Howdy, BugFans,

The BugLady is already fantasizing about warm, sunny days in a wetland, photographing Swamp milkweed (and dragonflies), because she loves its color, and she loves being in wetlands, and because it’s a very busy plant, indeed!  

Also called rose or red milkweed (there are a couple of species of southern milkweeds that are also called red milkweed), white Indian hemp, water nerve-root, and water silkweed, Swamp milkweed prefers damp soils and full sun near the water’s edge. 

Indians, and later, the European settlers, used it medicinally (a tea made from the roots was reputed to “drive the worms from a person in one hour’s time”). It was used with caution – its sap is poisonous – and the cardiac glycosides that protect Monarchs also deter mammals from grazing on all but the very young plants.��The fibers in its stem were twisted into rope and twine and were used in textiles.

Its flowers are typical milkweed flowers – a corona of five parts (hoods) with curved petals below and curved, nectar-secreting horns above.��The flowers are tricky – sticky, golden, saddlebag-shaped pollinia are hidden behind what one author calls a trap door (a��stigmatic slit).��Insects walk around on the flower head, and when one of their feet slips through the slit by chance, a pollinium sticks to it.��When the bug encounters a stigmatic slit on the next plant it visits, the pollen is inadvertently delivered.��A quick-and-dirty, pick-up and delivery is what the plant had in mind; but, like the story of the raccoon (or was it a monkey) that reaches into the jar for a candy bar and then can’t pull its fist out of the small opening, sometimes the insect’s foot gets stuck to pollinia inside the trap door. Insects that can’t free themselves will die dangling from the flower, and insects that escape may be gummed up by the waxy structures.�� Look carefully for pollinia in the pictures.

Milkweeds support complex communities of invertebrates – their nectar attracts ants, bugs, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps, plus predators looking for a meal.��Here are some of the insects that the BugLady sees on Swamp milkweed.

MULBERRY WING SKIPPER – A small (one-inch-ish wingspan) butterfly of wetlands with an arrow or airplane-shaped marking on its rich, chestnut-brown underwings ().��Adults fly slowly through low vegetation, where females lay their eggs on the leaves of sedges.��

FLOWER LONGHORN BEETLE��BRACHYLEPTURA��CHAMPLAINI��(no common name), on a Swamp milkweed leaf. Other than a “present” checkoff in a variety of natural area insect surveys, there’s just about nothing online about this beetle, and not much more in Evans’ book,��Beetles of Eastern North America. It’s a long-horned beetle in the Flower longhorn subfamily��Lepturinae, a group that feeds on pollen in the daytime. This one has pollinia on its mouthparts.

Also seen were ants, leafcutter bees, sweat bees, Great black wasps, Great golden digger wasps, Red soldier beetles, Fiery and Broad-winged Skipper butterflies, and Thick-headed flies.  

The BugLady

The post Wildflower Watch – Swamp Milkweed appeared first on Field Station.

Howdy, BugFans,

This is a somewhat rewritten rerun from 2009. New words, no new pictures.

It’s a good thing that the common usage of the term “bug” is so inexact, because once again we are stretching its boundaries to/past the limits.

Horsehair worms are in the Phylum Nematomorpha (which is different from the Nematode worms). They’re skinny and long; this individual was maybe five inches long, but some species grow to one or two feet long. They have a hard, chitinous covering that, says Ann Haven Morgan in her Field Book of Ponds and Streams, stiffens them so that “in their slow coiling and uncoiling they seem to be so much living wire.” They come in opaque yellow to tan to brown to black colors. They’re wiry and cylindrical, with little tapering at either end (unlike the nearby Nematodes).

Adults live in damp-to-wet habitats from the tropics to the cold-temperate regions. Morgan goes on to say that they “, watering troughs, and rain-barrels.” Horsehair worms tend to occur in clusters; Pennak, in Fresh-water Invertebrates of the United States, describes them as “a single writhing mass in the springtime.” They look a bit like the snags used to appear on the BugLady’s old casting reel. She doesn’t see them very often – this picture is an old, scanned color slide.

The adults do not eat – their only function is reproductive. Pennak says that not only is their digestive tract “degenerate and functionless”, they have “no special circulatory, respiratory or excretory structures” (and not much of a brain, either). Their muscle layer runs the long way, making them “slowly undulating swimmers.” But the simplicity of the adults is more than compensated for by their offspring.

