- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Have you seen any Checkered White butterflies lately?
They're quite common in the southern United States and northern Mexico (they're known as the Southern cabbage butterfly), but one CW fluttered through our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Solano County, Calif., on June 23.
It's in the same family, Pieridae, as the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae.
This one, a female Pontia protodice, as identified by butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, seemed to like our lavender.
"There was one laying eggs at Gates Canyon (Vacaville) two weeks ago," Shapiro noted. "This is an immigrant, which occasionally overwinters here--not very recently, though. It lives in the desert, both in SoCal and in Nevada. I don't know which direction these are coming from."
He reported two recently at Lang Crossing (Nevada County) on the Sierran West slope at 5000 feet. "This is probably a significant incursion."
He saw "scads of them" on June 30 in Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County)--clearly breeding there!"
The Checkered Whites "tend to fly in a straighter line than rapae, like it's late for an important date," he quipped. The females have more extensive markings than the males.
On his website, Art's Butterfly World, he points out that:
"In the 1970s this species was often abundant at low elevation along the transect, overwintering only locally and sporadically-mostly on dredge tailings along the American River. It has since become much rarer and in most years is seen only in September and October. At Sierra Valley it overwinters unpredictably but colonizes each year from the desert in May or June, and usually becomes common by late summer. It has been recorded at all sites but is not a permanent resident at any of them at this time!"
"A highly vagile species, the Checkered White breeds on a great variety of Brassicaceous plants, preferring smaller and unsucculent species such as Peppergrasses (Lepidium, but L. latifolium is unpreferred), Tumble Mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum), and the short-lived perennial Hirschfeldia incana (formerly called Brassica geniculata). The eggs are orange, laid conspicuously near the top of the plant, and the larvae, which are striped lengthwise in whitish yellow and greenish gray, feed primarily on buds, flowers and fruit. However, eggs are also often laid on small rosettes, especially if the larger plants in the area are senescent. This is overwhelmingly a species of grassland and steppe and occurs in wooded areas only along roadsides."
Shapiro, who has been monitoring the butterfly population of central California since 1972, says the Checkered White adults visit mustards, composites, legumes "and almost anything else; they are often abundant in irrigated alfalfa and visit its flowers freely. Males patrol in host-plant areas and often mate with teneral females."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No doubt you've seen a praying mantis egg case, or ootheca, on a tree, shrub, fence or post.
But have you ever seen one attached to a clothespin on an outdoor clothes line?
So here we were Thursday afternoon, hanging freshly laundered dog blankets on the clothes line.
We grabbed one clothespin after another, carefully fastening Fido's favorite blankets to the line to dry in the 80-degree temperature.
One more reach....Whoa! What's that?
Can't use that one. There's a ooth on it.
A praying mantis, Stagmomantis limbata, had apparently pinned her hopes to a clothespin. Or maybe that was her PIN number?
"Too funny," commented Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and a UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology. "What a weird place to put your ooth."
Our little gravid gal must have climbed the eight-foot-high clothes pole last fall; walked the line (ala Johnny Cash?); and discovered the "perfect place" to deposit her ooth--right above a patch of Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifola) buzzing with bees and fluttering with butterflies.
"I've seen egg cases on outdoor furniture, predator guards on duck boxes, on buildings between bricks, trees, and even garden implements like pots, watering cans, and tools," said praying mantis expert Andrew Pfeifer, who now studies horticulture/landscape design at North Carolina University. "It's a Stagmomantis limbata ooth for sure; the hatch rate will be 150 or less."
Oothecas don't usually hatch until around June, but with the temperatures soaring here in Vacaville, it could happen "even within the month," Pfeifer says.
In September 2018, we watched a praying mantis deposit her ooth a few feet from that clothesline. That gal chose a redwood stake. (See photos on Bug Squad blog).
Now we wait for the nymphs to emerge...and scramble to eat one another...and prey on bees and butterflies...and the life cycle begins.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
- It's one of the habitats of the California state insect, the California dogface butterfly, Zerene eurydice, and its host plant, false indigo, Amorpha californica--or at least it was before massive wildfire swept through there on Aug. 19, 2020.
- It's one of 10 research sites of butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, who has monitored central California's butterfly populations since 1972 and maintains a research website at https://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/
And now, it's the home of a newly discovered ant species.
Myrmecologists Brendon Boudinot, Marek Borowiec and Matthew Prebus, all alumni of the Phil Ward laboratory, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, just published their collaborative research, "Phylogeny, Evolution, and Classification of the Ant Genus Lasius, the Tribe Lasiini and the Subfamily Formicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)," in the journal Systemic Entomology.
The ant world on Twitter is crawling with congratulatory comments and how "awesome" the work is. Wrote one: "Congratulations! Lasius is a familiar genus in Japan, so I will let the Japanese entomologists know about it."
The story behind the story? It all began in the Ward lab. "The Three Ant Men" are now scattered from Idaho to Arizona to Germany.
