Slender in the grass

Nov20

‘”Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower, we will grieve not; rather find strength in what remains behind.” -Wordsworth

It seems to me that I have not posted in some time. For various reasons, I have not had much time or energy for photography or blogging recently. I do manage short bursts of inspiration, and I have plans for a few more in-depth posts, but for now I can only offer this gorgeous Tibellus oblongus that I shot the other day while digging for ants.

These slender spiders are members of the Philodromidae, or running crab spiders, and are most at home lying on grasses and slender twigs as ambush predators.

Here is one I photographed this summer showing her hunting prowess.

Their longitudinal stripes help them blend in with the substrate, and they are quite tricky to spot until they move.

I found this individual, as well as one more buried in the soil beneath a clump of tall grass.

I find the lines of these spiders very elegant, and they are definitely pleasing to photograph.

Next time you are out in a grassy meadow, keep an eye out for these cryptic hunters!

Weekend Expedition 59: A fungal outing to Lynn Canyon

Nov10

This Sunday, Catherine Scott, Mike Boers, Tanya Stemberger and I went out to Lynn Canyon, to take in some of the fungal delights of mid-fall. I used to be a much more avid mushroomer than I have been recently, so it was great to get out and exercise my rusty ID skills.Here are some of the things we saw!

Catherine looks amazed that Tanya is going to live-tweet our fungal expedition.

This is the cheaper version of the Capilano suspension bridge.

Here is a very pretty Lactarius.

Lactarius bleeding its “milk”.

Here is a chopper employed by North Shore Search and Rescue, combing the river for a missing hiker. With wilderness at your doorstep, as in Vancouver, these types of things happen frequently.

Ground-based searchers examine the river.

Mike gets overtaken by a man with a musclebound dog who pulled him up the slope. This is really the best way to hike!

Something so calming about looking at these trees on a fall day.

A luridly orange patch of witch’s butter on a fallen log.

Here is a fungus gnat on what might be a Mycena.

Newly growing caps of what may be Naematoloma.

An Elfin Saddle! This is Helvella lacunosa (or something similar), a species I used to pick and eat quite a bit.

Mushrooms are challenging subjects…I hope to get a chance to do more serious photography of them one day.

Since Tanya had yet to see a salamander, I uncovered this Ensatina for her to examine. As expected, this was a big hit. Ensatinas are probably the cutest of BC amphibians.

Catherine and Tanya examining the salamander, Catherine looks spooked, but this is normal (and has nothing to do with the Ensatina).

Lace Bug!

Nov5

Last night I brought a pile of leaves into our apartment to try some more spider shooting in a controlled environment. To my surprise, this little lace bug (Family Tingidae) must have come in on the leaves.

Tingids are one of my favourite bugs, as they look like they were sculpted from stained-glass. This one has a really crazy pronotum, which looks something like a radar dome.

I hope you enjoy these shots of our unexpected visitor!

Last Gasp of Arachtober

Oct31

For the very last post of Arachtober, I thought I would take some shots of the Halloweeniest spider on the west coast, Dysdera crocata. These orange and red beauties are specialist predators of terrestrial isopods (pillbugs) and have fangs equal to the task of envenomating these armoured prey.

Some Arachtober shots and thoughts

Oct28

October is a month for spiders, being the time when many of the species which have grown large on summer’s bounty are settling down to lay eggs, or looking for overwintering sites. For spider photographers, it is like golden hour all month! If you search flickr for “Arachtober” you will find the photographic bounty that macrophotographers have amassed.

This Arachtober, I have not really been applying myself to spider photography, although I have made some dedicated efforts to secure shots of black widow defenses (for Catherine’s invited talk at last weekend’s ESBC conference), or Steatoda males and females, for my friend Chloe Gerak’s award-winning talk at the same conference.

Anyway, here are some shots and thoughts about my Arachtober.

Western black widow throwing silk on Catherine’s finger at Island View Beach.

Catherine gave a great talk on “dangerous spiders” at the ESBC conference, her first 1/2 hour talk. Her t-shirt (thanks Alex Wild!) serves as a great abstract of the talk.

Female Steatoda grossa with a bit of backlight highlighting her web. False black widows around here are not very black!

Chloe after delivering her awesome, award-winning talk entitled “How the false widow finds true love”.

Male and female Steatoda grossa juxtaposed for comparison.

A largish sac spider (Clubionidae) showing the large chelicerae typical of the family.

Putting the light a little behind the spider can help resolve some of the surface details and maintain a bit of mysteriousness at the same time.

More direct light makes for a less moody feel as the sac spider drinks water on a colourful leaf.

