Frogs, Bugs, and Arachnids, Oh My!

I've been busy settling into a new full-time job, and certainly having a full-time job has been a fine thing; however, I've somehow fallen behind in everything else I do. And here it is ruddy October already. Oh well. Here are a few of the animals I met on safari in the garden this past summer.

This guy showed up in a drain at the top of our driveway, hopping up and down and bashing his head against the grate.  I caught him and hung on to him long enough to get a photo. Above, he's briefly escaped and sitting, astonished, before I caught him again.

I am pretty sure he is a green frog. OK, don't try and get funny with me. I know he is a frog. I know he is green. I mean a green frog, as in Rana clamitans. Green frogs are native to the eastern United States but now found in parts of Washington State. Such as our drainage ditch. I, too, am native to the eastern United States, so we had quite a friendly chat before I set him free.  We often hear him croaking loudly on damp evenings.

Gracious. Would you just look at what's going on in the daisy patch.  I'm afraid all I can tell you is that these are beetles. My field guides and the Internet are letting me down big time, hence no more specific identification. Whatever they are, they are making more of themselves. They also trundle about the daisies covered with pollen so they're helping to make more daisies, too.

Sometimes the whatever-they-are beetles get all shy and stuff, and hide, which is rather ridiculous seeing as to what they're perfectly happy getting up to right in the town square.

This fat little fellow is a well-fed aphid.

One of our many garden snails enjoying an ooze along a rock on a very wet day.

I can't see the pattern on the head of this lady beetle, so I can't tell you if it is a spotless lady beetle, even though it is obviously spotless, because it could be a spotless spotted beetle.

This may be a six-spotted orb weaver. Or it may not. I often see crab spiders but this doesn' t look like any of those even though this capture of a bee is typical of crab spiders. (Alas, crab spider photos from this summer are probably  miscatalogued and I can't find them....)  But there appears to be webbing over the unfortunate bee's abdomen, which lends credence to the orb-weaver bit. The daisy petals were curled around the grisly scene. 

I was wondering who was chewing the petals neatly off the daisies and then gobbling their interiors. I found this guy scooping up the yellow area as if he were face first in a big bowl of lemon custard.

A European garden spider checks out the center of a cosmos.

A hoverfly sips nectar from one of the dahlias. Completely harmless but looks like a bee so that predators and nosy people hesitate to come close.

This cheerful guy was perched on my Subaru window one summer morning. All I can tell you is that it's a katydid. I'm afraid my so-called "Insects of the Pacific Northwest" field guide has only about 5 orthopterans in it, and green katydids aren't among them. He was very large and had splendid antennae.

A leafhopper tiptoes along a 'Munstead White' columbine. 

The Garden, Ready for Its Closeup (and Only a Closeup...)

Sometimes when I look at my garden...er, no, make that every time I look at my garden--I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of utter futility. For all the hours spent weeding and planting and lugging soil, and all the achy muscles afterward, after 15 years it still often looks like I'm only getting started.

To keep from being completely disheartened, I put on blinkers and look for the patches that are achieving that close-packed, cottage-garden atmosphere that I'm laboriously trying to achieve. This was a particularly useful exercise this weekend since everybody has been flattened by a particularly vicious cold and no work could be done at all.

This sedum has filled in a rocky niche in the front garden.

The sunrose is twining among assorted variegated perennials.

For a limited time only, the flowers are cooperating  in putting on a pastel fireworks display.

Calendula and visitor

Two-spotted ladybug (no, really, that's its name!) on caterpillar-nibbled leaf

These birds, sent to me by my friend W. after my father's death, appear both smug and snug about their little house with its sedum-planted front yard.

Of course, they have their own bookshop. Otherwise how else would they be able to get "Peeple" magazine? They don't have a Twitter account, so they can only tweet, not Tweet.

Pollination Celebration

Critters are pollinating the heck out of the garden. Every flower seems to harbor a bee, beetle, or fly, and every time Luna sticks her nose into a plant, something flies out in a panic and she jumps back in surprise.

I'm not a pollinator, of course, but pollination has been much on my mind of late because I've been working simultaneously on two writing projects involving insects. So I am primed to spout statistics such as "about 75 percent of flowering plants rely on animal pollinators in order to set seed."  (I am also popping Benadryl tablets with frequency as pollen from wind-pollinated grasses ends up in my nasal passages instead of on grass flowers, much to my and the flowers' dismay.)

Here is a concatenation of snaps of pollination on our plantation being done with determination by a conglomeration of invertebration:

African daisy, with pollen splatter after rainfall

 

A species of bumble bee lolling around drunkenly inside a rhododendron blossom.



