucidum that grows in Asia. The above specimens are growing from a larger burl on a honey locust tree that has appeared in this journal (here) before. I posted a very different photo of mushrooms from this species complex here.

Red-backed salamander Plethodon cinereus

It's been almost ten years since I've photographed a red-backed salamander in the city. There are very few amphibians on my lists of urban species (two frog species and now two salamander species at this point). Amphibians have the challenge of a permeable skin, which exposes them to the various pollutants in the urban environment. They are particularly sensitive to acidic substrates, a condition which has been increasing in their eastern forest habitat for more than a century. In the case of the red-backed salamander, their skin is their only mode of respiration: they are lungless salamanders.

Despite this anatomical obstacle, red-backed salamanders are thought to be the most common amphibian species in the northeast North America. Unlike frogs and many other salamanders, they don't require bodies of water to breed; their offspring are born as miniature adults instead of as gilled larvae. They live in leaf litter, feeding on small invertebrates. Females guard their eggs until they hatch, and relatives recognize one another by scent and tolerate each other within a territory. These tiny animals (three inches long is a very large individual) are thought to live to about 10 years old, and possibly as old as thirty.

This individual was taking shelter in the fronds of a hen-of-the-woods mushroom, on a rainy afternoon in the Riverway.

Carbon balls Daldinia concentrica

What looks like a clump of old rot on a piece of dead wood is, in this case, a vibrant and relatively long-lived life form. An oddball among fungal fruiting bodies, carbon balls are perennial, persisting for years with new fertile layers growing over the old. The closely related mushroom dead man's fingers has a similar growth pattern. In cross-section, the layers of growth are visible as concentric rings, which is where the fungus gets its species name. The hard, coal-like structure conserves water, and allows the fungus to produce spores even under very dry conditions when most other fungi stay dormant. For reasons which are unclear but probably adaptive, carbon balls emit spores nocturnally. These small growths (less than 2 inches in diameter at most) can produce up to ten million spores per night.

Carbon balls are in the broad group of fungi that include cup fungi and morels, as opposed to the other main group that produce umbrella-shaped mushrooms and bracket fungi. Each group digests a different component of wood, and can therefore live in the same substrate without necessarily competing. In the photo above, a bracket fungus (possibly violet tooth polypore) shares dead wood with the carbon balls.

Mexican fleabane Erigeron karvinskianus

It's the last day of summer, the last day I won't feel too ridiculous posting a species I encountered back in August! Erigeron karvinskianus has many common names including seaside daisy, profusion fleabane, Mexican daisy, and Latin American fleabane. I'm going to use the name Mexican fleabane, since it is simple, fairly distinct, and accurate. It is native to Mexico and parts of South America, but has been deliberately introduced and cultivated around the world as an ornamental. It is considered invasive in some sensitive island habitats. In the places I visited in Britain this summer it did not seem to be considered invasive, and was actively cultivated, especially in stone walls.

The plant prefers open sun and dry sandy soil, in fact the cracks in the mortar of a rock wall building seems to be ideal. They were in bloom during my visit, and lent a cheery lively aspect to what would have been hot bare stone. It was fascinating to see weeds so carefully cultivated to grow in the cracks of man-made structures, when elsewhere so much effort is put into eradicating them.


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Jack-o-lantern mushroom Omphalotus olearius illudens

Sometimes naturalists like to describe an organism as "unmistakable," without properly respecting the human tendency to make mistakes. I think of this mushroom species as unmistakable, yet tales of poisonings insist that mistakes have been made. The biggest error of someone hunting mushrooms for food is wishful thinking--wanting something so bad as to ignore signs that things aren't what they are.

Another common error is choosing one identifying characteristic to stand the whole identification. These are orange. Chanterelles can be orange. The gills of this mushroom descend somewhat, from the cap down the stalk (they are decurrent). The gill-like folds of a chanterelle descend the stalk. These mushrooms are growing apparently from the ground, as the mycorrhyzal chantarelles do. And yet to claim these as chanterelles (which has happened, and why people have been poisoned by this species) is to willfully ignore signs that these clearly aren't.

The cap and stem are distinct parts here, even with the decurrent gills. While there is a surprising variety of shapes within this one cluster of mushrooms, none of them are remotely vase-shaped, the signature field marking of a chanterelle. And while lucky chanterelle hunters may find clusters of their preferred mushroom, they will not find them all sharing the same stalk, as these do.

