[ Lost in the Landscape ]

sphinx moths

Along with the flow­ers, spring brings its share of insects. I could do with­out the ants that are now begin­ning to explore the inte­rior of the house, but the sphinx moths that started to appear in huge num­bers last week are about as cool as any bug out there.

This is the white-lined sphinx moth, Hyles lin­eata. Although its main range is the Amer­i­can West and north­ern Mex­ico, the species can be found all over the US. (Check out the writeup at the ter­rific But­teryflies and Moths of North Amer­ica site for more information.)

There are dozens of other sphinx moths, includ­ing the adults of the noto­ri­ous tomato and tobacco horn­worms, famil­iar to almost any­one who’s tried to grow a tomato plant. The cater­pil­lars of the white-lined sphin­xes, how­ever, don’t seem to have the rep­u­ta­tion for going on the same sort of sus­tained ram­pages against our veg­etable gardens.

The way these large, mus­cu­lar insects maneu­ver and hover over flow­ers as they feed reminds you of hum­ming­birds, and in fact they’re also called “hum­ming­bird moths.” As with hum­ming­birds, they enjoy nectar-rich flow­ers, such as this Hot Lips sage. You can see these moths feed­ing dur­ing the day­light, but the pop­u­la­tions really come out after the sun sets, form­ing qui­etly buzzing clouds at dusk or before the sun rises.

In no way do I con­sider myself an insect pho­tog­ra­pher. I quickly found out how frus­trat­ing it can be to pho­to­graph fast-moving moths with a cam­era that refuses to focus in the dark. These are the only two pho­tos I kept out of a cou­ple dozen tries.

This sec­ond image is no stun­ner, but you can begin to make out the amaz­ing long tongue that the moth uses to lap up the tasty nectar.

If you’re into insect pho­tos done as well as any­one out there can do them, you should take a look at the work of Bob Parks. He was work­ing at San Diego’s Museum of Nat­ural His­tory when I first met him ten or so years ago. I don’t know of any­one as pas­sion­ate and devoted to bugs and pho­tos of bugs. That pas­sion shows in his tech­ni­cally out­stand­ing and patiently ren­dered pic­tures. There’s a nice bio­graph­i­cal writeup of him at the SDNHM site.

April 22 2009 | Categories: plant profiles • rambles | Tags: Bob Parks • desirable insects • Hyles lineata • insects • sphinx moths | 10 Comments »

snowflakes and insects

Snowflakes? What does this San Diego guy know about snowflakes?

Maybe a cou­ple things–at least if we’re talk­ing about the cut paper kind.

I’m sure it was an ele­men­tary school project at some point, fold­ing sheets of paper, then cut­ting through the dif­fer­ent lay­ers with scis­sors, and then finally unfold­ing the paper to reveal an intri­cate paper-lace snowflake. I thought it was magic the way one nick with the scis­sors, cut­ting through mul­ti­ple lay­ers of paper at once, mul­ti­plied into many iden­ti­cal lit­tle removals all over the snowflake. And I still kinda think the process is magic.

I was reminded of those paper snowflakes when I saw this gor­geous photo Jenny sent me of a canna leaf that had been munched by some gar­den beastie. It looked like the leaf was still devel­op­ing when the bug bur­rowed a hole from the out­side towards the stem. When the leaf unfurled, the insect dam­age unfurled along with it, cre­at­ing these uni­form, rhyth­mic lit­tle cuts in the leaf.

Pretty artis­tic insect, no?

November 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: cannas • insects • Jenny • snowflakes | 4 Comments »

carnivorous plants in action

I’ve had a cou­ple recent posts on insects. While I’ll on the sub­ject it looks like there’s a whole sub­cul­ture of insect snuff films on YouTube. Notice that the “no ani­mals were harmed dur­ing the film­ing of this video” assur­ance appears nowhere on any of these videos… Here are a cou­ple show­ing droseras in action:

You can read up on how the insides of the sar­race­nia pitcher plants are lined with hairs that point down­wards, into “the drink,” mak­ing escape almost impos­si­ble for small insects. Or you can see it for your­self:

And what col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plant videos would be com­plete with­out one show­ing a venus fly­trap doing its thing:

March 31 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Dionaea muscipula • drosera • insects • pitcher plants • sarracenia • sundews • venus flytraps • videos | 1 Comment »

ant farm[ers]

So…you think humans are the only crit­ters who farm and gar­den? Think again. From a Sci­ence in Brief col­umn in yesterday’s LA Times comes this about ants:

Study finds ants long­time farmers

Ants took up farm­ing some 50 mil­lion years ago, accord­ing to researchers who traced the ances­try of farmer ants.

