History, Natural History & the Arts
September Crickets
With the urgency of boreal fecundity
let us prick our souls and hasten the blooming summer
let us lap, and lap, and lap
insisting like westerly waves of Gitche Gumee
to make landfall, to make love all
enveloping and awash in soaking saturation
and then stop. [Read more…] about Poetry: September Crickets
I’m not one to shed a tear when authoritarian rulers die, but once they’re gone, picnics become a lot more dangerous. As summer wanes, the original queen in every yellowjacket wasp colony dies – having a few thousand babies in the course of one season is enough to tire any Queen Mum to death. [Read more…] about Late-Season Yellowjacket Anarchy
City life favors species that are adaptable and not too fussy about what they eat, among other characteristics. A worldwide consortium of scientists calls the resulting collection of traits an “Urban Trait Syndrome.” Their study includes data from 379 cities on 6 continents, with the largest data set coming from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird program. The work is published in Nature Communications. [Read more…] about City-Dwelling Wildlife Demonstrate Urban Trait Syndrome
The Adirondack Garden Club’s native plant garden at Families First on Water Street in Elizabethtown, Essex County, NY, is in only its first year, but the number of Monarch caterpillars (and others) calling the garden plot home this season are a clear indication of the project’s success. [Read more…] about Elizabethtown Native Plant Garden Project Update
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) began their annual fall migration around late-August. These butterflies are the great-great-grandchildren of the monarchs that migrated to Mexico last fall.
You can help monarchs by providing food (nectar) and keeping those areas protected: [Read more…] about Help Monarchs on their Long Migration South
A caterpillar eats and eats, becomes a chrysalis, and after a period of metamorphosis emerges as a beautiful butterfly! Except, sometimes… it doesn’t quite work that way.
Occasionally, while sitting on my deck, I spot smallish, orange butterflies landing on our hop plants. Their upper wings, about two inches across, are bright orange with dark blotches and eyespots, but camouflage brown on their underside. These are eastern comma butterflies (Polygonia comma), named for a silvery marking on the hind wing. If I look closely after one has flapped away, I can find one or two tiny, peridot eggs that it left behind on a hop leaf. [Read more…] about Chrysalis Surprise: A Parasitoid Wasp
The doodlebug waits. It is patient. It is silent. And it is hidden under a fine layer of dry, loose, sandy soil at the bottom of a small conical pit. Soon, a wandering ant will slip down the side of the pit, where the sickle-shaped mandibles of the doodlebug will rise from the bottom to grab the ant.
The doodlebug will inject paralyzing venom into its prey, followed by digestive fluids that turn the ant’s insides to liquid. Then this hungry doodlebug will slurp the juices before flicking the desiccated ant carcass out of its pit trap. Constantly hungry, the doodlebug hides again at the bottom of the pit and waits for its next meal to stumble in. [Read more…] about Doodlebug, Doodlebug, Are You at Home?
At first, I suspected it was the deer that had almost completely defoliated the northern spicebush sapling I had planted just weeks earlier. Only days prior, it had been brimming with new growth, and now all that remained were two leaves wrapped into cigarlike cylinders. Curious, I inspected this pair of surviving leaves. At the opening of each, snug between the leaf edges, was a bulbous green head adorned with a set of black, cartoonish eye spots. I had found my perpetrator, and it wasn’t the deer; it was the caterpillars of the spicebush swallowtail. [Read more…] about Spicebush Swallowtails: Beauty and Defense
Though the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is a decades-old caution for techies to be mindful when writing code or entering data, I thought my mom invented it. It was her stock retort when we kids asked why two hours of Saturday cartoons was plenty: “Garbage in, garbage out. Fill your heads with foolishness, and you’ll act that way.” I guess she was afraid we’d start chasing roadrunners across the desert, which typically leads to sprinting off cliffs and being struck by falling anvils.
It turns out she had a point. Numerous studies confirm that exposure to graphic TV violence raises a child’s level of aggression and anxiety in the short term, and is a sound predicter of hostile behavior as an adult. [Read more…] about Fly Research Yields Possible Trauma Treatment
Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) is active from now through Labor Day. Pool owners should check filters for the invasive insect regularly and submit a report if any are found.
ALB attacks and kills maples, birches, willows, and other hardwoods. They emerge from infested trees in the late summer to find a new host. The beetles are 1.5 inches long, have long black-and-white antennae, and have black-and-white spots on their body. [Read more…] about Check Your Pool Filter for Asian Longhorned Beetle