Here's the follow-up from last week's post: Rereading, I realize that
could have been better written. I described the scorched earth along Route 23 for people who'd been there, and thus omitted a crucial detail. Every yard of this roadside was not equally poisoned. Real moonscapes where everything had been killed appeared along guardrails. Selective spraying of bigger plants was visible along other segments (about as long as city blocks) on the three-mile roadside I described. There were greenish patches and browned-out patches.
During the past week, after the storms we've had hot humid weather, the kind we normally get in late July or early August but had missed this year. (We have still not had a true Code Red Day! All summer long!) That was what some plants had been waiting for; and although most plants are harmed by glyphosate, some plants react to it (and to other "herbicides" that haven't completely killed the roots) with bursts of explosive, aggressive regrowth.
As a result, the eastbound side of miles 4-7 on Route 23 now has a weird, patchy look. Here, with predictable swirl effects, is the best I could do toward documenting it with a cheap cell phone camera. You still see scorched earth along the guardrail, but in this particular spot you can see positively lush regrowth with all your favorite late-summer flowers, not far away!
That's goldenrod...one of my favorites,'cos people used to blame it for my hayfever and asthma and it is so not an allergy trigger for me, but not necessarily one of your favorites,'cos it is a weed that crowds out garden plants and it does trigger some people's allergies. It felt the burn from the poisoning nearby. Close up you can see a few withered leaves. But it's roaring back. So are the other roadside standards I missed last week. Chicory, Ladies' Bedstraw (so called because it smells the way good perfumes try to smell), daisies, Queen Anne's Lace, wild sunflowers, native vetches, jewelweed (both orange and yellow), petunias, dandelions, late honeysuckle and red clover, morning glories, kudzu, a few early asters, had all been blooming slowly or not at all before poisoning, then withered by poisoning, but oh how they're roaring back now. Along some stretches of Route 23 the blue, yellow, pink, and orange are positively screaming at each other. If you can't be here later for the leaf peeping, you might want to drive through now for the flowers.
Along those guardrails...you can actually see a few things starting to grow back. Spanish Needle's preliminary rosettes appeared first but wild garlic, dandelions, and convolvuli grow fastest. But don't eat any of those wild garlic and dandelions, delicious though young sprouts of both species are when they pop up in your unsprayed not-a-lawn at home. They are cleaning poison out of the soil along Route 23 and are probably poisonous enough to send some people to the hospital.
The convolvulus varieties called bindweeds, or "bad bindweed," grow much faster than the varieties called morning glories, which have prettier flowers. I saw two varieties of bindweed and three of morning glory blossoms. More about this large family of flowering vines:
When you poison anything, even with natural
disease germs that affect some other lifeforms but are harmles to humans, you always see more of the unwelcome
lifeforms sooner than you see more valuable species that are vulnerable to the
same toxin or pathogen.
Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, nobody wants to
see heirloom orchards and historic forests munched up by the unlovable larvae
of Lymantria dispar, the Dreaded
Gyps, so various bacteria and virus cultures have been cultivated for the
purpose of making Dreaded Gyps sick. These are diseases that caterpillars
naturally get; human interference is being limited to collecting and
concentrating the pathogenic microorganisms so that more caterpillars succumb
to these diseases. Caterpillars are alien enough from birds and animals that
most of the diseases they get do not affect most of their natural predators.
Predators are important because the only real
problem with the gyps is that in North America they don’t have enough predators.
Nature controls populations of this over-reproducing species in two ways. In
Europe, where they’re native, birds eat them; and also in Europe trees have
evolved to be less nutritious or even toxic, so that it’s harder for little gyps to survive. In North America, where neither of these natural processes has
had time to occur, humans have to become predators on gyps, which is a
nuisance—even though the most efficient way to do it does not involve handling
either poison or caterpillars.
To control Lymantria
dispar, which is required by law in some parts of the Northeast, you just
look for light brown furballs that adhere to vertical surfaces, showing that
they were not coughed up by a cat. They actually consist of a froth of gypsy
moth eggs covered by the parents’ long loose hair. (Most moths have a lot of
body hair. Gypsy moths are positively furry when they emerge from their
cocoons, but shed most of their hair in the process of fertilizing and laying
eggs.) You scrape this egg mass into a bucket and burn it. You don’t even have
to kill anything that can feel pain.
The Blue Ridge Mountains contain enough acres of
forests that so far nobody has felt confident about recruiting students to
collect all the gypsy moth eggs, although it’s the kind of tedious job that
seems naturally suitable for convicts.
Anyway we’ve had almost a mothless,
butterfly-less, wasp-less year at the Cat Sanctuary. Mainly I’ve missed my
colonies of Polistes fuscatus, which
are almost exclusively insect eaters and, being insects, are vulnerable both to
insect diseases and to nest predation by stinkbugs. If you hate having gnats dive at
your eyes and nose as much as I do, you too can positively warm up to paper
wasps.
I’ve seen only one pair of Tiger Swallowtails, our
state butterfly. Normally there ought to be dozens by early September. They’re
great composters and particularly like slurping up oil-slicked mud; males
gather in masses at polluted puddles and females fly around checking them out.
But not this year.
I’ve seen only three cute little Desmia moths, who eat wild grapevines,
which are native but a nuisance.