This beetle is, I think, a 20-spotted Lady Beetle, Psyllobora vigintimaculata. I haven't had any luck
deciphering the first part of this scientific name, but the latter translates, somewhat disappointingly, to merely "twenty spotted." Beetles are not as efficient as bees at pollinating but some flowers lure them specifically. This one is on a sedum flower and is well camouflaged incidentally by all those anthers. These lady beetles feed on fungi, not aphids. Its mandibles are lined with comblike small "teeth" for raking fungus and fungal spores from plant surfaces. This species is found throughout the United States and into Canada and Mexico.

The all-time pollination champion, the honey bee.
(At least I'm pretty sure it's a honey bee.)

Nectar guides, lines that point the way to where
nectar is stored in flowers such as the pansy

Lots of Spots and Aphid Tater-Tots

Suddenly, everything is bright lime-green in the garden. What a little sunshine will do for a place! It's so shockingly new-growth-green now that it makes your retinas vibrate. Scattered on all this greenery like sprinkles on a cake are bright red lady beetles galore. The whole place is looking like a kindergartner's drawing of a garden rendered with a brand-new box of 64 Crayola crayons.

I was easily distracted from more tedious gardening chores by these little beetles, which of course led to more discoveries of the entomological sort because the ladybugs were generally near clusters of green aphids.

Which I think are absolutely adorable creatures despite the fact that they can ruin your plants by sucking the life out of them or transmitting disease. They're just so round and fat and cuddly looking.

And lime green.

Soppy, I know. But I'm not alone. Some animator on the creative team of A Bug's Life thought much the same thing when he or she created a pet for the queen ant:

Not that I bear the aphid-eaters any ill will. I'm glad they are there to take care of keeping the aphids in check. And I loathe the dark aphids that cluster on the vegetable plants and nasturtiums . These little green guys are fewer in number and are like little families out for a picnic. The smaller aphids are hooligans who bring everyone they know and leave litter on the picnic grounds.

OK, I'm trying to justify why I am fond of the tubby lime-green aphids, but by now you must think I'm mad, so let's just move on to lady beetles, shall we?

Here is one that I spied on a vibernum in the back yard. It is probably a multicolored Asian lady beetle, a species introduced decades ago to control fruit-tree pests and is now widespread. It comes in so many patterns that it's the beetle equivalent of "tastes like chicken." This one had an interesting pattern on its back, what with that sploodgy marking in the middle:

This spotless one was tucked headfirst in a campanula out front and wouldn't show its face, so it was impossible to see the pattern on its pronotum, the shieldlike area behind its head. But it could be a multicolored Asian lady beetle, too:

And there was this one perched on a feverfew, who's probably also a (fill in the blank):

While ladybug-spotting, I came across this delicate little insect, which I thought at first was a species of lacewing. Lacewing larvae are as voracious when it comes to aphids as lady beetle larvae are. Some kinds also imbibe the honeydew excreted by aphids. And the females considerately lay their eggs near herds of aphids so their offspring will have plenty to eat upon hatching. But now I'm not so sure. It looked sort of aphid-like to me, not as slender as a lacewing. Sure enough, a bit of sleuthing turned up the information that aphids sometimes develop wings when conditions on a plant get overcrowded so they can pull up stakes and move elsewhere. So now I'm leaning toward this being a flying aphid.

OK, so after blathering on about aphids, what do I find forming a clump of deadness on the stalk of fresh broccoli I took out of the refrigerator this evening for dinner? I'll give you one guess. Let's just say it lends credence to the oft-quoted statistic that by law it is perfectly OK for there to be up to 60 aphids in 100 grams of frozen broccoli. Meaning you can sell it that way, not that very small police officers storm through the garden and do head counts of aphids on broccoli plants and close the vegetable garden down like a fire marshall would shut down an overcrowded theater. I actually don't care if I ingest an aphid or two. I just don't want to know about it.

Dragons in the Garden, Part II

This dragon-like little creature lurks in a shrub outside my front door. I've seen others of its kind skulking in the garden, and have witnessed adult humans yelping and shrinking away from them. But these insects are not only completely harmless to people and plants, they are also a gardener's best friends.

Because these menacing mini predators are none other than the babies of that scourge of aphids, a ladybug.

In this insect family, it's the adults who are endowed with all the features that make people say, "Awww." They're pudgy. They're round. They come in Gummi-bear colors. They often have polka-dots. They trustingly walk on your arm. Sometimes they forget to completely fold their wings underneath their wing cases and potter around looking like church ladies with too-long petticoats or little boys who've forgotten to tuck in their shirt tails. What could be more charming?

