Grasshopper heaven

It's the most wonderful time of the year! When you can walk along a trail and see hundreds of springing grasshoppers cascade ahead of you, wave after wave of tiny hoppers leaping in every direction. Some land on the sidewalk with a click, some grab a tall stem and peep around it at you, some catch a blade of grass momentarily before rapidly descending to the ground in a surprisingly coordinated rappel. 

The Greenway seeming a little sparse in the springers, I headed over to Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, which was an amateur orthopterist's heaven. The sandy soil around the lake, with wide swaths of Little Bluestem, Sideoats Grama, and other low-growing prairie plants along the trail, made for an interesting contrast with the moister/shadier and a bit weedier Greenway. 

The plan was to take pictures of grasshoppers. All kinds of grasshoppers! My hope was to find another Admirable Grasshopper, such as the one I encountered at nearby Sand Prairie a couple of years ago. They are not rare, but they are unusual enough (to me anyway) to stand out amid the more numerous specimens. 

It was a dry, sunny day; the air filled with songs of cicadas and katydids punctuated by the percussion of fleeing grasshoppers ticking against foliage. The occasional rhythmic whir of wheels or thuds of footsteps indicated a passing human. Have you seen an Admirable Grasshopper? I wonder wordlessly in their direction. I don't care to imagine what they may have been wondering in my direction in return, as I hunkered red-faced and dripping in sweat, to peer at the ground.

Like taking photos of swallows in the sky, it can be a little tricky to pick out a single grasshopper out of hundreds on the move and follow it to a landing point to take a picture. I began with taking a shot of every grasshopper I could focus on, and quickly discovered that they were all the same: Red-legged Grasshoppers (Melanoplus femurrubrum).* 

Red-legged Grasshopper

To be more discriminating I watched how they hopped. Some took broad leaps of a meter or more, going high above the ground. Some took sad little tiny hops, frantically trying to get away from the giant blundering about. Some jumped in the air and spread their wings to glide gently to a landing on the ground. 

Taking the time to stop and stalk, I encountered this handsome charcoal-colored individual, a Clouded Grasshopper (Encoptolophus sordidus). The banded femurs and interesting eye colors made it easy to see it wasn't like the others. 

Clouded Grasshopper

The robust Differential Grasshoppers (Melanoplus differentialis), a smooth porcelain green with black chevrons on their femurs, were fairly common, peering from the greenery.

Differential Grasshopper

A walk in the mowed grass alongside the paved trail proved to be a good strategy to flush some hoppers out of the grass and onto the trail, where I could get a good look at them. One of the first to appear using this technique was a little guy...even from several feet away I could see something a little different about it: the silhouette was unlike all those I'd been seeing so far, with a decidedly slanted face. Could it be...?

A glance left and right to see if any cyclist might unwittingly scare (or squish!) my target, then a few quick snaps, circling to get a good look. It was! An Admirable Grasshopper. What a beaut. 

Admirable Grasshopper

More photos, of tiny nymphs with nubs for wings. Some bright grassy green, others a little more yellow, and others a subdued tan with black stripes; IDs difficult, especially for nymphs, but possibly more Red-legged and maybe Two-striped Grasshoppers?

Assorted grasshopper nymphs

I saw several grasshoppers holding themselves high off the pavement, as if to try to keep their bodies cool from the sun-baked surface:

And finally one more individual that looked just a little different, with wonderful dark mottling and grassy green stripes highlighting its wings and pronotum, with a fainter wash of green on the face and femur. Tentatively a Slant-faced Pasture Grasshopper (Orphulella speciosa), though the slant of its face doesn't appear nearly as extreme as that of the Admirable Grasshopper! 

Slant-faced Pasture Grasshopper

Circling around to the boat ramp area where the grasses and forbs reached far overhead, much taller than the low grasses along the trail, the grasshoppers continued their popcorn leaps. The height of the greenery brought many of the leggy arthropods up to eye level or higher, a unique opportunity for us to eyeball each other on equal footing: their inscrutably faceted compound eyes and my watery orbs in contemplation at the vastly different ways we experience the same world.

