Microcosmos 4 - Life and Death in the Quarry Corner

Warm September days suffuse the Quarry Corner with ripeness. Insect species finish their cycles of preparation for next year's generations. The fullness of some individual lives falls prey to the fulfillment of others. A food chain that begins far below our ability to see breaks into visible life and death dramas.

A mortal tableau

I've spent time every day this month at the edge of the quarry lake, crouched in a small circle of observation. At one point a winged ant floats into view on the water surface. It may have fallen from the colony that swarmed out of a fissure in the adjacent ledge to replenish their colony. The lost one's struggles to free itself from the water have drawn predatory interest from a Long-legged Fly (Dolichopodidae). The fly's long legs spread its body weight wide enough to stay supported by the surface tension membrane of the water as it skates toward the foundering ant.

Floating aphid

An aphid finds itself in a similar predicament, blown or fallen onto the lake.

Water Strider devouring the aphid

A spidery-looking Water Strider (Rheumatobates vegatus) jets across the surface to grasp the aphid in its short front legs. Tiny hairs beneath its out-sized middle and rear legs capture air to support it on the water surface.

A web of life and death

The engineering efforts of a funnel-weaving spider are rewarded within the canopy of a plant.

Silk wrapping

The Grass Spider (Agelenopsis pennsylvanica) encases its victim, a Halictid Bee (Lasioglossum), in a tomb of silk.

Tiny spider dragging off a crane fly

When it comes to strength and potency, size is not the ruling factor in the Microcosmos.

The crane fly conqueror

The spider known as the  Bold Jumper (Phidippus audax) with the looks of an adorable stuffed animal perpetuates itself efficiently.

Microcosmos 3 - Proliferation in the Quarry Corner

Gaining a glimpse of Microcosmos is a matter of descending through layers of life. The first step is getting to ground level and looking face to face at organic realms that seem as complex in miniature as our familiar landscapes, minus civilization. It is easy to suppose that if further descent were possible we would see nano-worlds populated by bizarre creatures systematically going about the business of their lives. Somewhere, while scaling down to viruses on their home turf, we might pass beyond the frontier of familiarity.

An ant tending aphids

Kneeling in the Quarry Corner I noticed miniscule green grains on the purplish stem of a wildflower Bidens vulgata (Tall beggar-ticks). I zeroed in with help of the close-up lens. Plump, capricorn-looking creatures were lined up cafeteria style helping themselves to the vital juices of the plant. Black ants stepped carefully among them. Other tiny things wandered through the picture.

An ant ingesting plant secretions

One of the ants lapped secretions at the base of a flower. Despite the various plundering the plant seemed to be thriving, probably aided by replacement fluids from the moist growing location.  I wondered if there might be symbiotic bargains at play as with the pollinating-for-foraging exchange I've observed between ants and peonies.

Aphid stages

The still photographs seemed to show aphids at different developmental stages and the dramatic approach of larger black, winged individuals. Through the BugGuide website I sent these photographs to entomologist Natalie Hernandez who monitors aphid incursions for the USDA in Texas. She responded with some illuminating comments on mutualism in the Microcosm. 

Aphid colonies can have a lot going on all at once. These look like Aphis coreopsidis, Tupelo - Blackjack Aphid. They're often attended by ants in the genus Lasius, and the one you photographed does look like it could be Lasius....The ants farm and herd the aphids like cows, except they milk them for honeydew. Since aphids are phloem feeders they've developed a filtration system in their digestive tract to help them get rid of all the water, sugars, and amino acids they ingest, so that produces honeydew. It's very sticky and sooty mold can grow out of control on it. The ants will consume the honeydew, which helps keep sooty mold in check, and protect the aphids from predators.