Arachtober is also a scary time for spiders. Here is an emesine thread-legged bug I found in a spider retreat, where it was likely feeding on spider eggs.

Fall foliage makes for a wonderful seasonal backdrop for this Hallowe’en spider villain.

White Woodpecker preying on wasp nests!

Oct21

Melanerpes candidus approaching the nest of social paper wasps. Photo by Miguel Rangel Jr. used under terms of a CC-BY-SA licence.

In the latest issue of Revista Brasileira de Ornithologia, I found a paper on a topic near and dear to my heart: birds preying on wasp nests. In this case, it is an account of the White Woodpecker, Melanerpes candidus preying on the nests of Polybia paulista. In this paper, Ivan Sazima describes the predation tactics used by this woodpecker when attacking a large, well-defended nest. Ivan conducted this research at Parque Ecológico Prof. Hermógenes de Freitas Leitão, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.

Like the Red-throated Caracaras I studied, the White Woodpecker appears to exploit the absconding response of these swarm-founding wasps in order to secure its meal of wasp brood. Rather than inflicting rapid, catastrophic damage, however, the woodpecker takes its time, approaching the nest gradually and tapping the branch to which the nest is attached. During this approach, some of the wasps come out to sting, and if this gets too fierce, the woodpecker will retreat. Sazima attempted this tactic himself with a similar nest of P. paulista, and got stung severely for his efforts. Sazima suspects that the continuous nature of the woodpecker’s disturbance is what is required to induce the wasps to abandon their nest. Also, the agility of the birds at evading attacking wasps also means they can keep this harassment up longer than an unprotected human.

This paper is a valuable contribution to the study of wasp and bird behaviour, as it highlights that certain anti-predator strategies of social wasps (stinging, alarm recruitment) can be defeated by exploiting the evacuation swarming (absconding) behaviour of these wasps. Bearing this in mind, it is no wonder that so many species of swarm founding wasps have cryptic nests to escape the detection of diurnal vertebrate predators.

I especially love one of the concluding sentences:

The foraging behaviour of the White Woodpecker reported herein results from so-called anecdotic, natural history oriented observations, often disregarded by theory-trained biologists. Nevertheless, this kind of observation draws attention to phenomena that later may prove more widespread or commoner that previously thought.

I could not agree more. Please head over to read the paper yourself, as the photos of the behaviour are great, and the text well worth the read.

Update: See another wasp predator in action here.

Photo by Márcio Vinícius Pinheiro, shared under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

Successful tagging of Three-wattled Bellbirds in Honduras

Oct19

Male Three-wattled Bellbird (photo by Michael Loukides) released under a CC-NC-SA licence.

I just received in an email a press release for the Zoo Conservation Outreach Group describing recent successes in fieldwork on Three-wattled Bellbirds (Procnias tricarunculatus) in Honduras. This project aims to use satellite tags to study the migratory movements of these endangered frugivores in the Sierra de Agalta cloud forests of Honduras. I have no doubt that Isidro Zuniga, our Honduran colleague during our last field season in Honduras was greatly involved in this research.

The big mystery surrounding these odd birds (Family Cotingidae) is their complex migratory movements between cloud forests in the region. Each of these cloud forests is like an individual island of habitat in a great sea of lower level pine forests and agriculturally-dominated valleys. The birds are very evident from July to September in the Sierra de Agalta cloud forest, but then disappear for the balance of the year. The team on the ground in Honduras, led by Dr. Robin Bjork, has managed to outfit four of these birds with satellite tags which are transmitting data already.

The data generated by these tagged birds should be very interesting to say the least, and will help identify key habitat for conservation efforts.

A bird in the hand is worth quite a bit! Male Three-wattled Bellbird outfitted with 5 g satellite tag.

Weekend Expedition 57: Thanksgiving in Victoria

Oct14

This weekend, Catherine and I visited Victoria, for the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday. The weather was not super cooperative for outdoor activities, and Catherine was working hard on her PhD NSERC proposal, but we did manage one trip out to Island View Beach to check up on the local arthropods. I also went for a stroll in Uplands Park to get some of the following shots.

This is how the rain looked on Saturday morning…

Better to be sheltered inside, or under the eaves of a house!

Quite a few grasshoppers were out and about. This one I shot as it was hiding on a Garry Oak leaf (you can see I was holding a white card below).

A juvenile wolf spider looking odd and elegant with two very prominent eyes.

A Dysdera crocata male in Uplands Park.

An Aphaenogaster occidentalis worker carrying brood in Uplands Park. This species does well in Garry Oak meadows.