* As a non-expert, I have attempted to verify as closely as possible with resources at hand, including iNaturalist and those listed below, but welcome corrections and alternative suggestions!

Resources/Additional Reading:

• Field Guide to Common Western Grasshoppers
• BugGuide

Opting out of the attention economy

In a world where everything has become transactional...where everything is an opportunity to make a buck or to sell a product, from politicians selling legislation in exchange for campaign donations down to a podcaster rapturously offering paeans in service of the latest supplement or gadget to service their advertisers, our attention one of the most valuable products of all.

That's why it feels joyously transgressive to opt out for an hour or two, and give your attention to nature, who asks for nothing in exchange. To the contrary: our money is no good with nature. There is no price you can pay to get a rain shower or a sunny sky. You can't order up a nice warbler or fritillary on demand. They show up when they show up. You can increase your chances of encounters if you take the time to get to know the rhythms and ways of the nature, but that, too, takes an investment more valuable than dollars. 

Each summer, as the heat presses in August, the smartweeds begin to bloom in colors from a dirty white to a shocking hot pink, half a dozen different species or more found along the trail and in the wetlands. The tiny flowers attract equally tiny bees, flies, ants. 

Maybe it's their humble stature, or the lack of attention they get in comparison to bigger, more charismatic flowers, or the extravagant carnation-pink hues against their elegant green leaves...but I'm inordinately fond of these little plants. 

That's why I was delighted to spot the telltale flower in a new (to me) spot along the trail. And even better...what is that bunch of dead hanging off the inflorescence? Could it be...a Camouflaged Looper?! One of my favorite invertebrates, on one of my favorite flowers. 

Sources note that Camouflaged Loopers often, though not exclusively,  use members of Asteraceae, or Composite, family of flowers (like coneflowers, Silphiums, and daisies) as a host. It was particularly fun to know that they also appreciate smartweeds' Polygonaceae family. 

I can't go down to the local nursery and buy a flowering smartweed. And I definitely can't order up a Camouflaged Looper to decorate it. The smartweed doesn't want anything from me except to be left alone to do its smartweed thing. Same for the looper. 

They don't even want our attention. 

Fuzz on the Ratibida: a mystery

Every summer I eagerly await the return of the Gray-headed Coneflowers (Ratibida pinnata), not just because they are beautiful and prolific bloomers, but also because they host a huge variety of pollinators and other insect life—including my beloved Camouflaged Loopers. 

Said loopers are one of the reasons I will stop and closely inspect any slight aberration on the head of a flowering Ratibida. Sometimes it is just an errant yellow ray floret, twisted up at an angle, or a sneaky ambush bug lurking until its unsuspecting lunch shows up, or maybe some warty-looking galls. But on lucky days, I find a little Camouflaged Looper in its petaled finery. 

Last summer I noticed many Ratibida that had clumps of yellow thready material tangled among the brown disc florets: 

It appeared as if the pollen-carrying anthers (stamens?) from the florets had been pulled out and collected together in a mass. What was causing this phenomenon? Could a bee or other pollinator be collecting them, purposely or inadvertently, and discarding them as they snagged on the florets?

Stumped, I took my question to the IOWA-NATIVE-PLANTS listserv (always an amazingly friendly and helpful group), which yielded several theories but also a general puzzlement as well. Perhaps a bit of webbing was visible that would indicate an arachnid origin, or maybe some kind of fungal growth? But alas, no definitive answer surfaced. After a stretch of rainy weather, I failed to locate the mysterious clumps again for closer inspection that summer.

Skipping ahead to this summer, around the same time, I again found the yellow clumps during routine Ratibida inspections! This time, I broke off one of the flowerheads and brought it home for a deep dive into the mass. With my trusty 10x magnification loupe, I thought there might be something visible beneath the fuzz, just a hint of something pale amid the brown florets:

Gently teasing away the threads caused whatever was under them to retreat into the forest of florets. A tiny worm! Caterpillar? Something....

