Monarchs and California golden poppies...Color them orange...Color them bold...Color them beautiful...

And color them natives...

The California golden poppy, Eschscholzia californica, California's state flower, is popping up all over, while monarchs, Danaus plexippus, are winging their way inland from their overwintering sites along the California coast.

The overwintering population in California dropped this year by 30 percent as compared to last year, according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. The stormy weather didn't help.

"The 27th annual Thanksgiving count ran from November 11 through December 3, 2023, totaling 233,394 butterflies across 256 overwintering sites in the western United States," Xerces reports on its website. "This tally is slightly lower than last year's (330,000), yet similar to the 2021 count. The overwintering population of western monarchs remains at approximately 5% of its size in the 1980s."

Overall, habitat loss and increased use of pesticides and herbicides continue to be key factors in the decline of the monarch population.

Interestingly enough, both monarchs and California golden poppies are toxic. "All parts of the (California golden poppy) plant have toxic properties if ingested," according to the State of California Capitol Museum website. And, as we all know, monarchs are toxic. As caterpillars, monarchs sequester or store toxins from milkweed, and those toxins help protect them from predators. The coloring is also a deterrent. 

Two natives, toxic, but beautiful...

Ever seen a lagoon fly? 

It's a syrphid fly, Eristalinus aeneus, distinguished by small black spots patterning its eyes. Syrphids, also known hoverflies or flower flies, hover over a flower before foraging. They're pollinators.

Native to Europe and widespread throughout Europe and the United States, it draws its common name from its habitat of lagoons, ponds, slow-moving rivers, streams and irrigation ditches.

This little pollinator (below) took a liking to our Virginia stock (Malcolmia maritima). It competed with a few honey bees, but kept low. 

The lagoon fly is a common research subject. Recently a team of international researchers (University of Wisconsin, Sweden, Australia and India) published their work, "Innate Floral Object Identification in the Generalist Solitary Hoverfly Pollinator Eristalinus aeneus," in BioRxiv, the preprint server for biology. 

The abstract:

"All animals must locate and identify food for their survival. Most insects are solitary. Newly emerged solitary insects must therefore employ innate identification of food cues to locate relevant nutritive objects from a distance. Innate preferences for food cues should be both specific enough to allow discrimination between food and non-food objects and general enough to allow for the variety of food objects relevant to each species' ecology. How insects with small nervous systems are able to encode these cues innately is an area of intense study for ecologists and neuroscientists alike. Here, we used the solitary generalist pollinator Eristalinus aeneus to understand how the innate search template used to identify multiple floral species can arise through a small number of sensory cues spanning multiple modalities. We found that innate floral choices of the hoverfly E. aeneus are a product of contextual integration of broad, plant-based olfactory cues and visual cues, where a combination of radial symmetry and reflection in the 500-700 nm wavelength range was particularly important. Our study, therefore, shows how tiny brains can efficiently encode multimodal cues to identify multiple relevant objects without prior experience."

The research originates from The NICE Lab, which stands for Naturalist-Inspired Chemical Ecology (corresponding authors: Aditi Mishra, at aditi@nicelab.science, and Shannon Olson at shannon@nicelab.science).

You got to love the NICE website: "We are creative, dedicated, and adventurous. We are NICE." And when they recruit they ask "Are you NICE?"

If you've been pruning bushes or trees, check to see if a praying mantis egg case (ootheca) is attached to a limb.

If you do, you're in luck! 

A mantis deposits her egg case in late summer or fall, and usually on twigs, stems, a wooden stake or fence slat, but sometimes even on a clothespin.  

The nymphs emerge in early spring. 

The hard egg capsule protects the future offspring from "microorganisms, parasitoids, predators, and weather," Wikipedia tells us. The ootheca "maintains a stable water balance through variation in its surface, as it is porous in dry climates to protect against desiccation, and smooth in wet climates to protect against oversaturation. Its composition and appearance vary depending on species and environment."

Meanwhile we've been watching a neighbor's gift: an ootheca attached to redbud twig. With any luck, we expect the nymphs to emerge around April 9, weather permitting.

Back in 2022--April 9th to be exact--we were delighted to see some 150 nymphs emerge from the clothespin just a'hanging on the line. Of course, the sisters and brothers ate one another. Only a handful survived.

It's survival of the fittest. Or the fleetist. Or maybe just luck?

A gray butterfly and a fruit fly...

Each has "fly" in its name but one is a member of the order Lepidoptera and the other, order Diptera. Etymology does not agree with entomology. 

Ever managed to photograph a butterfly and fruit fly in the same image?

Presenting: a gray hairstreak butterfly, Strymon melinus,  and a fruit fly, Neotephritis finalis, an organism commonly known as  "the sunflower seed maggot." 

They were foraging March 21 in a Vacaville garden on Coreopsis, a genus of flowering plants in Asteraceae. 

N. finalis, one of the most commonly seen fruit flies (tephritids) flies in North America. develops in the seed heads of plants in the sunflower family. They're also called "picture-winged flies."  BugGuide.net tells us "Wings are mostly dark in apical half with six hyaline spots forming a distinct triangle."

The wings are indeed striking!

But so are the wings of the gray hairstreak butterfly. That orange spot with a black dot on the hindwing probably resembles an eye to a predator.

Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus, says on his research website that the gray hairstreak "is one of the most polyphagous butterflies known, recorded on host plants in many families. Its most frequent hosts in our area are mallows, including the weedy species of Malva; legumes, including Spanish Lotus (Lotus purshianus), Bird's-Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), White Clover (Trifolium repens) in lawns, Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) and many others; and Turkey Mullein (Eremocarpus or Croton setigerus, Euphorbiaceae)."

Maybe we'll see the butterfly and the fruit fly again...