I’ve seen none
of the amusing Tiger moths, of which my favorite is Haploidea bipuncta...but I’ve not seen any Isia or Arctia either.
(Then again, I have seen encouraging
numbers of Hyphantria cunea in the
fall, and several caterpillars of a related family that have the English name
“Daggers.” Daggers caterpillars are mostly covered in long pale fur, with a few
ornamental tufts of dark hair that might suggest daggers on a belt.)
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| This cell phone takes bad, bad pictures, even under ideal conditions, but that's the general shape of a Daggers caterpillar crawling on the rim of a water dish. |
I’ve seen no Sphinx moths all year. (Big Sphinx
moths in the genus Manduca are pests;
smaller ones are interesting, with long lives and strong bodies as moths go,
enough sense not to be distracted by lights, and in some species the ability to
hiss or squeak.)
I’ve seen very few of the pretty Zebra
Swallowtails on which pawpaw trees depend for pollination.
I’ve seen none of the smaller dark swallowtails
the female Tigers imitate.
I’ve seen no Tulip Tree Beauties and very few of
the smaller Geometrid moths whose caterpillars are called inchworms.
I’ve seen just a few little dark Skipper
butterflies, none of the Silver-Spotted ones, which can be a nuisance but are
another species of great composters.
I’ve seen one or two Red-Spotted Purples, one or
two Vanessas, but no pairs...and no Fritillaries.
If I’d seen the Hibiscus Leaf Moth in time, I
wouldn’t have seen...actually, only ten or twenty Hibiscus Caterpillars got
past the wrens and cardinals, but as Mother planted only two Hibiscus syriaca that was enough to blast the flowers and defoliate
one of the bushes.
And then on Sunday night I went out looking for
hibiscus caterpillars at night. I didn’t see any. I did see spiders watching
for them, which was sort of heart-warming (I like spiders, and anything else that eats gnats and mosquitoes), and then I also saw the
“Packsaddle.”
Books usually call this caterpillar “Saddleback,”
but its four branching bristles, and the color pattern that suggests a vented
cover, look remarkably like an oldfashioned pack saddle. Funnily enough, when I
was growing up I heard people calling the more common Daggers “Packsaddles”
too, since some of them have four tufts placed at the corners. That may be why
the local common name is not used in the books. If you touch them you'll know the difference. Daggers look spiky, but their soft fur feels almost like a cat's fur. Packsaddles' bristles sting.
Out with the loppers and I brought this nasty
little animal indoors. Packsaddles’ branching bristles are loaded with venom
so, although interesting, they’re another species that needs for humans to be
predators, not poisoners. I didn’t think the local population needed to be
allowed to evolve a taste for hibiscus leaves and I think they always need
encouragement to evolve a preference to stay as far away from humans as they
can get. As with gyps: see one, kill one. They have thick little hides so this
one didn’t seem badly hurt by being picked up in the loppers. (I use loppers to pick thinner-skinned hibiscus caterpillars off the leaves and kill them.)
They’re in a family of moths, the Limacodidae, defined by the
caterpillars’ peculiar feet. Note how smooth its underside looks. The feet have
suckers rather than claws and stick out at its side edges.
More about the Limacodidae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddleback_caterpillar
This specimen of Acharia or Sibine stimulea is in a tin of wax I use for off-grid cooking,
perching on kitchen matches, to illustrate how small it is. I don’t
particularly care that it’s hardly an inch long; if it had got down someone’s neck it could leave more than an inch-long rash. No points for guessing what’s about to become of it.
Most insects have relatively thin exoskeletons so
burning them in a tin of wax is a very efficient, humane way to kill them,
almost as humane as crushing them with sticks or, if one happened to be a bird,
in one’s beak. The Packsaddle, unfortunately, has a thick skin and might have
had half a minute to feel the heat before it stopped quivering and sank down into the melting wax.
Moths and butterflies are so small, with so little
room for brain, that many species display mind-boggling “stupidity”—lack of
perceptions and defenses other animals have. The Packsaddle is able to depend
so completely on its thick skin and venomous bristles that it didn’t try to
escape while being photographed, even when handled (with burnt matches, held
like chopsticks). For this caterpillar, unlike most, standing still and letting itself be gripped is its most effective defense, so nature has not provided it with others.
When transferred from the loppers to the matches
propped up in the wax like candle wicks, it bit into a charred end, spat out a
lump of charcoal, and flopped down onto the solid wax. (I took a picture of its little beady black head biting off an end of a match, but that one came out even worse than these pathetic pictures you see above.) When turned upside down
to display its slick underside it did display a righting reflex (few animals
want to stay upside down), but it didn’t try to move off the wax. Even when I lighted the matches the Packsaddle showed a lack of survival intelligence, a complete reliance on survival instincts that were all wrong for the situation. It clung to the wax as the wax melted under it, quivering but not budging, holding up its bristles.
The appearance of the Packsaddle, Daggers, and Fall
Webworms shows that autumn caterpillars are less affected than spring ones,
which means local populations of moths and butterflies that have two-month life
cycles may begin to recover this fall. Swallowtail caterpillars and inchworms
can be considered fall as well as spring species.
But you notice which species are recovering first! In the fifteen years since Mother
planted the “Rose of Sharon” hibiscus bushes, this is the first time they’ve
attracted a Packsaddle.
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