PF PHOTO CONTEST - Creepy-crawlies

[physics girl phd]

I'll admit, I love matthyaouw's moth. Mainly because it brings back bad memories. One apartment I lived in (during grad school) had some old (rotting) mulch and pretty old trees outside... and one year the moths went mad for the place. They always managed to slip in behind me too. Fortunately the cat rather liked to eat them, which helped SLIGHTLY in population control. Still... I killed so many of them that snuck into the house that year.

About the only thing that might be worse was the apartment with roaches in undergrad.

Borek's praying mantis is just darling. :!) We use to collect the egg-pods in fall and place them in our front and back bushes. We watched MANY of them right at the moment of hatching. I just find them darling. (Of course I didn't watch the part that resulted in the egg-pods... the famle biting off the hand of the male!)

 

[Borek]

(Of course I didn't watch the part that resulted in the egg-pods... the famle biting off the hand of the male!)

Urban legend. Sometimes female eats male (it may even start during copulation) but that's much less common than believed. I have read somewhere report of biologist researching population of Mantis religiosa in Czech Republic (?). He have seen over 100 pairs engaged in sex, and not a single case of cannibalism.

Truth is that mantids attack everything that moves and can be eaten. Male is usually smaller and qualifies as a meal, so it is at risk, but not doomed.

 

[turbo]

I may have to buy some mantid egg-cases and set them in my garden this summer. Not the very large ones, because I don't want them to target my bumblebees. Since the honeybee die-off, bumblebees are my best pollinators. Once you have seen an assassin-bug fly off with a bumblebee in its grips, you realize that it's not a good idea to have insect predators that are large enough and effective enough to kill your best pollinators.

 

[Borek]

With mantids that's a trade off, they will eat everything, and at least species that I have seen in action are much better at attacking flying insects than those slowly crawling. It is fast movement that catches mantid attention and triggers attack reflex.

At some point I had a problem with feeding mantids, they were too tiny for even smallest crickets that I could buy and I had no more fruit flies, so I tried to use Chironomidae larvae sold as a fish fodder. The hardest part was to make mantid attack them. It turned out that the best way of doing it was to drop the larva close to the matid - it was very fast movement that triggered the attack.

 

[dlgoff]

I would love to have thousands of them in my garden next summer, but they seem to have died off and left the job to tiny bees and bumble-bees.

Yep. But they are starting to make a little comeback here in Kansas. I saw more last summer in my apple trees than I've seen in years. I'm hopeing this summer will be even better.

 

[turbo]

Yep. But they are starting to make a little comeback here in Kansas. I saw more last summer in my apple trees than I've seen in years. I'm hopeing this summer will be even better.

I pray that this happens here, Don. There are no wild honeybees around anywhere. They may have died off before the commercial hives did, and only the business-aspect of the commercial die-off triggered an alarm. I did not see a single honeybee last summer, and one of my nearest neighbors and I have extensive organic gardens with fruit-trees. Yields really stink when the pollinators are ill-adapted to the crops. For example, bumblebees are buzz-pollinators and are excellent at pollinating squash and other crops with big blossoms. They are not so good at pollinating plants with small blossoms that require the insects to negotiate a narrow space in order to get the pollen/nectar, etc, and visit other similar blossoms.

I don't know what's causing all of this, but I live in an area that is heavily dependent on corn-fed dairy cows, and I fear that GM corn with enhanced BT content is killing off hives near those fields. If the BT toxins could be confined to the green parts of the plants, we might be OK, but I fear that the genetic manipulation has been heavy-handed and the BT toxins extend to the pollen, and that bees are taking it home. BT paralyzes the gut of insects that consume it so that they starve.