Again gently, I prodded the critter closer to the surface for a better look. Definitely a caterpillar, and did it have bits of pollen and florets stuck to it? Could it be....a super-tiny early Camouflaged Looper?!

iNaturalist's suggested ID supports the suspicion. The Camouflaged Loopers I'd encountered previously were small—maybe 1.5 cm long?—but readily visible. These? Super tiny. Each of those brown disc florets in the photos above are maybe 1 mm across, so the caterpillar itself was perhaps .5 cm? 

What caused it to collect the yellow thready clump? Was it a purposeful effort at concealment? Or maybe more likely did the threads just snag on the assorted protuberances and edges of the caterpillar's body as it moved around the flower? Or was excavating the caterpillar beneath the fuzz merely a coincidence, and the fuzz was caused by something else entirely?

I'll have to again be on the lookout for bits of fuzz on the Ratibida to see if the discovery can be replicated. Regardless, what a fun demonstration of what there is to see right along the trail if you slow down to look!

Note also the even tinier critters scampering around the Ratibida florets!

Sources/Additional Reading

• The Prairie Ecologist: My favorite insect further endears itself to me
• Missouri Department of Conservation: Wavy-lined Emerald
• BugGuide: Species Synchlora aerata - Wavy-lined Emerald

No such thing as a free lunch...

 

Beetle socks? Clown shoes? What is going on with this Margined Leatherwing's little feets and their coordinating attachments?

With difficulty, it walked along the leaf margin like a dog reluctantly wearing shoes, lifting and shaking its legs in an attempt to unencumber itself from these orange globs. 

For a bit, it attempted to use its mandibles to loosen them...

with limited success, before with a short flight returning to the source of its discomfort:

Beautiful, fragrant Common Milkweed flowers have a fascinating structure. Upon blooming, the petals of the flower fold downward, forming a kind of skirt below the corona, which is where all the action happens.

Each corona has five "hoods" that hold the nectar pollinators so desire—nothing tricky there. But in between those hoods are slits into which the leg of a butterfly, fly, bee, or beetle may slip. When the leg is pulled out, it may catch a structure called the corpusculum, from which dangle a pair of pollen packets called pollinia. 

If an insect successfully extracts its leg, pollinia and all, its continued foraging on other milkweed flowers will hopefully (for the milkweed at least) bring the pollinia into contact with another slit. A pollinium thus delivered can slip into the "stigmatic chamber" contained inside, where it will make contact with the stigma and fertilize the flower.  

This process can be dangerous for the insect: sometimes their leg may become stuck and they may lose it...or even perish if they are unable to get free. Our Margined Leatherwing, fortunately, has so far escaped that fate.

Sources/Additional Reading:

• The Story of an Organism: Common Milkweed
• Milkweed Pollination: A Series of Fortunate Events

A shortgrass prairie plant in a tallgrass prairie state

A little tumbling flower beetle (Mordella spp., tentative)
on a spike of Buffalograss.

As you walk along the trail, look down and you're apt to see the flower spikes of low-growing Buffalograss, a beautiful native grass with fine blades that may have more of a blue or gray tinge to them than the surrounding grasses. 

A drought-resistant denizen of the shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains, Buffalograss tops out at around five inches — quite a contrast to the flashy tallgrass specimens of Big Bluestem or Indiangrass, both of which regularly reach six feet tall. It is an important food source for bison and other mammals, hence the common name, and many grasshoppers, including the Admirable Grasshopper, Syrbula admirabilis. 

What a pretty grass!
Male flowering spike of Buffalograss.

Buffalograss is generally dioecious, meaning male and female flowers are found on separate individuals. The conspicuous male flowers are held above the grass on short spikelets, which are arranged on a spike that has been described as resembling a comb or eyelash. To see the female flowers, you have to get down on the ground and look closely (so closely, perhaps, that your behavior prompts a kind passing cyclist stop to make sure you aren't in need of assistance). The seed-producing female flowers grow closer to the base of the plant, with reddish-purple styles to catch the wind-distributed pollen from those male flowers up above. 

Most other grasses hold their seeds high above, making for easy distribution. Why does Buffalograss tuck theirs way down low to the ground? Some sources mention that the low profile helps prevent the seeds from being munched and destroyed by the bison and other browsers who find the grass so palatable. Other sources note that its placement encourages consumption by bison, whose digestive process helps break down the seed's coating, and deposits it in a rich bed of fertilizer. 

