Readers’ wildlife photos

We now have about four sets of photos, so I’m even more complacent. But please send in yours if you got ’em. Thanks.

Today we have regular Mark Sturtevant with a collection of insects and one vertebrate. Mark’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Readers may remember the recent post where I showed pictures of the dual emergence of 13- and 17-year cicadas during a trip to Illinois. I naturally did not take pictures of only cicadas, and so here are many examples of other insects I found in the parks that I visited. The rest will be in a later post.

First up is a banquet scene of ants feeding on a dead beetle. According to iNaturalist, the ants are a good match for Bearded Carpenter Ants (Camponotus subbarbatus). The picture took many hours to prepare since the ants were constantly moving around and the depth of focus would not capture all that I wanted. So I had to manually assemble some parts of most of the ants from different pictures to recover different focal points. Like focus stacking, only without the automated software that does that for you. I also moved some ants around to improve on the composition. For example, the one on the far left wasn’t where it is now. It’s worth clicking to embiggen this picture because jeez, it was a lot of work!!:

Next up are two pictures showing a bucket list item for me. This little beetle is from the Brentidae weevil family, and I was excited to find it since I don’t recall seeing a beetle from this family before. Weevils are divided into multiple families, but Brentid weevils are considered to be a primitive example of the group, identified by their straight snouts and lack of elbowed antennae. This particular species is the Oak Timberworm (Arrenodes minutus). Do you see the little mites? They were probably phoretic hitch-hikers, using the weevil for dispersal:

The grasshopper shown next is called the Green-legged Spur-Throat Grasshopper, Melanoplus viridipes. This small forest grasshopper has vestigial wings, although I don’t know why. Flightlessness in grasshoppers is more typical in large species where flying is not practical. In any case, they were pretty common in the screaming forest (screaming because of the millions of cicadas above), and it was fun stalking them because they are quite wily, moving to the opposite sides of leaves as I approached. But I snuck up on this one from a distance and this is a heavily cropped picture:

A few Lepidopterans are next. This is the caterpillar of the Hackberry Emperor Butterfly (Asterocampa celtis). Emperor butterflies are exceedingly common along forest margins, but the caterpillars are seldom seen (at least to me). Perhaps they are a species that stays hidden during most of the day. I believe this one was parasitized since it was not looking nor behaving normally. Notice the elaborate head ornamentation:

The butterfly in the next picture is the Question Mark (with the great binomial Polygonia interrogationis). They are close relatives of the similar Comma butterflies. Commas have a single white squiggle (a , ) on their hind wings, but here you can see a squiggle and a dot – so it’s a ?.:

This small moth is aptly named the Pale Beauty (Campaea perlata). One can easily recognize moths from its large family, Geometridae. Geometrids rest with their wings held out flat, and they usually have angular wing margins. The larvae of Geometrids are the familiar inchworms, and they have a distinctive way of crawling that probably everybody has seen:

Next is an odd little insect known as a Hangingfly (Bittacus sp.). Hangingflies look like craneflies, but they have four wings rather than two, and they belong to a completely different insect order. They hang vertically like this, but usually with their hind legs dangling free in order to snag small flying insects out of the air:

What is going on in the next picture? This insect is a plant bug in the family Miridae, and this particular species is Hyaliodes vitripennis. Plant bugs are Hemipterans that feed on sap, but the puzzle here are the eggs. They are Hemipteran eggs by the looks of them, but they seem way too big for this insect to have laid. Still, it showed no interest in moving away from the clutch:

Next up is a Hemipteran that is NOT a sap feeder. This was one of about a dozen hatchling Wheel Bugs (Arilus cristatus) that were milling around on some plants, slowly dispersing after emerging from eggs. Wheel bugs are predators, and are our largest species of assassin bug. You can see something of their eventual size and why they are called Wheel Bugs in the linked picture:

Finally, here is a dozy tree frog, quietly waiting out the day deep in the woods. It should be either Dryophytes chrysoscelis, or D. versicolor, but it is fairly impossible to visually tell them apart and their ranges broadly overlap. If the former species, then it is diploid with conventional pairs of chromosomes. But if it is the latter species, then it will be a tetraploid with four of each chromosome:

Jerry can most definitely correct me here, but this is one way in which a new species can emerge quite rapidly because once a fertile tetraploid population is established, any hybridization between tetraploid individuals and their diploid ancestors will produce triploid offspring, and these are generally sterile.

JAC:  Yes, Mark is right. An increase in ploidy can cause instantaneous reproductive isolation, and is in fact fairly common in plants.  One issue is how a tetraploid species (which could arise from the union of a diploid sperm and egg, or chromosome doubling after fertilization) can actually establish a population.  That usually requires that the new tetraploid species can occupy a different habitat from the progenitor diploid species, for if it’s outcompeted by the progenitor, then there is no ecological isolation and the tetraploid could be “hybridized to death”.