- Borowiec, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2016, is an assistant professor at the University of Idaho.
- Prebus, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2018, is a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University.
- Boudinot, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2020, is in Jena, Germany on a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship to research evolutionary and comparative anatomy.
Looking back, Prebus and Borowiec said that they were both interested in Lasius atopus "due to its strange morphology and lack of phylogenetic data despite the amount of attention paid to the genus, and planned a collecting trip to the type locality in Mendocino County in 2013."
The collecting trip to Mendocino proved unsuccessful. "But because of Phil's extensive collections. we knew of a population of a closely related species in Gates Canyon near the city of Vacaville," Prebus said. This time the trio collected specimens from several colonies at Gates Canyon, which is located off Pleasants Valley Road.
"For all of us, this was a collaborative side project, so after the study was presented, submitted, and rejected, it took the back-burner while people finished their dissertations, got jobs, got married, had kids, and so on," Prebus recalled. "Speaking personally, the pandemic put quite a few of my postdoc projects on hold after the Arizona State University campus closed, but the small upside amongst the inundation of downsides was that I was able to focus on getting some long-haul projects into shape for publication, including the Lasius study. This involved a huge amount of reanalysis of data that we had already collected, but thankfully didn't require generating any new data."
See more on the ant research on the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website.
(Note that the 7.8 mile Gates Canyon Road, lined with residential homes (private property) and "no trespassing" signs, is a paved county road that leads to the top of Mount Summit, the highest point in Vacaville. It is narrow and hilly. Hikers, runners, walkers and bicylists consider it a challenge.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The elm leaf beetles and their larvae don't want to hold your hand--unless perhaps you're holding a elm leaf that they can eat.
A recent walk down the 200 block of Buck Avenue, Vacaville, California, revealed the damage this pest does. The stately canopied elms don't look so stately, what with the dry skeletonized leaves, the browning and the dieback.
And if you look closer, you'll see the leaves--the feeding site--dropping prematurely, and beetles and their larvae falling with them.
Infestations of these beetles can defoliate large elm trees, according to the UC Integrated Statewide Management Program's Pest Note on this pest, Xanthogaleruca (=Pyrrhalta) luteola.
Have you ever seen them? They're about 1/4 inch long, yellow to olive-green with a black stripe on each side and four black spots near the head. They are an invasive species from southern Europe, introduced here in the 1800s, and considered the most serious elm defoliator in the United States.
"Females lay yellowish eggs in double rows of about 5 to 25 on the underside of leaves," according to UC IPM. "Eggs become grayish before hatching. Larvae resemble caterpillars and are black when newly hatched and shortly after molting (shedding the old skin). After feeding, larvae become yellowish to green with rows of tiny dark tubercles (projections). Third-instar larvae grow up to 1/3 inch long and have dense rows of dark tubercles down their sides that resemble two black stripes. Pupae are orange to bright yellow."
We observed some natural enemies on site: lady beetles, aka ladybugs, and their larvae munching on the larvae of the elm leaf beetles. Yes, beetle larvae eating beetle larvae. Lady beetles and their larvae target soft-bodied insects, and not just aphids.
UC IPM says:
"The elm leaf beetle develops through four life stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Adults commonly overwinter in bark crevices and woodpiles or in buildings. In spring they fly to elm foliage and chew leaves, and females lay eggs. Eggs hatch into larvae that develop through three instars (growth stages) over a period of several weeks while chewing on foliage and then crawl down the tree trunk. Mature larvae become curled and inactive (a stage referred to as prepupae), then pupate, sometimes in large numbers, around the tree base. After about 10 days as pupae, adults emerge and fly to the canopy to feed and, during spring and summer, lay eggs. The elm leaf beetle has at least one generation a year in northern California and two to three generations in central and southern California."
Elm trees with massive defoliation can weaken the tree and pave the way for diseases and damage from other pests.
If you have elm trees, especially European elm species, and you have these little buggers all over them, you might want to access the UC IPM Pest Notes to see how to manage them.
These beetles mean business.
/span>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It was July 3, 2020.
The male bees, Melissodes agilis, were getting quite territorial.
Every time a butterfly, a honey bee or another insect in our family's pollinator garden expressed an interest in foraging on the Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia rotundifola, a male Melissodes buzzed them.
"Get out of here!" he threatened. "I own these flowers. These are mine!"
What to do? I grabbed my Nikon D500 and 200 mm macro lens, adjusted the settings to 1/5000 of a second, f-stop 5.6, ISO of 800, and managed to get a shot of the menacing bee confronting a bewildered monarch.
Eye-to-eye. Antenna-to-antenna. Wing-to-wing.
What happened? The monarch quickly escaped the wrath.
And the bee? It buzzed off, only to return to target another insect.
"Get out of here! I own these flowers. These are mine!"
Another tiff on the Tithonia. Another round on the rotundifola.
Just another day in the pollinator garden.