To all my People Who Are Crabs

A bunch of friends and family members have birthdays under the sign of Cancer the Crab. Astrology is a bunch of bunk; still it is a good excuse to post these photos of a smallish crab spider I noticed today on the shasta daisies that have just started to bloom.

Happy birthday all you crabby people.

Two Flies for your viewing Pleasure

These green bottle flies are way prettier than they should be, given their nasty feeding and breeding habits. Well, as momma always said, life is like a box of chocolates. Or, if you're a bottle fly, your short existence is like a refuse can of rotting veggies and meats.

I try to brush up their image a little more by fiddling with the color in these two photos, just for the heck of it.

solstice haiku

as we inch across
our small sunfilled world you stop,
then swing toward autumn

Everybody likes a butterfly

So, there are some butterflies around after all. I practically had to get religion, though, to see 'em. At a flower/art festival at Mission San Juan Capistrano there were quite a few monarchs flying. I got suspicious, actually, there were that many. They looked, as this one does, like they had just emerged. Did the Garden Angels at the Mission figure their festival would be enhanced by a lovely flight of butterflies?

Anyway, they were beautiful to see, even though it was another grey morning in So Cal.

I also saw this one caterpillar preparing to pupate under a nice hollyhock leaf.

The Who Needs Chicken Caesar Salad

I was cutting some romaine lettuce for a salad this evening and just missed slicing this stowed-away ladybird beetle in two. After just a minute or so, it started wiggling just the tarsus of its front left leg, then the whole leg, then the head started moving up and down. Before I knew it, the beetle was crawling clumsily over and through the folds of the lettuce. Once it found its way off my future salad, it seemed distinctly reluctant to go near it again. So I obliged and took it outside to the big show. Good luck, lucky ladybug.




It's actually not weird this beetle should be in such good condition. The recommended storage temperature and condition for commercially shipped ladybirds is 35-45 degrees F, preferably in an older, non-frost free refrigerator. The safe-food thermometer on the butter shelf in my fridge reads "43 degrees, Too Warm". And it is definitely an older, more experienced unit. Since it was quite warm in the house when I took the lettuce out (high 70s) it obviously didn't take long for the beetle to warm up enough to get moving.

the Birth of the Blues . . . for Tomato Lovers

So yesterday afternoon I was walking by the tomato plant; the one with the treehoppers and their eggs on it. And I noticed the eggs had hatched. There were several to many tiny black treehopper nymphs stationed slightly apart from the parents, their sucking mouthparts inserted into the tomato stem, tapped into the nutrient stream in the tomato's phloem.

This afternoon, I counted 17 nymphs per each adult female. They will stay close through their development stages; these groups are called aggregations. When I nudged one of the adults away from the egg-laying site, she just sidled back over the eggs, so maybe there are still more to hatch.

I picked the first little tomato from this plant today. It was tasty.

Caterpillar Crypticism

Corn earworms (Helicoverpa zea) are all over the geraniums right now. So, in an attempt to make themselves less noticeable among all the droppings and chew holes, they assume poses that mimic the geranium plant parts. Some try to look like stems, others blend in with the undersides of leaves; this one is doing its impression of a flower bud.

A major predator of these caterpillar is the golden polistes wasp. There are a lot of them flying now; but they don't seem to have discovered this patch of caterpillar infested geraniums yet. Or maybe the wasps are just completely fooled by their prey's amazing cryptic abilities.

Lynx Spider Midsummer Update

This year's crop of green lynx spiders (peucetia viridans) is growing up. This one, like many others hunting throughout the garden, shows the distinctive chevron striping on the abdomen, and is about 3/8" in body length.

Death of a Sawfly

The incredibly sticky stalks of salvia discolor can be doom for the unwary insect. This sawfly (species unknown) struggled to get free but in the end was enveloped in the flow of goo that is probably useful to prevent aphid infestation of the salvia inflorescences.

T is for Treehopper

This keelbacked treehopper, Antianthe expansa, laid eggs in the stem of one of my tomato plants about a week ago. Here she is guarding them, or possibly whispering sweet nothings to them. A recent National Geographic story reveals that tropical treehoppers communicate audibly amongst the members of their apparently well-organized colonies. I loved the regret one of the researchers expressed for those times he was lacking his audio equipment: "I'm missing 98% of everything," he lamented.

You will recall that these treehoppers overwintered on the nearby cestrum shrub. Did one of them smell the tomato transpiring in the warming summer and say, hey, let's go make a family on that nice tasty Roma over there?

Little House + Flies

Here's an annoying swarm of little house flies, fannia canicularis, circling aimlessly in the shady place between my little house and the little house across the street. These summer swarmers are mostly males they say. The females rest nearby on flowers or shrubbery.

A Bit of Summer Rain

Some called it heavy June gloom or dismissed it as mist. But I kinda liked the sweet little rain we had yesterday. It accumulated on the sheet webs in globules, pointing out just how many spiders are lurking in the shrubbery and how much weight their webs can hold.



This picture wing fly (Tephritidae) was not hanging out on the usual tagetes buds; but was looking for love in one of the wrong places: the schefflera that just happens to be hopping with young, hungry mantids. For the moment he seems safe enough among the raindrops.




Here's a freshly washed prunus leaf and its lacewing egg punctuation mark.

Note To Self:

Never leave mantis egg mass in open container on kitchen table.


I am still picking tiny mantids off the lights, the mini-blinds, the walls, the keyboard, etc. Can't really reach the ones on the ceiling.





















I managed to get most of them (100 or so) out in the garden where they belong. It's gotten dark; they are out there all alone right now in the dark hot night, not even a day old, maybe eating things smaller than themselves; maybe being eaten by larger things.

The guy who sold the ootheca to me said these are Chinese mantids. Maybe this is them. More to come as they grow up.

2 pounds of caterpillar in a 1 pound coffee can

I the tiny horn on the rear end of this small sphinx moth larva caught my eye as I walked by one recent morning. The caterpillar was not moving, even when touched.














The next day it appeared to be starting to molt.














The following day it had emerged as this much larger more colorful version of itself. How do they fit that much caterpillar into such a (formerly) small package?


I found a reference (enchantedlearning.com) that says the newly molted caterpillar swallows a lot of air, thus puffing up its new, soft exoskeleton to a larger size while it is hardening. This, they explain, gives the caterpillar room to grow into its new exoskeleton, until it too becomes too small and the process repeats. That seemed a bit simplistic when I read it, but this article bears out the puffing up process, at least in part. It says enlargement of the body via intake of air helps the old exoskeleton to split and shed while chemical processes of molting cause the new exosketon to expand. Truly amazing feat of chemical and structural engineering. It would be an interesting experiment to record the mass of the caterpillar pre- and post-molting . . . the post-molt should be lighter contrary to appearances. That is if it hadn't eaten it's molted cuticle yet!