Catherine, my friend Jeff, and a borrowed golden retriever (Jackson) at Island View Beach.

The fall selection of resting Hymenoptera was much more limited than previously, with this impressively-ovipositored ichneumonid being the only example we could find.

Resting snakes were about though; this garter snake was torpid and remained in a ball rather than trying to flee when we found her under a log.

Spiders were to be found in large numbers though, this being Arachtober and all. Here is a tetragnathid backlit with a bare flash.

Here is a running crab spider, of the genus Tibellus; the same one appears at the top of the post. These are very elegant-looking little spiders, and make great photographic subjects.

Most of the creatures we found were covered by a light dew. This cranefly sparkles.

This female Araneus diadematus was particularly large. That is Catherine’s finger for scale.

Speaking of large, here is a giant! A giant house spider, formerly Tegenaria duellica, now this species is called Eratigena atrica. Since Catherine is scheduled to give an upcoming talk on spider bites (and how they are very unlikely) at the ESBC conference, we decided for an illustrative photo shoot.

Here is the same spider ~~sinking her fangs into~~ resting peacefully on Catherine’s nose.

Apparently, the feet tickle. Not that I would ever try this, that would be crazy.

A female Castianeira we found under some old plywood.

A penultimate male black widow. These ones that overwinter always seem to be more robust and darker than the juveniles that develop quickly in the summer. I would imagine this is a textbook example of phenotypic plasticity; one that deserves more careful study.

Again with an eye to Catherine’s upcoming talk, we took some shots of black widow defensive behaviour. Here a female throws glue-like silk on an offending finger. This is so reliable, I might have to try this in a studio setting with some nice backlight!

Last but not least, on our final morning in Victoria, we walked on Mt. Tolmie, where we found this male Anna’s hummingbird, still defending territory. It is impressive these little birds are still nesting in the cold wet fall!

Arthropod sampling with the Future Science leaders!

Oct12

This past week has been pretty busy, so getting out and shooting has not really been on my list of accomplishments (my “Ta Da!” list). On Tuesday, I did manage to get interviewed by Global News about invasive ants, and then schlepped across town to assist my friend Tanya Stemberger with a field exercise for high school students in the Future Science Leaders program.

Due to high tides, the planned transect based survey of intertidal organisms had to be scrubbed, so instead, we attempted a transect-based survey of a forest near Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park.

I planned to show the students a simple technique for sampling called beating, wherein you strike foliage forcefully and collect any falling arthropods in a sheet placed below. We used small photographic shoot-through umbrellas to do our collection, and then used a simple aspirator to collect the catch. We had planned on sampling 5 sites along a 50 m transect, beating 4 small bushes at each site. Due to time constraints, we only managed to get a single site done.

Nonetheless, with only beating 4 bushes (2 salal, 2 salmonberry) we secured 25 spiders, 1 isopod and 1 harvestman. Many of these spiders were tiny juveniles, but some were just tiny adults. Identifying them in the field was definitely not going to happen in the limited time frame, but there may be hope of at least getting some identifications. Here are some of the spiders that were large enough to photograph well:

It seems the spider diversity seems pretty high, and interestingly, of these spiders I photographed, 4 of the 5 are males.

The most striking thing about this sample (to me anyhow) was the lack of insects. Usually, at this time of year, I expect to see barklice (Psocoptera), springtails (Collembolla) and perhaps a stinkbug (Pentatomidae) or plant bug (Miridae). Nonetheless, it is tough to draw conclusions about the diversity of taxa we found, with only one sample being taken.

Of course, finding such a predator-biased range of taxa seems a little strange, until you consider that every sampling method has its biases. In the fall, when plant growth is limited, finding phytophagous insects out and about is much more difficult, but at a sites such as this, adjacent to a large freshwater source (Lost Lagoon) there is ample prey for web building spiders. These freshwater bodies are still producing abundant chironomid midges, and a few caddisflies.

All in all, this was a great (albeit short) little introduction to terrestrial arthropod sampling. Special thanks to the Stanley Park Ecology Society volunteers for leading us on the great nature walk!

Weekend Expedition 56: To the realm of the pikas

Oct6

This weekend, Catherine and I were invited by Sofi Hindmarch and Brian Coote (along with his kids Alexa and Jamie) to go down to Mt. Baker, a stratovolcano in Washington State near the Canadian border. On Sunday, we went on a trip to Lake Ann, a 13 km alpine trail. Catherine had to sit this one out due to knee issues, but I went to document our trip. This was my first outing to the alpine zone in quite a while, and it was not disappointing!