Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today’s wi8ldlife photos came from Charles Dunlop, who notes that they were taken in Costa Rica in 2019. I’ve indented his brief captions, and my own IDs are in brackets. Some of the animals are unidentified, so feel free to weigh in in the comments. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Charles Dunlop sent some photos with a short intro. His brief IDs (without species names) are below, and click to enlarge the photos. (I’ve linked to species when I can identify them, but readers can help in the comments.)
Attached are some photos that I took in Costa Rica in 2019.
Today we have a text-and-photo essay by reader Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His captions and descriptions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Bubbling sans blubbing
We don’t know much about Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), but it’s safe to assume this Roman polymath was no slacker. Varro wrote about history, theology, philosophy, language, literature, rhetoric, music, medicine, geography, architecture, law and agriculture, including apiculture (the Varroa genus of parasitic mites that plague honey bees was named after him). Near the end of his life, Varro wrote res rusticae (Country Matters), the last of his reported 490 publications. Possibly gripped by a sense of irrevocability about what was soon to come, Varro opens res rusticae with a sentence that says …ut dicitur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex (…as they say, man is a bubble, all the more so is an old man). Varro’s image of life as ephemeral and fragile as a bubble was picked up by the Dutch humanist and philosopher Erasmus (1466-1536), who popularised the saying homo bulla est (man is a bubble). Erasmus in turn hit a chord with baroque Dutch painters who had started the vanitas (futility) movement, a style focussed on depicting the transience of life, the pointlessness of earthly pursuits, the inevitability of death. Vanitas painters were partial to dark environs, extinguished candles, flowers, clocks, hourglasses, skeletons, skulls, and lots of bubbles.
Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish, Mühlbracht 1558–1617 Haarlem) Quis evadet?, 1594 Netherlandish, Engraving; sheet: 8 1/4 x 6 in. (21 x 15.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951 (51.501.4929)
The appeal of this less than cheery theme wasn’t to last: not many art patrons wanted to be reminded of their approaching death every time they looked at a painting on the wall. The Dutch artists needed another source of inspiration. They kept the bubbles, but now depicted as aids to children playing games and having fun – bubbles of a joyful variety instead of portents of oblivion (Kareem, 2005).
To this day, blowing soap bubbles thrills and entertains many a child. But to several bee species, blowing bubbles is no laughing matter.
The great majority of the more than 20,000 known bee species depend on nectar from flowers as their main source of energy. Nectar, secreted by specialised glands (nectaries), contains sugars, mostly glucose, fructose and sucrose. Free amino acids, proteins, minerals and lipids add to the mixture’s nutritional content, although we have only a vague understanding of their workings. Besides bees, wasps, hover flies, mosquitoes, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and bats are among the most enthusiastic consumers of this ready-to-use source of carbohydrates and nitrogen.
The sugar content of flowers from different plants varies considerably, and one could expect bees preferring the sugar-rich ones. But they face a mechanical obstacle: the sweetest nectars offer the greatest energetic rewards, but are hard to extract because of their viscosity. And the longer bees work on the sticky stuff, the more they are exposed to predators. Based on the balance sheet of energetic rewards and costs, sugar concentrations in the 35-65% range seem to be optimal. That suits plants fine, because 40% is the median value of sugar concentration for bee-visited flowers in many habitats and geographic regions (Pamminger et al., 2019).
Nectars with 35 to 65% sugars may be ideal for harvesting, but not so for preventing spoilage and fermentation during long-term storage. Some bees sort out the problem by removing excess water, thus concentrating the nectar. This process is best understood for the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). A worker returning to the hive passes the nectar to one of her sisters by trophallaxis, which is the transfer of food from one individual to another.
The receiving bee regurgitates a bubble of nectar between her mandibles, then swallows it again. The nectar bubble is exposed to the warm air inside the hive and loses some water to evaporation. The bee repeats the process several times, making the nectar more and more concentrated. But the work is not done. The nectar is transferred to the honeycomb, which the bees fan with their wings to further reduce it. When water content is lowered to about 18%, the nectar has turned into a supersaturated sugar solution – or honey to us. Watch a clear and accurate 6’32” summary of honey bees’ amazing comings and goings to produce honey.
Incidentally, the bubbling activity has led some people to assert that honey is bee vomit. Is it? Vomiting is to eject the stomach contents through the mouth, usually as a reflex to some physiological anomaly. Bubbling and other forms of animal regurgitation are regular occurrences with some purpose other than self-protection. Moreover, nectar collected to become honey is not digested or mixed with food. Rather, it is temporarily stored in the bee’s crop (or honey stomach), a pouch located before the stomach proper. So, despite what you read in the social media, honey is not bee puke.