(OK, they also ooze foul-smelling yellow fluid from their joints if alarmed. Nobody's perfect.)

The larvae, however, won't be winning any Beautiful Baby contests anytime soon. Upon hatching, they look a bit like deer ticks (minus one pair of legs). They grow into elongated little black alligators, eventually acquiring bright orange, red, or yellow markings. (Thus far I haven't been able to determine whether lady-beetle larvae are as foul-tasting to birds as the adults are and if these colors serve as fair warning to them.)

Mama lady beetle considerately lays her eggs on a leaf in a veritable smorgasbord of aphids, so when the larvae hatch, they blunder into a feast. I imagine that'd be like waking up in the morning surrounded by chocolate croissants. The babies tuck into the meal about an hour or two after hatching, stabbing aphids right and left with hollow mandibles and slurping them up like milkshakes.

Then they probably enjoy a nice aphid-dinner mint.

A typical larva with a good appetite may gobble up 30 to 40 aphids a day over the course of four or five weeks. (According to many sources, "the convergent lady beetle may eat its weight in aphids every day as a larva." This sounds like an awesome statistic until you realize that you don't know how much a lady-beetle larva or an aphid weighs. Still, that's a lot of chocolate croissants.)

But wait, kids! It's WORD PROBLEM TIME! According to a 2007 scientific paper, "Molecular sabotage of plant defense by aphid saliva," a typical adult aphid weighs approximately 1 milligram. If an aphid weighs 1 mg, and a lady-beetle larva stuffs itself with 40 aphids, how much does the larva weigh?

Adult lady beetles consume a lot of aphids too, but they're not as voracious as the growing youngsters, plus they can fly away if your garden runs out of aphids and other small chitin-clad snacks. The larvae can't.

I once watched a lady-beetle larva approach a cluster of fat aphids on a stem--so delighted with its find that it was nearly rubbing its hands (if it'd had hands) together with anticipation like a cartoon fox in a henhouse--only to be met by a hostile ant that was guarding the aphids; ants tend to little herds of aphids so as to enjoy the honeydew they produce. The ant was ferocious; the larva seemed surprised; the aphids were oblivious. The ant won the gladiatoral event, but sort of by default--the larva did what looked like a pratfall, falling off the stem in astonishment, actually a very effective "I'm outta here" reflexive response. This time the ant was the one to dust off its virtual hands, satisfied with a job well done.

Dragons in the Garden, Part I

Every flower in my garden sparks pleasure and satisfaction in me when I see it, but the ones that plant themselves and spring up seemingly out of nowhere to shout "Surprise!" are my favorites. In this category of "Best Impromptu Performance," the award would definitely go to the snapdragons.

I've purchased and planted snapdragons in the past, but in recent years there's been no need to do so, because their descendants send up spears of color every spring not only in the pots that held their parents, but also in the most unlikely corners and dry spots in the yard.

And what colors! Snapdragons blaze in sunset colors of orange, yellow, pink, red, purple, and red-purple. And lavender, melon, ruby, and crimson. You can also cleanse your palate (or "palette," in this case) with snapdragons as white as cumulous clouds. Any of these may also boast fringes and highlights in other colors.

My current crop of snapdragons tend toward the cooler colors--there's a lavender, a pink-purple, and a nearly-black purple snapdragon growing in the front yard as well as one crisp white plant. Recently a yellow and plum snapdragon snaked out from the rockery wall over the driveway.

Snapdragons range in size from petite six-inchers to tall three-footers; mine seem to top out at about two and a half feet. The shortest one grows in a pot outside the door. It's about 18 inches tall but makes up for its short stature in bulk: this plant is a five-headed dragon, with each flower-bedecked raceme curving in a different direction.

Some of these 'dragons may actually be springing back to life in the manner of a phoenix, because snapdragons (which are native to the Mediterranean) are actually perennials, though they are generally regarded and sold as annuals in the United States. My growing zone in the Northwest, however, is often likened to a Mediterranean climate (though without the spanikopita, ouzo, and endless-summer "Shirley Valentine"/"Mama Mia" romantic atmosphere).

Did I know they were perennials because I'm, like, a totally know-it-all gardener in touch with Earth and all her children? No, I did not. I had to look it up. In the process, I learned the following:

The snapdragon's scientific name is Antirrhinum majus. "Antirrhinum" is derived from Greek words that come together to mean "like a nose." Since "majus" means "larger," this poor flower's name basically means "big schnozzola." Fortunately, its common name "snapdragon" comes to the rescue here. Gently squeeze the sides of a snapdragon flower to see it snap its jaws, and you won't be in any doubt as to how it acquired this evocative name.

