The Urban Pantheist

The plant is a black cherry Prunus serotina, a weedy little tree found throughout the New World. The leaf bears the mushroom-like galls of a tiny arachnid, the mite Eriophyes cerasicrumena. The animals are living inside the protuberance.

The white discoloration patterns on the leaf are feeding marks left by leafhoppers--small (but enormous compared to the mites) insects that puncture the leaf and feed on the fluid within.

Thanks always to Charley Eiseman, who expertly divines animals from the marks they make on plants. He rears galls to identify the adult insects--I think he has discovered new or locally unknown species doing this.

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"

I set some stinging insect traps that include a liquid chamber to catch the insects. I had left them for several weeks, and much of the liquid had evaporated, but a sludgy mix of drowned flies, moths, and yellowjackets remained. I opened the trap to clean and rebait it, and it was crawling with life.


I dumped it out and out crawled several Nicrophorus beetles! These attractive orange-and-black beetles are carrion feeders, and flew into the trap to eat the dead bug sludge, and maybe lay some eggs. They are usually called "burying beetles" but Bugguide.net gives the common name "Sexton beetles" for the genus. Included in this group is the American burying beetle (not pictured here), an endangered species that is the subject of a repopulation project run by Rhode Island's Roger Williams Park Zoo.

This individual is carrying a passenger: a fairly large mite the same color as the beetle's orange spots.

Unearthed by yard work, a velvet mite (quite probably Trombidium holosericeum, a species found throughout the northern part of the northern hemisphere but who the hell knows? Family Trombidiidae for sure) lumbers across an open palm.

Velvet mites are giants among mites, measured in millimeters instead of micrometers. Their most striking feature is their pelage of vibrant red hairs, an umambiguous message meaning "I taste bad, birdies." (It is thought, by the way, that poison dart frogs obtain their poisons from the tropical mites they consume.) Velvet mites are beneficial creatures to the garden, feeding on other arthropods and their eggs. Their young, like many mite nymphs, are fluid-sucking parasites. Fortunately for us, they suck the fluids from insects, not humans or other vertebrates.