Tiny, hidden female flowers of Buffalograss grow low to the ground.

Sources/Additional Reading

• Illinois Wildflowers: Buffalo Grass
• Minnesota Wildflowers: Buffalo Grass
• USDA Plant Guide: Buffalograss
• A Wandering Botanist: Plant story: the amazing buffalograss, Buchloë dactyloides

The Crepitator

 zzzzt 

There it was again. I had noted the sound for several days as I walked along the trail: a soft buzzing, so faint and sporadic it could have been a gentle breeze making a piece of grass vibrate like a reed.  But recurring frequently enough that I suspected an arthropod origin. So I walked on. And I listened.

zzzzt  

And again. The same sound, the same duration. Too far away to investigate though: meters away from the trail. I walked on. 

zzzzt  

I stop. Peer intently into the tall, dry grass but see no movement. The sounds doesn't repeat. I walked on.

zzzzt     zzzzt             zzzzt  

I freeze. The sound came from three different points around me, in quick succession.

zzzzt     zzzzt             zzzzt  

And again! Definitely not wind and grass, responding to itself from multiple locations. I creep toward the sound of the nearest zzzzt  and stand motionless but for my eyes, which scanned and darted in search of the slightest movement. And then....

zzzzt 

I catch movement coinciding with the sound, a reasonably large insect flying a short distance low to the ground, landing in an area where the grass had been tamped down enough to get a good view. I crept closer. I sidled silently. I squatted...awkwardly. 

Got him!

Look at that big boy! With fully-developed wings already in late April, it must be one of the few grasshoppers that overwinters as a nymph or adult, as the majority of species overwintering as eggs would emerge as tiny nymphs and require several weeks to reach adulthood. iNaturalist suggests Green-striped Grasshopper, Chortophaga viridifasciata.

This widespread grasshopper tends to live in moist, grassy areas; their diet, unsurprisingly, is a variety of grasses, including foxtail barley and Kentucky bluegrass. It does indeed overwinter as a later-stage nymph, after hatching from eggs towards the end of summer (which is when many other grasshopper species are in full-blown adulthood). They will become dormant through the cold months, emerging in March as the days become longer.

The zzzzt sound, called crepitation, is made by their wings rubbing together; the Green-striped Grasshopper may crepitate regularly during flight, with males also crepitating to attract females. An interested female will approach, crepitating herself before they woo each other with a seductive femur-tipping dance.

But what about that name? Striped, sure...I guess I can see that. But green? Chortophaga viridifasciata actually comes in two colors: green or brown. Females are generally green, with males normally brown...though both sexes can come in either color (I am calling this one "big boy" but I can't declare with 100% certainty it is actually a boy). 

Check out the interesting stripe through the compound eye!

And listen closely for the soft zzzzts (you can hear them fairly clearly at 0:00:03, 0:00::06, and around 0:00:20):

Sources/Additional Reading:

• BugGuide: Species Chortophaga viridifasciata - Green-striped Grasshopper
• Grasshoppers of Wyoming and the West: Greenstriped Grasshopper

Goblet Mosses

After the last post's exploration of the springtails and other delights to be found by closely examining mosses, last week brought a crazy eruption in some of the mosses growing in the gravel Lehman Ave. extension near the Sycamore Apartments. 

Goblet mosses, or urn mosses (tentatively Physcomitrium pyriforme), are fairly subtle for most of the year, but when they are ready to release their spores in the spring, they produce bladderlike capsules atop thin stalks that are a little more eye-catching (relatively, as mosses go, I suppose). Like other mosses, their lifecycle is quite different from what we might imagine based on most of the plants we encounter.*

A cluster of balloon-like sporophytes.

Mosses are non-vascular, non-flowering plants that have two basic life phases:

1. Gametophyte generation. This is what we normally picture when we imagine moss: the plain, low-growing mats of tiny leaves. It is a haploid generation** that will produce shoots bearing either an archegonium that contains eggs or an antheridium that produces sperm. Water, via rainfall or other methods, can help the sperm make its way to an awaiting egg. Once fertilized, the moss will transition to its
2. Sporophyte generation. This diploid generation is names after its sporophyte, the structure that carries and later releases its haploid spores to the world, which will grow into a new gametophyte generation and start the process all over again. 