An analy­sis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an orig­i­nal ances­tor — a sort of Adam ant, at least for the types that raise their own food, accord­ing to a paper pub­lished in the online edi­tion of Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sciences.

In the last 25 mil­lion years, ants have devel­oped dif­fer­ent types of farm­ing, includ­ing the well-known leaf-cutter ants. Leaf-cutter ants don’t eat the leaves they col­lect. Instead, they grow fun­gus on the leaves and eat the fungus.

Only four types of ani­mals are known to farm for food — ants, ter­mites, bark bee­tles and, of course, humans. All four cul­ti­vate fungi.

If you have online access to that jour­nal, you can read the full arti­cle at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0711024105v1. There’s no research on whether ants pre­fer to cre­ate for­mal gar­dens or nat­u­ral­is­tic ones, though I’d guess aes­thet­ics aren’t hight on their list of concerns.

To that, I’d also add that some ants are also live­stock farm­ers in that they cul­ti­vate other ani­mals. Aphids and ants have a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship, with ants tend­ing aphids to share in the sweet nec­tar they exude. And all last year we had a major ant trail lead­ing from the ground into the grape­fruit tree, where ants and scale insects had set up shop on the skins of the young grape­fruits. It didn’t seem to affect the grape­fruits too much, though we always had to remem­ber to scrub them clean before serv­ing them up. Here’s a link to a related story on ants and scale insects in trop­i­cal cof­fee plan­ta­tions.

March 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes | Tags: ants • evolutionary biology • gardeners • insects | 1 Comment »

in defense of bees

A lot of nurs­eries around here tout plants as being hum­ming­bird– or butterfly-friendly. Those lit­tle crit­ters are awfully dec­o­ra­tive and fun to have around, but the major work of pol­li­na­tion belongs to the bees. For instance the Cal­i­for­nia almond crop sup­plies some­thing like 80% of the world’s almond exports, and the crop wouldn’t be pos­si­ble with­out all the hives that are trucked into the Cen­tral Val­ley about this time of year. Accord­ing to the Los Ange­les Times, farm­ers now are spend­ing more on rent­ing hives than they are on water­ing their trees.

A recent arti­cle, The Headbonker’s Ball, in Orion Mag­a­zine has a great arti­cle on the Urban Bee Project, a project headed by UC Berke­ley prof Gor­don Frankie that’s designed to edu­cate folks about the value of hav­ing bee-friendly gar­dens. Their Urban Bee Gar­dens site crawls with all sorts of infor­ma­tion on the value of bees and what you can do to wel­come them into your gar­den. Some of it’s under con­struc­tion still, but there’s already lots of use­ful infor­ma­tion there.

One of the cores of the site is a list of plants that are friendly to bees, and the list is bro­ken into spring plants and sum­mer plants so that you can plan a pro­gres­sion of food sources for the lit­tle guys. The list is a lit­tle Berkeley-centric, though many of the plants on the list would grow plenty of other places. At first you might worry that you’d have to plant odd­ball ugly plants just to the do the right thing, but incor­po­rat­ing bee-friendly plants requires no such thing. A lot of the selec­tions are really com­mon gar­den plants, and you prob­a­bly have a num­ber of them in your gar­den already: laven­ders, pen­ste­mons, salvias, cos­mos, sun­flow­ers, and the like.

With all the plants out there the list couldn’t pos­si­bly list every bee-friendly plant out there.Various thymes, for instance, have a rep­u­ta­tion for being major bee party pads. The Berke­ley project came to its con­clu­sions by send­ing peo­ple out into gar­dens and hav­ing them count how many bees vis­ited a plant in a cer­tain time period. (Not a bad way to con­duct research, eh?) You could do the same. If there’s some­thing not on the list but you notice that the bees like it, why not plant a lit­tle more of it? Give the hum­ming­birds and but­ter­flies some company.

March 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: bees • insects • pollination | 1 Comment »