What I Learned Today

While cleaning my windows today, I removed the screens and made an unpleasant discovery. Some insect had wedged bits of material into little nests around the edges of two window screens. I brushed it off, noticing that each nest looked like brown dried grass with a bright green squishy center. Then I looked more closely at what plopped onto the ground. The bright green bits looked like baby grasshoppers. Were they grasshopper nests? (In the windows?!)

Then a wasp flew up… carrying one of the bright green grasshopper like things, which was a bit larger than it was! It flew to where the screen had been and kept bumping along the window frame looking for the nesting site (presumably). Was it food? What? This is exactly what it looked like:

Some googling brought me to this description of the grass-carrying wasp, an insect I’d never heard of. Apparently they bite off bits of grass to wedge them in “cavities.” They then hunt for tree crickets. When they find a cricket, they sting it, paralyze it, and carry it off to sequester in a grass-lined nest, then lay an egg on it. When the egg hatches, the larva can immediately start eating the cricket. I was nauseated by the description, yet simultaneously felt bad at having cleaned out all the nests, after reading the very sympathetic description of this “beneficial wasp” at the above link. (Apparently ridding the trees of crickets that feast on them is good, and the wasps are also pollinators and not aggressive.)

Still, I don’t really want them in my windows! And I think my forest offers many other hollow woody crevices for the wasps to populate. To me the most salient part of their behavior is the cricket-hunting, paralysis, and egg-laying, but I guess the grass nesting is kind of interesting too (it’s not just for the birds!). I hope they enjoy feasting on the local tree crickets!

So… there’s a faint northern constellation called Camelopardalis. It is so named because someone thought it looked kind of like a giraffe. Which was known as a kamelopardalis, or a camel-leopard, in Greek – because come on guys, it has a long camel-like neck and it also has spots! This cracks me up! :) Words are awesome!

Surprisingly, even English-speaking folks used “camelopard” in medieval times (pr. kuh-MEH-luh-pard).

Of course then I had to wonder why we started calling it “giraffe”. Apparently “giraffe” derives from the Arabic word “zarāfah” (fast-walker). So that one’s pretty good, but not nearly as descriptive. I say, bring back the camelopard! Who’s with me?

Last year, I bought some solar-powered garden lights and put them along my driveway to make it easier (and more welcoming) to follow the driveway to my house. I was very pleased with the little spots of light marking the edge of the driveway. Then I kept finding two of them knocked over… with scrape/gnawing marks on them. The top part of one disappeared entirely. These had plastic tops, and maybe weren’t as durable, but it was weird to have a piece just disappear. What animal would want it? But what human would take just the top of one light? The two affected lights were under a tree, and squirrels maybe jumped onto them? My best hypothesis was that the squirrels thought they were some kind of bird feeder and hoped there were seeds inside the glass. I finally relocated them to the front of the house and bought metal ones to replace along the driveway. Neither set has suffered further attacks.

Recently I was doing some yard work, and I found the missing top, buried in leaves! But it just raised more questions. Because something spent some serious time and effort extracting just the solar panel. See below an undamaged top (left) and the one I found (right):

You can click to enlarge. It looks like dedicated… gnawing, to me. A human would have used a tool – or just taken the whole top with them (why dig out the solar panel and then leave the shell?).

The back side is equally weird, with the rechargeable battery and its cover removed. A human would have opened the cover with their fingers. Instead, whatever took this battery dug/gnawed it out.

This no longer looks like someone thought it was a bird feeder.

So I’m standing here with this chewed-up solar light and I’m wondering just what kind of squirrel is hungry for this technology. Or am I living next to the rats of NIMH? Help?

I was raking up a ton of leaves that had fallen in my yard when I discovered a little ball of brown and black amongst the leaves. I repositioned him in a tree and took a picture:

I did some sleuthing and found that this is a wooly bear caterpillar (they roll into a ball when disturbed). They transform into the beautiful Isabella tiger moth.

I marvel anew at how different these forms can be. And then there’s this amazing part of its lifecycle:

The banded woolly bear larva emerges from the egg in the fall and overwinters in its caterpillar form, when it literally freezes solid. First its heart stops beating, then its gut freezes, then its blood, followed by the rest of the body. It survives being frozen by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissues. In the spring it thaws. (Wikipedia)

Wow! I’ll have to look for this guy again in the spring. I hope he makes it :) (But maybe he’ll be a moth by then!)

I recently discovered iNaturalist, which is a website and smartphone app that encourages you to collect observations of plants, animals, and insects. By recording when and where they were observed, you contribute to the store of data about these organisms. This place must be every biologist’s dream come true! Data for free!

They’ve put some thought into how to ensure high quality data. When you log an observation of, say, a ladybug, you can simply record it as “insect” and let others refine it, or be as specific as you feel confident to narrow down its precise species. The crowd of other users will review your tag and vote for it as correct or make corrections. When an organism is pinned down at the species level, that observation becomes “research grade.”

So far I have contributed observations of a praying mantis (needs review) and a raccoon (research grade!). When you log an observation and connect it with a species, you also get to see a map of where else that species has been seen.

You can also “subscribe” to get updates whenever a particular organism of interest is spotted! I signed up for praying mantises (mantis religiosa), spiny lizards (at the genus level (sceloporus), not a species), and collared lizards (family crotaphytidae – a beautiful creature from my childhood). Just today I’ve seen a bunch of new lizard observations (one dead). I’m looking forward to more. (I’m also being exposed to the Latin names for things. What fun!)

Another cool feature is that you can browse an area (say, where you are currently standing) to see what has been observed there.` You can also join specific research “projects” and contribute your matching observations (e.g., a project might specify that they want only pictures of reptiles observed in southern California).

I love to see well constructed efforts to engage people in the process of science. This one seems particularly compelling and enjoyable to use.