And not just any insect can come along and dip into a snapdragon flower's largesse of nectar. Oh, no. Only one of the right size, with enough heft to make the flower's lower lip drop, will be able to burrow into the blossom. This lucky insect is typically a bumblebee (honeybees are apparently too light to tip the lip).

The flower welcomes this pollinator by providing a landing platform complete with "conical epidermal cells" (what you and I would call by the more technical name of "tiny little bumps"). This provides traction for the bee, a no-slip grip mat to help it get a foothold. Studies show that bumblebees shun mutant flowers that lack these cells.

But other studies show that some naughty bees don't live up to their end of the bargain, either, and drill into the flower from the side so as to nab the nectar without doing the work of burrowing and thereby getting daubed with pollen. Very bad bee-havior.

In other snapdragon news: In Europe, the flower was believed to repel witchcraft and other trickery. The Victorians, those wacky purveyors of fun who created a whole language of flowers, labeled snapdragons as symbols of presumptuousness (Who would one send a bouquet of snapdragons to, in that case? To a presumptous suitor who sent you a dozen red roses?). And like many plants, it's found its way into dishes, though please take heed that I am not suggesting you do so; I've merely read that its seeds were used to make cooking oil and its petals and leaves to make tea. (One book I found online will even tell you how to whip up a dish of Pan-Fried Pork with Snapdragons.)

A snapdragon that manages to avoid being brewed, stir-fried, or pressed will no doubt be glad to hear it has not only dodged being known as the Giant Nose Plant but also that "snapdragon" is unlikely to yield to such other common names for the plant as toad's mouth, dog's mouth, lion's mouth, rabbit's lips, and lion's lips.

Oh, and incidentally, even though snapdragons may seed themselves freely in the garden and aren't native to the Pacific Northwest, they're not considered invasive--unlike the dalmatian toadflax that looks a lot like a yellow snapdragon and sometimes passes itself off with the alias "wild snapdragon," but is really a very distant cousin in a completely different genus that the snapdragons would prefer you not mention at all.

The Lady of No Spot

I found this little ladybug on the top of the yard-waste bin when I went to put the trash out over the weekend. Its elytra were so vividly red, it looked like a droplet of blood. The lack of spots made it look quite exotic, though I think it belongs to a species fairly well represented in the Pacific Northwest. I'm not a coleopterist (nor do I play one on TV), but it appears to be a Western Blood-Red Ladybeetle (Cycloneda polita polita).

This possible identity came up in an Internet search. My field guides weren't much help in identifying the little beetle. Granted, there are about 350,000 known species of beetles ("on Earth," many sources like to add, suggesting the possibility that beetles abound on other planets--but with beetles being so abundant, who knows?). And there are more than 450 species of ladybugs just in North America. So that would be one heck of a fat field guide if it listed all the possibilities. Instead of boosting toddlers up to table height with a phone book, parents could use a Ladybug Field Guide to do the job.

The field guide did suggest one spotless species, the ironically named Spotless Nine-Spotted Ladybug. But the shield behind the head did not look the same, much to my relief.

Right after I snapped this picture of the ladybug, a spittlebug toddled past her. A spittlebug is a nymph; when it grows up, it's known by the equally wonderful name of froghopper. Spittlebugs are not generally regarded fondly. They're condemned as pests, and a quick Google search turns up many sites suggesting how to eradicate "infestations" of them. They're particularly loathed by growers of alfalfa and other crops.

But I still harbor a fondness for these little creatures. I remember, as a kid, learning that the weird blobs of foam I saw on plant stems were made by tiny bugs hidden inside them, merrily spewing bubble fluid out of their hind ends and whipping it into a foam with their legs and bodies. The first time I poked a grass blade into one of the little foam homes, I encountered a tubby bug with big brown eyes that looked like a cartoon character. It's hard to shake first impressions. My infestation of spittlebugs quietly resides on the stems of the Canterbury bells in my garden, and both seem to be thriving.

After I loaded the images onto my computer, I noticed what looks like an aphid moseying about in the background. As aphids are the ladybug's main prey (a ladybug may chow down on 5,000 aphids in a lifetime), you'd think it would steer clear, but it was quite unconcerned. Perhaps, like a gazelle on the savannah stepping lightly past a recumbent lion, it knew the ladybug was sated. More likely, it's just completely oblivious. (OK, you probably can't be partly oblivious.)