Aphids shedding their skin

This picture shows 2 alatoid nymphs (will become adults with wings), an alate (winged) adult, and that specimen with the wrinkled wings over on the right is a teneral (newly molted) alate adult, probably just came out of that exuviae on the midrib of the leaf. The darker alatoid nymph looks pharate, meaning it's about to molt. Right before insects molt their old skin separates from the new skin. So often when I slide mount immature aphids it looks like there is an aphid inside an aphid because it was about to molt. It's pretty cool. 

The white things are exuviae, shed skins. I think the white filaments are hairs of the plant, which can apparently be variable in its hairiness. They're supposed to be a defense mechanism to deter herbivores, but aphids have gotten around that hurdle. 

An aphid predator

The orange thing is in fact an aphid predator, a fly larva in the family Cecidomyiidae.... You'll frequently see the larvae of Syrphidae in colonies as well, and sometimes Chamaemyiidae.

I followed the thread into a Wikipedia article on Aphids. "The small, bright orange, slug-like larvae inject a toxin into aphids' leg joints to paralyze them and then suck out the aphid body contents through a hole bitten in the thorax. Larvae can consume aphids much larger than themselves and may kill many more aphids than they eat when aphid populations are high." It's no wonder these flies are used as biological pest controls, in mutualism with human agriculturists.

Ants swarming

One day in September a large congregation of ants milled around beside a fissure in the granite ledge where they lived. Wikipedia research revealed that winged ants leave colonies to form mating swarms, typically in early spring and late summer. By the next day only the quiet, methodical patrols of wingless ants remained visible in the Quarry Corner. Apparently these were sterile females responsible for doing the manual work like tending to the immature larvae, foraging for food, and maintaining the nest. Winged males lead a short and hopefully ecstatic life. According to the Wikipedia article on Ants, the males are "produced only at certain times of the season from unfertilized eggs, and their sole purpose is to mate....Male ants die shortly after mating, usually within a couple of weeks." 

Clearly in the aphid and ant orders of insects success in life is measured in proliferation of the colony rather than individual longevity.

Microcosmos 2 - Diversity in the Quarry Corner

During my September séances in the Quarry Corner a surprising variety of insects appeared along the shoreline. The presence of water is not only essential to life but multiplies the habitat elements that make for a more diverse ecological community.

Green Bottle Fly, Lucilia sericata, family Calliphoridae

There were of course commonplace insects like this Green Bottle Fly. The opportunity to see it close up (macro-photography) presented a rather elegant portrait of a creature most of us have a dim view of around the house, with its uncanny knack for dodging screen doors and buzzing around the kitchen. I rinsed out some prejudices and read a bit about this fly's split-second flight reflexes and ability to come to light upside down on a ceiling.

Grass Fly, Thaumatomyia glabra, family Chloropidae

An eighth-inch speck on the tip of a leaf introduced me to this member of the Chloropidae family, a handsomely decorated type of Grass Fly. Before the month was out I had encountered representatives of nearly three dozen fly families at Halibut Point, each with potentially multiple genera and species. Clearly flies were a very diverse group. Among all the winged six-legged creatures, I wondered, what distinguishes a true fly?

A crane fly of the family Limoniidae,
nectaring on Lycopus virginicum, Virginia water-horehound

As I crouched in the Quarry Corner a remarkably large mosquito-looking creature drew nectar from the flowers of a plant growing on the shoreline. It was a crane fly, in no way equipped to siphon the blood of an animal (me). Both it and mosquitoes are members of the insect order Diptera (from the Greek meaning "two wings"), the True Flies. Diptera are distinguished by using only a single pair of wings to fly. Their wing arrangement gives them great maneuverability in flight. This order contains an estimated 1,000,000 different species of insects.

A crane fly showing the hind wings reduced to drumstick-shaped halteres *

The hind wings of True Flies have evolved into advanced mechanosensory organs known as halteres, which act as high-speed sensors of rotational movement and allow dipterans to perform advanced aerobatics. 

Flies have evolved remarkable features in their small bodies to enable their prolific abilities. A few of these are described in the footnotes below.

