Wind and rain did not necessarily have anything to do with the demise of the male Eacles imperialis moth who fell out of a tree on Jackson Street. As this web site has noted, the big silk moths don't eat after emerging from their cocoons. They've done all the eating they're going to do, and can live up to a week, during which they can find mates if they're lucky--that's nature's way of keeping them from becoming pests. I don't know how lucky this moth had been but his ragged, faded wings might have been a whole week old.
Wind and rain did, however, blow some caterpillars out of their trees in the orchard. The one I recognized was a baby Tiger Swallowtail, only about an inch long, still drab-colored enough to be mistaken for a bird dropping, active and healthy and moving quite rapidly in search of another tree. Adult Lepidopterae active at the Cat Sanctuary included several Vanessas and a few Desmias. Over the course of the weekend I was drooled on by a friend's dog, and one little Desmia perched on my ankle, slurping up the wet doggie drool.
And, my wasp friends of early summer having died of old age, I noted the first applicant for Jade's position of office mosquito killer over the weekend. She was smaller than Jade, iridesced more of a metallic green than a bluish "jade" green, and had a longer waist. While looking up Jade at the Bug Guide site I'd read the pages about the various species in the genus Isodontia who all look pretty much alike, but are slightly smaller, longer-waisted, shorter-tailed, bigger-headed, and less bluish than the Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter. Their common name is Grass-Carrying Wasps; they mix grass straw with the mud in their nests, especially plugging up holes in wood with clumps of straw when they move into the borings of carpenter bees. Since many carpenter bees have bored into the siding at the Cat Sanctuary I'm sure this Isodontia wasp is a resident of the house, albeit unlikely to make the office her home.
And I think Google noted my comments on the confusion at some insect identification sites last week, because when I searched for a good image of Isodontia to show you, just now, what Google pulled up first was Ohio State University's copyrighted PDF of common wasps, ants, bees, and sawflies. If you allow for the way each species is magnified to fill up its space, so that a centimeter-long harmless Sweat Bee looks as big as a three-inch-long venomous European Hornet, this is a lovely site anyone trying to identify their "native pollinators" should see:
http://wildlife.ohiodnr.gov/portals/wildlife/pdfs/publications/id%20guides/Pub5488_Bees%20and%20Wasps%20of%20Ohio.pdf
The OSU page confirms my observation that "solitary" daubers, like last year's office mates Cobalt and Shimmer, actually (prefer to) live in couples. Males are so much smaller that humans haven't always recognized them as the same species as the females, who like to carry their mates about, sometimes during the mating act, and may bring food to the males who hang around the nests.
But what about Isodontia? Here's a video showing how they may wad up all the straw they bring into their nests inside a cranny, or leave little tufts hanging out as the cranny fills up...
http://bugoftheweek.com/blog/2013/11/11/window-wasps-the-grass-carrying-wasps-iisodontiai-spp
As the blogger known as Michael J. Raupp says, these useful wasps are uninterested in stinging humans. The one I saw didn't even bother with a threat display. It's likely that we've had Isodontias at the Cat Sanctuary in other years and that this year, after the paper wasps have stopped dominating the space and making them nervous, is the first year I've made the time to notice that some of them make more threat displays than others. I grew up thinking that no dauber actually stings but all daubers are nuisances who constantly make threat displays. I was wrong. The family is very diverse--and very useful to humans. There's even a species whose favorite food is stinkbugs; scroll down that OSU page to see them.
Isodontia species can be hard to distinguish. I. philadelphica sounds the most likely to be what I saw: dark, without brownish legs or red or yellow markings, slightly iridescent, reflecting light with more of a blue-green, true green, or even bronze-green gleam than a blue-violet gleam, and having noticeable body hair (when not magnified). Google is not showing me a free photo for I. philadelphica. What's on the Internet for public use is a closely related and confusible species, I. mexicana, which is usually described as flat black but can iridesce blue or green. There's also I. apicalis, with a faint but noticeable halo of whitish body hair, and I. auripes, black with bronze-brown legs. They all have the same body shape, and are all basically black but capable of reflecting blue-green light like a chicken's tail feathers under some lights. The office light has one blue-white fluorescent tube and one yellowish-white "natural-looking" fluorescent tube, so is likely to bring out bluish iridescence on surfaces that might not show it outdoors. (Some other grass-carrying wasp species are red, yellow, or marked with combinations of black, red, and yellow; mine definitely isn't one of those.) I still don't know which species I have.