Mom lays more than a million eggs in a gelatinous string, maybe 8” long, and the string breaks down into smaller pieces and disperses. Soon after they hatch, the microscopic larvae attach to vegetation along the shoreline and form a protective cyst on the plant. When water levels drop, land critters like grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches, and beetles can reach the aquatic vegetation, and the larvae are inadvertently eaten (“engulfed”) by grazing. They may also be ingested when their host drinks the water, and they can be swallowed by the aquatic immatures of mayflies, dragonflies and caddisflies that escape the water as adults, die, and are eaten by scavenging grasshoppers. Lots of paths.

Once consumed, the cyst dissolves and the larva burrows through the gut wall and into its host, and begins absorbing nutrients from the nearby tissue. Some potential hosts have the ability to encapsulate the cyst with a layer of toxic chemicals after they’ve ingested it.

Mother Nature is careful of the species but careless of the individual – she has produced an exuberance of horsehair worms, and only a vanishingly small percentage will ever find hosts, but that’s enough to keep the species going. An animal that produces that many eggs “expects” a high mortality rate.

When it matures, the larva needs to exit the host’s body, which doesn’t sound like a benign process (although one source said that it’s possible for the host to survive it). It’s best for the larva if the host is near water when this happens, and it is believed that the maturation of the larva somehow causes its host to seek water, by some mechanism that is not fully understood. If the host is nowhere near water when the horsehair worm matures, “c’est la vie” – few hairworms find hosts, and few of those that mature in the bodies of grasshoppers will ever get back to water. If the host is near water when the larva is mature/nearly mature, then it “breaks through/burrows out of body wall and becomes free-living.”

Horsehair worms are not a public health issue – all Horsehair worm hosts are invertebrates. A couple of Exterminator sites inform us that horsehair worms show up in toilets from time to time (the current would seem to be going the wrong way for such a feeble swimmer to accomplish that), but one site confessed that it’s more likely to happen if someone just disposed of a grasshopper in the toilet.

A picture for your head: According to Morgan, a common species of horsehair worm reaches about a foot in length, and its larvae have been found in 2 species of cricket. If you’re wondering how they do that, the BugLady is, too (and, of course, there’s a ).

These are also called “Gordian Worms,” in honor of the Gordian Knot tied by King Gordius of Phrygia, a knot that only the future king of Asia would be able to untie (Alexander the Great “thought outside the box” and used his sword). The name “horsehair worms” is a nod to folk tales about horsehairs which say that “a hair will turn to life if you leave it in water or in the town watering trough overnight.”

The BugLady

The post Horsehair worm Redux appeared first on Field Station.

May is American wetlands month, so we’ll end it in the swamp, in the company of Marsh Marigolds, the flowers that turn newly thawed wetlands a riotous yellow from the last days of April through much of May. Skunk cabbage and pussy willows may whisper the arrival of spring, but marsh marigolds crank up the volume.

The BugLady should have started this project two weeks ago when the marsh marigold was at its peak, but the truth is that despite the masses of flowers it produces, she seldom sees many insects on it, and the ones she sees are as likely to be resting as dining. According to the great , “The nectar and pollen of the flowers attract flies and bees primarily. This includes Bombylius major (Giant Bee Fly), Syrphid [hover, flower] flies, Halictid [sweat] bees, honey bees, and others. Two leaf beetles are occasionally found on the foliage of Marsh Marigold: Plateumaris nitida and Hydrothassa [Prasocuris] vittata. It is possible that they eat the foliage. For other herbivores, specific information for Marsh Marigold is lacking. Because the acrid foliage contains toxic alkaloids and glycosides, it is usually avoided by mammalian herbivores.”

Here are some marsh marigold basics, adapted from an article the BugLady wrote for the newsletter of the Friends of the Cedarburg Bog in 2012:

