Sections

To begin the post I have a small entomological anecdote to share: Last summer I was told about a very small island in a Swedish lake. The island was not often visited but humans (or probably much other wildlife) because it was supposedly teeming with ants. Whilst I don’t know much about ants, this seemed a bit improbable and I wondered what they would eat.

This summer I had the opportunity to visit this island. The stories were true. My visit was brief and I should have worn different clothes. Being in a small rowing boat with ants in your pants is not fun!

I have never seen so many ants on almost anything. There were ants all over the ground, all the low vegetation and on the tree trunks.

Unfortunately, in my haste to leave I forgot to take any specimens. I would guess that they were a Formica species but would need to go back and confirm. Does anyone have some good suggestions for keeping ants at bay?

Anyway, autumn is definitely underway here. It’s dark when I get home from work, the leaves are changing colour and I have started packing my waterproof jacket for the inevitable rain.

My summer has been incredibly busy and that’s one of the poor reasons I have not written recently. The more important reason is due to changing jobs, where it matters more if I identify myself online, especially entomologically. Thankfully, I think I’ll have the latter reason resolved soon.

Entomologically, this summer has been action packed. I have been to many interesting sites and seen more new insects that any other year.

North Thames/Stanford-le-Hope Marshes - One of the more interesting sites which has a salt marsh area.

Soon my insect photo count will breach the 1,000 mark! I even managed to do a little insect hunting in Sweden and saw one of the world’s oldest tractors :)

Ferguson Tractor

In previous years I remember feeling somewhat sad when summer ended and the insect season was finishing. Right now I am looking forward to sorting out my insect records, investigating photographic metadata and catching up on some reading!

My April holidays have ended and I am back at work. I spent a lot of time in the garden, digging vegetable beds and constructing some pallet-based compost bins.

Whilst last week was fairly rainy, the previous week had some nice sunny days so there was plenty of insect activity. I have seen much more insect variety, with various flies, butterflies and bees on the wing.

The holidays seem to use my time faster than when I am working so I will just post some spring insect photos for now:

Anthophora plumipes (male).

A leafhopper, Euscelis incisus.

A lateral fly shot, probably a bluebottle.

A few weekends ago I visited Wicken Fen, the UK’s oldest nature reserve. Since it was first bought in 1899 by the National Trust, the area of the reserve has increased from 0.008km² (2 acres) to 7.7km², and the trust plans to buy more of the surrounding land to enlarge it further.

Wicken Fen

The habitat of the reserve is a remnant of the formerly vast Cambridgeshire fenlands, land which is now used almost entirely (99.9%) for farming. The fen has long been a place of interest for entomologists, and continues to be so: as well as being species rich, the British Dragonfly Society will be opening a dragonfly center at the fen later in the year.

Even though I visited early in the year, the weather was nice and sunny, and I saw many insect species for the first time. On the start of our walk my girlfriend found a prowling water scorpion, Nepa cinerea, which was an exciting first Heteropteran bug of the year! This was also my first proper opportunity to use my new macro lens, and although I am still learning many basics, I was happy with most of the photos I took.

Water scoprion, Nepa cinerea

Some other firsts for me was seeing a slender groundhopper, Tetrix subulata, and a 24-spot ladybird, Subcoccinella 24-punctata. Whilst my girlfriend is (fortunately) fond of insects, she was particularly excited to see a common lizard, Zootoca vivipara, basking in the sun.

Common lizard, Zootoca vivipara

On the way back I saw many mining bees, Andrena clarkella, digging their burrows around an oak tree.

Mining bee, Adrena clarkella

I am hoping to visit Wicken Fen again soon, perhaps during my next holiday.

These photos are slightly delayed because I formated my computer over the weekend, replaced some parts and switched from taking jpegs to raw images. The aquisition of a larger capacity memory card and hard drive has meant that storage space is less of a concern, at least for now!

I posted the bee photos on Flickr a few days ago, hoping that some of my contacts would help with identifications, which they did – thanks Tristan.

I saw two species of Adrena but have yet to identify them, and one species of bumblebee, Bombus terrestris. Aside from some Diptera, this was all that I encountered.

Andrena sp. on lesser celandine. This was a very small bee, around 5-7mm.

Another Andrena sp. (male). There were a lot of these in the same place, on the bark of the tree and around the surrounding earth. At one point there were over ten of them.

If the weather is good tomorrow I will visit Langdon Hills again.

The larvae and pupae of Maculinea rebeli (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae), a threatened blue butterfly, produce a scent made by red ant larvae (Myrmica sp.) allowing them to infiltrate the nest. Researchers found that the larvae and pupae also make a ticking sound which mimics the song of a red ant queen, causing the ant workers to give the developing butterfly preferential treatment and protection (Barbero et al, 2009).

The original article (abstract only) was published in Science but you can read a summary on the New Scientist website.

Reference:

Barbero F., Thomas J.A., Bonelli S., Balletto E. and Schönrogge K. (2009) Queen Ants Make Distinctive Sounds That Are Mimicked by a Butterfly Social Parasite. Science 323: 782-785

ScienceDaily continues to be a good source of insect-related news with one particular study catching my eye earlier this week:

A recent study by Gross et al (2009) looked at the counting ability of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, by using a series of numerical patterns in branched mazes. The researchers found that bees trained with a sugar reward could tell the difference between patterns containing two or three elements by counting, rather than remembering the patterns. For a control the researchers altered the colour and layout of the elements in the patterns.

Without any further training the researchers found that the bees could differentiate between patterns containing three or four elements but could not differentiate between four and five, or four and six.

The authors also note that “this is the first report of number-based visual generalisation by an invertebrate”.

I wonder if octopuses can count…

Reference:

Gross H.J., Pahl M., Si A., Zhu H., Tautz J. and Zhang S. (2009) Number-Based Visual Generalisation in the Honeybee. PLoS ONE 4(1): e4263. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004263

An article on ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) joins two other (Chrysiridia rhipheus and cochineal/Dactylopius coccus) insect related featured articles on Wikipedia.

The Biology section of the featured articles is dominated by dinosaurs and things with feathers or fur and needs more insect content!

Spore is a game that is built around creating your own content and sharing it with others. Whilst there are some aspects of the game that I wish had more depth I still have fun making creatures in the editor (and later populating worlds with them).

Today I decided to try and recreate Rhogogaster viridis, a sawfly (Hymenoptera: Tenthredinidae) which you can see in a photograph from an earlier post.

I began with a basic body shape by altering the initial randomly generated one and adding some eyes.

Creating an insect body in Spore

I then altered the colour a little to add some black before attaching some legs, mouthparts and antennae.

A Spore sawfly with legs, antennae and mouthparts.

The final body part to add were the wings which completes the Spore sawfly!

Rhogoviridis - a sawfly made in Spore

Whilst it’s not quite a perfect likeness I think it’s pretty close.

Expect to see more Spore insects.

I was checking the BWARS website for 2009 events and found a link to Hymettus, a website for the conservation of British and Irish Hymenoptera.

They have conservation information sheets for bumble bees, a grassland cuckoo bee (Nomada armata) and a saltmarsh bee (Colletes halophilus). These information sheets contain some general biology, the conservation status and global and local distribution. They also have reports which cover a range of species.

If you’re interested in insect conservation or Hymenoptera then you should have a look at the website.