Here is a photo of I. mexicana, showing that this species typically look brownish black in sunshine, also showing the sort of tassel of grass I sometimes see sticking out of wood around the Cat Sanctuary for what that's worth.
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| By Pjt56 -- Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81047424 |
Around 5:30 p.m., sitting on somebody's front porch, in between singing old songs I heard a commercial blaring out of a TV inside the house: "Attention farm workers! If you have used 'Roundup' and have been diagnosed with cancer or Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma..." Glyphosate lawsuits have moved into prime time.
Around 8:30 p.m., another day, I was indoors watching somebody's television. "Attention farm workers!" blared the commercial. Turning down the commercial, the TV owner said, "I still have some "Roundup." I guess I oughta throw it away."
"Why not take it back and ask for a refund? It's hazardous material."
"But I've already used some of it," said my poor but honest host.
We are winning, Gentle Readers.
I'm still sick--ate a cucumber and a tomato from the garden of someone who swore they had never sprayed their garden, on Friday, and then on Sunday, making matters worse, I ate some potato chips.
And one evening somebody broke out a bottle of V-8 juice. My father and I used to love V-8; we didn't buy it often because we had our own vegetable garden and juicer at home, but for a treat when we were in town, or after Dad went blind and moved into town, we used to drink V-8 instead of soda pop. I passed on the V-8 this time, though, because I knew at least some of the eight vegetables in the mix would have been sprayed with glyphosate. One bold soul drank a whole glass of V-8, though. Ten minutes later he was out on the porch trying to get it back out. Sales of fruit and vegetables are down in the U.S. because one of the non-celiac reactions some people have to high levels of glyphosate is vomiting.
When will it be safe to eat much of anything we did not personally raise? I don't know. Can't happen soon enough. Planters Cocktail Peanuts (not their other products) and M&Ms have been my two safe road food options for a long time, after years when batches of those were contaminated and tweets in which the manufacturers promised to watch for glyphosate poisoning. Lately I've had celiac reactions to both, again; the batches currently in stores are not safe. I don't know for sure about anything. Current batches of some flavors of Zatarain's rice and unflavored Success Brown rice, and Swanson's canned chicken, have not made me sick. Other Zatarain's flavors and store-brand canned chicken have done."Organic" labels may or may not indicate that any given batch of any given food is safe. Even what's grown at the Cat Sanctuary probably contains traces of glyphosate from vapor drift, although that's the only food I can really trust not to contain enough glyphosate to make me sick, and the only food I could confidently recommend to other people.
But things will get better if we carry on--leaving any food that can't be verified 3-G-Free to rot in the stores, teaching farmers that the cost of spraying any kind of poison on food can easily exceed the cost of weeding, and even picking off insects, by hand. And, of course, boycotting all Bayer products until Bayer abandons the "pesticide" business and focusses its team of chemists on the real challenge of building robots that can weed wheat.
Simple visual sensors allow robots to spot many weeds in some crop fields--they can "see" grass as something that does not belong in a lettuce bed. Putting robots on long legs allows them to be small enough to move between plants yet too big to be swallowed by birds...though that wouldn't work with wheat. But wheat looks like grass, grows in dense patches like grass, is infested by weeds in the grass family, and needs to be weeded by something that can detect the chemical difference among weeds that look just like wheat even to human eyes. There has to be a way to build robots that can weed tarnel grass (the biblical "tares") out of wheat, without leaving chemical residues in the wheat.
Any fool can poison plants, and until they're banned from doing so by law any fool probably will poison plants. What should interest Real Scientists is getting the weeds out of wheat fields without poisoning the wheat. It certainly ought to be possible, given the current state of robot technology. It may not be cheap, but it is certain to be more profitable than glyphosate.
Despite the popularity of Star Wars' C3PO, the weeder robots our century needs probably won't have an "android" look. But more expensive weeders marketed to home gardeners could be fabulous...what little girl wouldn't love gardening with a corps of stylishly dressed Weed-Whacker and Bug-Zapper Barbies, each one programmed to destroy a different pest?
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