Snaily Greetings

Just passing along some cute snail-themed holiday images I found. I especially like the festive shell cozy. You'll see what I mean when you click here.

Update 12-30-08:
Couldn't resist adding one more holiday link to Snail's Tales.

Happy New Year

ETIII, L2

On my bedroom windowsill this morning, having some sun and a little spritz.

cold weather friend

Now that the rainy season is here, the salamanders are out, and by "out", I mean under stuff. I found 3 of them under a trashcan the other day.

Rippled slug

I came across this slug the other morning in my back yard. At about 2 1/2 inches, it's about as big as slugs get around here.



Its skin looked especially rippled. Like it was sporting a full-body fingerprint.



Or maybe some slimy, shiny woodgrain.

The stripe-eyed fly

This bee-sized hoverfly has a strikingly striped set of eyes. But I was amused by its busy tongue, dab-dab-dabbing all over the flowers.

You can sort of see the tongue in this video clip.

Incidental zoo critter

The other day, Jerry and I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I left the animal photography to him, with his superior camera and big lens. I still ended up finding a cute little bug to take a picture of.

This natty little treehopper was on a plant in the "Botanical" section of the park.

Monarch caterpillar peak season

Well, this is nothing I haven't seen (or photographed) a bunch of times, but the monarch caterpillars at the arboretum are approaching critical mass, at least on certain patches of milkweed.

There are some clumps of tall ornamental grass that the caterpillars like to hang from in order to make their chrysalis.


A jewel of nature.

My favorite part of the caterpillar

The prolegs!

Hairy little buggers

I found a family of hairy stinkbugs at the arboretum today. I've never seen this kind before. I submitted it to Bugguide to confirm if it's Prionosoma podopioides.

Lefty goes home

The undersized mantid I named "Lefty" shed his(her?) skin last week, and a couple of disfigurements became evident.

You can see in the photo above that his left front leg is slightly malformed. Also, you can see a weird little "finger" of his left mandible is also jutting out in an unnatural manner.


Without a full complement of mouthparts, and a sub-par set of graspers, eating has been a little difficult for him. This may have something to do with his being so small this late in the year, although I don't know if it's the cause or the effect of his problems.

In any case, I decided to return Lefty to the arboretum this morning, to live his life in the perilous freedom that Nature intended. Next weekend, I will be going on a little trip, and I don't want to have to worry about him languishing in a bug container while I'm away.

ETIII is another story. Her leafy eucalyptus branches can stay fresh for several days in the little vase in her container, and my boys can manage to give her a quick spritz of water once a day.

Broke Man Tries Paying Bill With a Picture of a Spider

Once, when I was a kid, I tried to buy something from the neighborhood ice cream truck using only play money. I had a wad of fake bills, totalling possibly thousands of fake dollars. Surely it would be worth at least a dime's worth of goodies. (Uh, no, said the ice cream man.)

Anyway, here's another even more amusing story about someone trying to use his humble artwork to help pay the bills.

Broke Man Tries Paying Bill With a Picture of a Spider

Extatosoma tiaratum, third generation (ETIII)

I hadn't planned on raising any more Extatosoma tiaratum ("ET") stick insects, after raising 2 consecutive generations. When my ETII matured early this year, I was careful to keep the eggs contained and later destroyed them. These insects would be considered invasive here. There was a place in my yard, though, where I allowed ETII to hang out. A prickly bramble vine (ET food) had started growing spontaneously, coincidentally, right around the time I first started playing with these bugs a few years ago. It hangs down from the top of a retaining wall, over a concrete walkway. It was nice to be able to let her spend time outside safely, and it was easy for me to find her eggs on the sidewalk, where I simply stepped on them.

Apparently, one egg fell through the cracks. Literally.

Yesterday, I found this ET hatchling on the side of a trash can, just inches away from the very vine where her momma used to hang out. I hope there aren't any more out there, but there may well be...

ETIII

Stink bugs Shield bugs

Stink is such a yucky word. It conjures up notions of rotten eggs, poop, and a whole host of other undesirable odors. And I've decided that these stink bugs are just too nice looking to be associated with the concept of stink. Not to mention that they really aren't all that smelly, at least not to me.

Luckily, I have found that these bugs also have another common name: shield bugs, referring to the characteristic shield shape of the adults. So from now on, I will refer to them as shield bugs.

Cloudless sulfur

Well, for some reason I haven't yet figured out, Blogger is posting my pictures in the opposite order that I uploaded them. So instead of starting with caterpillars and scrolling down to the lovely adult specimen, you'll have to go backwards in time. Oh well....

In a previous post, I saw a female Cloudless Sulfur butterfly laying eggs on a little cassia tree. Now that same plant is just loaded with eggs and small caterpillars.

Beautiful female


I've never seen a sulfur chrysalis this color before.



Green larva on leaves

Yellow larva on flowers (buds in this case)

Another lizard friend

In the chill of morning, (if you can call lower 60's chilly), this tiny lizard had a little basking time on my thumb.

An unlucky lizard's lucky day

I was at the arboretum for a tour this morning, and when it was over, I was doing a little bug-hunting. I heard something scuttling in the leaf litter under a tree. It figured it was a lizard, because we have lots of lizards, and the weather is warm enough that they are still active. But as I sought out the source of the scuttling sound, what I saw didn’t move quite like a lizard. A mouse perhaps? I thought I saw a pair of beady eyes before it submerged itself in the leaves. I waited a bit. The leaves began to twitch as the creature surfaced again. It was a lizard, with its entire head stuck fast inside what looked to be a palm kernel shell!