Jack-o-lantern mushroom is the name for a group of orange mushroom species: one found in Europe, one in the Southeast U.S., one in the western states, and this one, native to the Northeast and Central state. All are toxic, with at least two toxic chemicals identified in their flesh. One of these chemicals is illudin, which interests science both for its antitumor properties and its bioluminescence. The fact that this mushroom's gills glow in the dark, and has orange flesh are the reasons for the common name. Although Michael Kuo has a serious beef with the whole bioluminescence deal. Suffice it to say, it has to be a whole lot darker than it typically gets in a city to rely on glowing gills as a field marking. (Tom Volk provides the evidence here.)

The fungus that produces this mushroom feeds on the dead roots of trees, especially oaks. Often times, as in this case, the tree in question has been cut down and hauled off as firewood, possibly years ago. There isn't even a stump, but the mycelium lives on in the buried roots, producing mushrooms to reproduce as it uses up its finite food source.

Giant puffball Calvatia gigantea

Not everyone has encountered a giant puffball, but surely everyone who has remembers the experience. Often they are mistaken for deflated volleyballs, or soccer balls that have faded to all-white. A group of particularly large giant puffballs, dotting a meadow, might be taken to be a flock of sheep. Each mushroom ranges in size from that of a grapefruit up to a meter across. The fungus organism, hidden in the soil, is a larger creature made of millions of interlacing threads only a single cell wide. These threads exude digestive juices into the soil, breaking down chemicals into usable nutrients and reabsorbing the result.



All mushroom-producing fungi live this way, though many live in dead wood instead of soil, and others live within or among the roots of living trees. Secondary decomposers (or secondary saprobes in the terminology of mycologists) feed in places where other fungi and bacteria have already done some work breaking down formerly living things into smaller, more digestible parts. A microscopic puffball spore must drift to such a place, and somehow escape the predations of springtails, slime molds, earthworms and a myriad other creatures in order to grow into fungus organism, . The odds seem very bad for the spore, perhaps that's why each giant puffball produces more than a trillion spores. Surely one will reach the right spot.


Giant puffball links:

Tom Volk's page on the species: http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/aug98.html

David Fischer's page on the species and its relatives: http://americanmushrooms.com/edibles3.htm

Michael Kuo's page on the species: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/calvatia_gigantea.html

Two years ago they appeared three weeks earlier, for some reason. I ate one:
http://urbpan.livejournal.com/767622.html

Goofballs with puffballs: http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/calvatia.html

(Thanks to Tom Volk and David Fischer for responding to my questions about this species.)

Common moorhen Gallinula chloropus

It's not much of a coincidence that many of the worlds most widespread bird species also happen to thrive in cities. If an animal can adapt to many different habitats, chances are fairly good that it can adapt to urban habitats. Barn swallows, black-crowned night herons, cattle egrets, and barn owls are all found on multiple continents and in and around hundreds of the world's cities. To this list we can add the common moorhen, or gallinule. Though most comfortable in a marsh or swamp, the moorhen is happy to forage along drainage ditches and canals, and other places where urban water is maintained or mitigated. They feed on a wide variety of small aquatic animals as well as some plant foods. The one I saw at a rest stop near Heathrow was cleaning up crumbs below cafe tables.

They swim without the benefit of webs or even the flattened toe lobes that their close relatives, the coots, have. Their toes are elongated to facilitate walking across floating vegetation. For whatever reason, their range excludes the northern coasts of North America, but they can be found almost everywhere else in North and South America, throughout Europe, and in habitats in Africa, Arabia and Asia. Only very dry places, very cold places, and tropical rainforests have no common moorhens.

Hairy rove beetle Creophilus maxillosus

This rove beetle was found roving around a fly trap. This kind of fly trap is a simple jar filled with water and a nasty smelling lure, with a lid that has small holes in it. Flies (mostly carrion flies, but some houseflies and others) fly into the trap, fall into the water and die there, contributing to the attractiveness of the aroma. The stink attracted this beetle as well, and well it should have since this species specializes on eating flies and maggots on filth and carrion.

Unlike other rove beetles I've observed, this individual unfolded its wings and flew around a bit. I was skeptical back when I first encountered the devil's coach horse that there were functional wings underneath the tiny wing covers on the beetle's back. Not having an abdomen covered with a hard elytra (like other more familiar beetles such as ladybird beetles do), rove beetles are free to waggle their hind ends alarmingly, in the manner of an earwig. Instead of pincers, the hairy rove beetle has a gland which produces a chemical defense. The active ingredient, dihydronepetalactone, is being studied as a possible repellent against mosquitoes and stable flies.