The balloonlike capsules here are the sporophytes, held up by the stalk, technically called the seta. The cup-like capsule has a lid (the operculum) that will fall away and allow the spores to disperse. 

While we eagerly await the spring flowers and shows reproductive organs, it's a neat reminder that there are many other reproductive strategies in the world of plants.

Threadlike setae hold the sporophytes aloft.

*Did I resort to searching "moss lifecycle for dummies" in researching this? Yes I did. 

**  If you remember high school biology, haploid refers a cell or organism with just a single set of chromosomes. Our gametes—reproductive cells like sperm and egg—are haploid, each containing a single set of the chromosomes that combine into a diploid cell with two complete sets of chromosomes. 

Resources/Additional Reading:

• Urn Moss (Goblet Moss). Missouri Department of Conservation.
• Goblet Moss. Illinois Wildflowers.

"Who cares about tiny non-insects...?"

 If you had any idea the number of photos I take on the Greenway every time I go out, compared to the number of photos I actually share, you would be forgiven for thinking I'm a truly terrible photographer who happens to catch a few lucky shots here and there. The sheer volume of photos (thank goodness for digital cameras) that are out of focus alone... but also those that capture a bird looking the wrong way or flying out of frame, or a breeze blowing a flower and its insect passenger aside just as I click the button, or the interesting-looking thing off in the distance that turns out to be a clod of dirt. Embarrassing. 

But sometimes, sometimes...those wasted shots turn out to be a little more interesting than they seem at first glance. 

Take this one:

Okay. Moss. It's fairly green for the middle of January, which is kind of nice. The rocks and twigs lend a little bit of texture and visual interest. But zooming in, it's not too crisp and just kind of meh. Delete.

But hang on—what was that? Just a glimpse as the deleted image disappeared off my screen. Fortunately I still had the backup file....zoom in....

Who are those?! Chunky little gray-blue bodies with plump abdomens, segmented like tiny Michelin men, out and about on a below-freezing Iowa afternoon. Scrolling back and forth yielded several more:

Springtails? I'd encountered similar chubby soft bodies previously on the Greenway, in a watery area near the Great Snail Crossing. iNaturalist suggested several types of springtail as an ID, including Moss Springtail (Neanura muscorum, which seems to be native to Europe, introduced in the U.S.) and Hypogastrura, a genus with dozens of species including several that "are active in winter and are called 'snow fleas'", according to BugGuide. Barely being able to see them, much less notice such diagnostics as furca length (?), anal spines (!), and number of "ocelli in each eyepatch", I shall have to leave the ID at "some kind of springtail, maybe Hypogastrura."

Who cares about tiny non-insects that you can barely see? — Anyone who wants nature to work! 

— Missouri Dept. of Conservation 

Springtails are hexapod arthropods, but not insects; like insects, they have six legs and three main body parts (head, thorax, abdomen), but they lack wings and have internal mouthparts rather than the external mouthparts of insects. They are tiny, usually just a couple of millimeters long, and they tend to hang around moist areas where they will eat decaying plant matter, mold and fungus, and assorted other organic detritus (they are also often cited as an excellent "cleanup crew" for terrariums).

The common name "springtail" comes from their furcula, a forked "tail" normally held tucked beneath their abdomen that can be deployed to fling them several inches into the air when they are bothered (imagine one of those spring-loaded mousetraps that jump into the air when triggered— but it would have to jump more than 16 feet in the air to proportionally equal the "spring" of a springtail!).

So next time you are out and about and think there's not much to see...slow down and take a very close look at moist areas: under logs on the ground, mossy patches, water surfaces. You might find a little neighborhood of life you had no idea was there! 

Watch springtails jump:

Resources/Additional Reading

• Missouri Department of Conservation: Springtails
• University of Minnesota Extension: Springtails
• Ohio State University Extension: Springtails
• Virginia Cooperative Extension
• A Chaos of Delight - lots of delightful information and photos showing the huge variety of springtails