I picked up the lizard, and pulled gently on the shell. There was no way I could pull it off without wringing the reptile’s neck. There was no telling how long it may have been stuck, but I didn’t want to leave it to suffer for days or even weeks before it slowly died of thirst or starvation. So I brought it to the attention of a couple of the garden staff working nearby, Greg and Jonathan. They were appropriately impressed by the lizard’s predicament, and immediately began brainstorming about the best way to remove the shell, which was smaller than a golf ball, but extremely hard, like a coconut shell.

I tagged along (I found the lizard, after all) and we all went to the service yard, where an array of tools were available to try to crack the shell without cracking the poor lizard’s tiny skull! First they put it in a vice, but the roundness of the kernel made it hard to tighten without it shifting around in the clamp. I suggested that maybe we could use a drop or 2 of olive oil and "lube" it free, much as a person might work a too-tight ring off their finger. I don’t know if there was even any olive oil in the arboretum’s little kitchen, and I didn’t want to chance using soap on a lizard, but it didn’t matter, because the guys had already moved on to the next piece of hardware: a hacksaw.

Carefully and slowly, Jonathan sawed on the tough kernel shell with one hand as he held the lizard in his other hand. Every few seconds he would stop and check the progress of the shell. It was slow going. The lizard was squirming a little, but not as much as I was! Finally, the saw just barely broke through, but the shell was still intact. The next step would be to hold a chisel in the cut and tap it with a hammer. They set the lizard down, held its captive head steady and began tapping, tapping….

Suddenly the kernel shell gave way and split apart, and in that same instant the lizard dashed across the yard at an incredible speed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lizard move that fast! We all thought we might have seen something on its head. Whether it had been injured, or whether it was just a bit of shell still stuck on its head, we will never know because that little guy just kept running, but the fact that it could run so dang fast was encouraging.

Tools, empty shell halves and a long-gone lizard.

Photos by Greg Pongetti

The end, for one mantid

This male S. californica had been hanging around my front porch light for the better part of a week. I'm not sure, but I'd like to hope he was at least feeding on the various moths and bugs that come each night. But I think he had never found a mate, got distracted by the light, and ultimately didn't have the "oomph" to go anywhere else. This morning I checked and did not see him, only to discover soon after that he had somehow managed to get in the house. I picked him up. He was clearly weak. I carried him outside, put him on a plant and sprayed him liberally with water.

I just checked on him. He is dying. He will probably not survive the night.

Lefty, the tiny mantid I collected last week, is still doing well. I'll post some pictures after he sheds his skin, which should be soon.

A Bee Blog

Today's Blogger Blogs of Note has listed Linda's Bees. Linda has been blogging her experience with beekeeping since she got her first hive in 2006. Lots of detailed posts and pictures. Lots of links, too. I haven't had time to do more than skim through it, but it looks to cover everything you ever wanted to know about beekeeping but were afraid to ask!

Mantis on bark

I found this pretty S. californica girl on the trunk of a pine tree. I just loved her brown coloring.






Looking at you looking at me.

Mellow Yellow grasshopper fellow

This grasshopper nymph made my day today. He's so yellow! Definitely the yellowest grasshopper I've ever seen. Not that his color suprises me. These gray bird nymphs can be just about any color.





Although he was hanging out on this Society Garlic bloom, there were Milkweed plants and some other things nearby that had yellow on them, but I'm not really sure where he was feeding and where he got that color from.

Lefty

I found an unseasonably small mantid at the arboretum the other day. Pretty much all the other mantids are adults now. Why was this little one so far behind in his development? Was he late to hatch for some reason, or was he unable to find enough food? I decided to bring him home and take care of him. I named him Lefty because he seemed to have been "left behind". So far, he seems OK.

Mulch volcano and mushroom villages

A few weeks ago, arboretum workers pruned the huge Ombu tree. It needs pruning every year, because it's heavy and it grows so fast. The severed limbs were put through a chipper, and the resulting mounds of mulch have been composting vigorously. Yesterday morning I noticed steam rising from the top of the pile, and it looked for all the world like a mini-volcano. Today, I returned with my camera to take pictures.

A brief video of steam rising from the mulch. The little black box is the LCD display for a temperature probe I brought along.

Mulch volcano, ringed by little mushrooms. I'm guessing it was too hot up on top for the mushrooms to grow.

The ambient temperature outside the mulch pile.


The reading with the temperature probe plunged about elbow-deep into the mulch. By the way, this handy little gadget normally gets plunged inside our Thanksgiving turkey, among other edibles. Don't worry, I've already washed it.


Views of the mushroom "village"










...and I need to have a bug in this post, so here is a little fly hanging out in the Mushroom Village.

Small bug

Looked like a teeny-tiny relative of a harlequin bug. Seen on the side of my garage.

Update: Identified as Bagrada hilaris. An African pest species just recently "discovered" in California.

Follow the signs (and arrows)

This morning I was at the arboretum, scouting for bugs for this weekend's Bug Safari, (the last scheduled Bug Safari of the year.) While scanning the passiflora for Gulf Frittilary caterpillars, I came upon a conspicuous trailing line of spider silk.




I followed it a little way...


... and it led me to this beautiful creature.


She was reeling in her silk line. I think she was eating it.



She had an enormous bum! Full of eggs, I'll bet.



I marked the spot on the trail with an arrow of twigs. I do this occasionally so I can try to re-find the bug in question at a later date. Crab spiders usually stay within in a small territory, as long as food is available. I will check on Saturday morning before the Bug Safari and see if she's still there.