• Your Grandma probably called them “Cowslips,” which comes from an Old English word “cuslyppe “or “cu slyppe” for cow slobber or cow dung.
• Thoreau called them “A flower-fire bursting up, as if through crevices in the meadow where they grow.” He also said that “the flower has no scent but speaks wholly to the eye.” He was wrong about the scent, but the flower’s faint odor is more easily detected by insects than by humans.
• Early 20th century naturalist John Burroughs wrote that “they give a golden lining to many a dark, marshy place in the leafless April woods.”
• They’re not marigolds, and marsh buttercup would be the most accurate name for these members of the Buttercup family Ranunculaceae (Ranunculus is Latin for “little frog”). The scientific name, Caltha palustris, means “Cup of the swamp.”
• Marsh marigold is found in damp-to wet ground around the world, growing in sunny places with saturated soil. Forty years ago, it was hard to find a marsh marigold in bloom before the first week of May; now it often flowers in the last ten days of April.
• The flower has no petals but is made up of five to ten shiny, yellow sepals (sepals are the usually-green, modified leaves that clasp the flower bud, protecting it before it blooms). The sepal’s yellow color is in a waxy coating that can easily be scraped off with your thumbnail – in a few of the pictures, you can see white spots where the color has been eaten away.
• Marsh marigold is an abundant source of pollen and nectar that attracts more than three dozen species of early sweat bees, flower flies, and bee flies. A bee’s-eye-view is vastly different than ours is, and its perception of UV light makes the yellow sepals look purple and turns the center, where the nectar is found, black.
• Marsh marigold has awesome, starfish-like seed pods (#3 in the slide show https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/marsh-marigold).

What did the BugLady find on the flowers and leaves?

MINING BEES AND SWEAT BEES hard at work ensuring next year’s show.

A TEPHRITID FLY – Tephritidae is the (true) fruit fly family, as opposed to the pomace fly family Drosophilidae, home of those universal lab rats, the Drosophila. Tephritid larvae develop within various plant parts.

A CRAB SPIDER having a Sistine Chapel (or an ET) moment.

MOTH FLIES – The BugLady has been seeing these tiny (1.5 to 4 mm), aptly-named flies (family Psychodidae) on the vegetation in wetlands recently. Some moth flies live wholesome existences, and others live in sewers and feed on the by-products thereof. These feed on nectar and on stuff they find in stagnant water; their offspring eat algae, fungi and bacteria suspended in the still waters of the swamp. For the story of another group of moth flies, see this past Bug of the Week.

(PINK) SPOTTED LADY BEETLE – Ladybugs eat aphids and other tiny critters, both as larvae and as adults – you can find both stages feeding in aphid herds side by side. Pink lady beetles prefer dampish habitats, and, according to , “Unlike most lady beetles, plant pollen may constitute up to 50% of the diet. This is the only North American lady beetle that can complete its life cycle on plant pollen.”

A MALE CRAB SPIDER lurking. Spoiler alert – the fly flew.

ANTS are unsung (and ineffective) pollinators. Yes, they are all over the flowers, but since they are on foot, it’s hard for them to move pollen from one flower to another (unless it’s a cluster of flowers). Plus, they groom their slick little bodies constantly.

BAG WORM – This little collection of plant material looks like a case made by a bag worm moth larva called . The BugLady often sees these on screens and siding and even on leaves, but never before on flowers. Larvae make the shelters, enlarge the shelters as they grow, pupate in the shelters, and the wingless adult females receive suitors in the shelters, and lay their eggs there.

SYRPHID FLY – aka Hover or Flower fly. A great group of often-exquisitely-marked bee mimics that feed on pollen and nectar.

MOSQUITO WITH MITE – Both male and female mosquitoes feed on nectar – males exclusively and females as a supplement. This one is being fed upon by the nymph of a water mite that attached when the mosquito was in its aquatic, larval stage.

BUTTERCUP BEETLE Prasocuris vitata – A leaf beetle (Chrysomelid) that is a buttercup/marsh marigold specialist. Check out this previous Bug of the Week on the Buttercup Beetle.

PLATEUMARIS NITIDA – The BugLady’s first thought was “what’s a Donacia () doing in a marsh marigold thicket, far from the nearest water lily?” Then she looked up the second beetle mentioned in the Illinois Wildflower site. It turns out that some members of the genus Plateumaris are Donacia look-alikes and marsh marigold is listed as the host plant of at least one species. The beetle’s gleam is due to physics, not pigments. While looking for info about this beetle, the BugLady came across this about the feeding behaviors of leaf beetles.

Also seen were a , a soldier beetle, several more spider species, and a mining bee, and a clever shelter built by a spider that bent a yellow sepal over and anchored it with silk.

FYI – BOTW will, as usual, be Closed for June, so that the BugLady can go out and photograph the heck out of the local nature areas. She will post tasteful and timely reruns.

The BugLady

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