Female Tiger Crane Fly, Nephrotoma ferruginea, family Tipulidae

Many crane flies live in moist habitats. The one pictured above is hovering along the edge of the quarry repeatedly bouncing up and down on the waterline to deposit eggs beneath the surface. In both form and behavior the insect world has stretched inventiveness in ways that prompt human imagination to ever greater wonder. 

 .....

* Photo and description from the Wikipedia article "Fly". 

Maneuverability

The halteres act as gyroscopic and are rapidly oscillated in time with the wings; they act as a balance and guidance system by providing rapid feedback to the wing-steering muscles, and flies deprived of their halteres are unable to fly. The wings and halteres move in synchrony but the amplitude of each wing beat is independent, allowing the fly to turn sideways. The wings of the fly are attached to two kinds of muscles, those used to power it and another set used for fine control.

Flies tend to fly in a straight line then make a rapid change in direction before continuing on a different straight path. The directional changes are called saccades and typically involve an angle of 90°, being achieved in 50 milliseconds. They are initiated by visual stimuli as the fly observes an object, nerves then activate steering muscles in the thorax that cause a small change in wing stroke which generate sufficient torque to turn. Detecting this within four or five wingbeats, the halteres trigger a counter-turn and the fly heads off in a new direction.

 

Vision

Flies have a mobile head with a pair of large compound eyes on the sides of the head, and in most species, three small ocelli on the top....For visual course control, flies' optic flow field is analyzed by a set of motion-sensitive neurons. A subset of these neurons is thought to be involved in using the optic flow to estimate the parameters of self-motion, such as yaw, roll, and sideward translation. Other neurons are thought to be involved in analyzing the content of the visual scene itself, such as separating figures from the ground using motion parallax. The H1 neuron is responsible for detecting horizontal motion across the entire visual field of the fly, allowing the fly to generate and guide stabilizing motor corrections midflight with respect to yaw. The ocelli are concerned in the detection of changes in light intensity, enabling the fly to react swiftly to the approach of an object.

 

Taste and touch

Like other insects, flies have chemoreceptors that detect smell and taste, and mechanoreceptors that respond to touch. The third segments of the antennae and the maxillary palps bear the main olfactory receptors, while the gustatory receptors are in the labium, pharynx, feet, wing margins and female genitalia, enabling flies to taste their food by walking on it....Flies that feed on blood have special sensory structures that can detect infrared emissions, and use them to home in on their hosts, and many blood-sucking flies can detect the raised concentration of carbon dioxide that occurs near large animals.

Microcosmos 1 - Camping out in the Quarry Corner

By late summer Halibut Point has a southern feel where a light breeze is welcome. With courtship and nesting behind them, and all that foliage in the trees, the birds have become hard to see. It's a time when the insect realm comes to full buzz. I decided to invest in a close-up lens for a better look at their lilliputian world. Since insects so vastly outnumber all the other inhabitants of Halibut Point, the lens opened a portal of discovery below our usual scale of awareness. 

As you can imagine, chasing insects through the landscape, or even to the other side of a leaf, resulted in few trophies and a lot of frustration. I found that I had better luck staying stationary in a good spot with the camera steady. When the when the water level was low in September one corner of the quarry provided just such a place, an ecologically diverse habitat where I could crouch at bug level. Folded up like that and focused within a world only a few feet in diameter, my sensory experience felt miniaturized like a dot on the edge of enormous surroundings. The looming granite walls circled away. Great gulls splashed behind me and chattered on about gull business. Astonishing little creatures hopped, crawled, and flew around.

Oribatid mite (left) beside a Two-striped Planthopper, Acanalonia bivittata

The quarter-inch size of the planthopper pictured here dramatizes the tininess of the mites which are "by far the most prevalent of all arthropods in forest soils, and are essential for breaking down organic detritus and distributing fungi." (Wikipedia) The photograph raises limitless curiosities about biologic success. I have learned that winged, six-legged planthoppers are true insects, while the flightless eight-legged mites are more closely related to crabs and spiders. 

Eastern Forktail Damselfly, Ishnura verticalis

A damselfly perched with its wings either partially open or pressed together above its narrow abdomen looks delicate compared to a muscular dragonfly with wings outspread. Damselflies have the prominent eyes of an aerial hunter. The eyes are separated by more than their own width, on a head wider than long.

Broad-nosed weevil with winged (R) and nymph aphids

Weevils are a type of beetle, which are distinguished from other insect groups by the hardening of their forewings into shell-like covers protecting their abdomens and are held aside while flying. A pair of membranous flight wings lies folded underneath the 'shell.' Beetles have well-developed mandibles and chewing mouthparts. 

Aphids, as is characteristic of the true bug group, have needle-like, sucking mouthparts and forewings hardened at the base becoming membranous toward the tip, useful for flight. 

An ichneumonid wasp, Diplazon laetatorius

Many ichneumonid wasps are dramatically shaped and colored with long ovipositors to insert their eggs into the bodies of other insects. Diplazon laetatorius larvae develop by feeding inside the host, usually a syrphid fly, eventually consuming it alive. Adults sustain themselves on  flower nectar. 

Females of this species have the unusual ability to produce more of themselves from unfertilized eggs (thelytokous parthenogenesis) by which they can increase their numbers prolifically without the bother of satisfying a mate. Males have become extremely rare throughout most of its range. However one supposes they retain an important role in the genetic vigor of the species, a fundamental principle of organic life, as well as occasionally satisfying the fuller potentials of relationship with fortunate females.

Minnows beside me

In this state of being quiet and motionless the animated world apparently didn't recognize me as human. Little fish swam into the shallows beside me, giving pleasant thoughts of a Peaceable Kingdom. Then splashing sounds just to the rear alerted me to their true motivation. A sapphire-eyed maritime fish hunter had discovered easy prey in the pond.

Double-crested Cormorant

The bird and I happened on this Quarry Corner from the macrocosm, it could be said, devouring the inhabitants of a secluded world for our own sustenance. In my case the physical consumption came from sources beyond this location but my psychic appetite was satisfied here in witnessing grandeur on another scale and stage.

Shoreline Diversions

 I collect images in time while walking along the boundary of land, sea and sky. The pictures capture what I think of as familiar, spiced with little variations and just the right amount of unpredictability. They contrast my own sense of wellbeing with the natural world's slender margins of endurance. That combination of tension and peace forms strands of beauty in my mind, something I respond to but don't create. 

In revisiting the photographs experimentally with the digital algorithms of Photoshop I open up to turbulence in that familiarity. The little variations and unpredictable possibilities zoom around irreverently. Exhilarating images form and reform barely tethered to their literal origins, but suggesting other satisfying truths in fiction. The abstractions provoke skirmishes between my interior mood and the camera's version of the universe. The process twists, stretches, rolls like kneaded dough.

Fluid Realities

Cormorants Resting

Gannet Formation

Brant, Folly Cove

Long-tailed Duck Preening

Looking Toward Ipswich

Tideline Plover

Merganser Courtship

Torn Sunset

Poster Birds

There's a feature in Photoshop that renders a 'Poster Edge.' What could be more deserving of posterization than birds of Halibut Point that endured the winter? I agree with those of you who appreciate a plain portrait. On the other hand, painterly liberties can give them a nice touch.

Cedar Waxwing

Robins in the Snow

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Hermit Thrush

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Chickadee

Cooper's Hawk

Quarry Impressions

Impressions of the landscape change day by day, hour by hour, in accordance with light, temperature and humidity. What meets the outer eye brings gifts to the inner eye. For photographers in the digital age, the camera lens only begins the image.

Quarry Departures

Out on a winter walk certain images in the stone and ice captivate my mind. I continue the ramble through Photoshop filters. Do titles freeze or thaw the pictures?

Glazed Lightning

Bristling Ledge

Glowing Edges

Burning Bubble

Gale Force