Solitary bees, i.e., those that don’t live in colonies, don’t have large stashes of honey to care for, but several species also blow bubbles to concentrate the nectar. We don’t know for sure why they do it, but by repeated regurgitation and re-ingestion, bees make their nectar more viscous and possibly better suited for storage – just like for honey bees – but also to be transported, mixed with pollen to be fed to their larvae, or used in nest construction (Portman et al., 2023). Watch the superbly named pure gold-green sweat bee (Augochlora pura) pausing her busy life to work on a bubble.
Some flies, which make up another group of bubbling experts, hint at another function of the practice for bees: thermoregulation. The harshly named – despite being an excellent pollinator – oriental latrine fly (Chrysomya megacephala) lowers its body temperature by pushing a gobbet of liquid food in and out of its mouth several times before swallowing it. As the bubble comes out, evaporation lowers its temperature; when sucked in, it cools the fly’s body (Gomes et al., 2018). This form of evaporative cooling is analogous to what panting dogs and ear-flapping elephants do to keep cool.
We don’t know the extent of bubbling among bees, flies and other practitioners such as hawk moths, sawflies and mosquitoes. Whatever its frequency, bubbling is another clever trick that helps insects succeed out there in the wide harsh world.
This is it, folks: I have no reserves of wildlife photos. If you have some good ones, you know what to do. Otherwise, I’ll post ’em as I get ’em.
Today we have a pastiche of photos from three readers. Readers’ commentary is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
The first contribution comes from Patrick May:
A friend of mine is taking care of some orphaned Virginia opossums [Didelphis virginiana]. These nine are due to be released gradually into the wild in a couple of weeks. [Patrick says he’ll send photos of the release; which will take place in central Connecticut, where they were found. This will be in about a week.]
They’re sleeping in three groups of three (and seem to be smiling about it):
Since they’re growing, their favorite activity is eating:
From Sher Hendrickson, a former student of Greg Mayer:
This Daddy Long-legs (Harvestman) is just after molt, and appears to be eating its former “self”. I do believe it is Phalangium opilio. The location is Boonsboro, MD, not too far from your old stomping grounds. I thought it was eating the exoskeleton, but the legs are still hanging from where it was. I suspect what I observed was the process it uses to get the remaining exoskeleton from its body and legs.
JAC: Note that harvestmen are often thought of as spiders, but they’re not. They’re probably more closely related to groups like horseshoe crabs or scorpions than to true spiders.
From Neil Jones, who is using his new camera and doing good work for conservation. The photo was taken at Caeau Ffos Fach (Little Ditch Fields) near Cross hands in South Wales.
This mating pair of Ringlet butterflies (Aphantopus hyperanthus) landed on my hand. It almost seems they knew I was a friend as I persuaded the British charity Butterfly Conservation to buy and preserve the site where they were flying.
I usually post a series of finalists for “Wildlife photographer of the year” contest by London’s Natural History Museum , as that has among the best nature photos around. Today, though, as I’m in a rush, I’ll just show you the photo that won the “Grand Title” prize.
A bit from CBS News:
A photo of a golden horseshoe crab —one of the world’s most ancient and highly endangered animals— earned a marine photographer the grand title in the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest. The Natural History Museum in London, which runs the competition, made the announcement Tuesday.
The picture, taken by Laurent Ballesta, shows a tri-spine horseshoe crab on a seabed near Pangatalan Island in the Philippines, as it is followed by three golden trevallies. Ballesta documented the horseshoe crabs as they moved through water, fed, mated and provided a home to other animals, according to the museum.
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest is produced by the Natural History Museum. Ballesta’s photo was chosen from nearly 50,000 entires across 95 countries. Kathy Moran, who was the chair of the jury, called the image “luminescent.”
“To see a horseshoe crab so vibrantly alive in its natural habitat, in such a hauntingly beautiful way, was astonishing,” Moran said.
“We are looking at an ancient species, highly endangered, and also critical to human health,” Moran added. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed the tri-spine horseshoe crab as “endangered.”
It’s the second time Ballesta has won the grand prize, after he earned it in 2021.
Nothing fancy here, and no spectacular animals or behaviors. Just a gorgeous picture of a gorgeous animal, and one accompanied by three pals. Click to enlarge.
(from CBS News): French photographer Laurent Ballesta has won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award for the second time after capturing this image of a horseshoe crab near an island in the Philippines. LAURENT BALLESTA/WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR
Regular Mark Sturtevant is back with a batch of lovely arthropod photos. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.
Here are more pictures of arthropods. Some are from area parks, and others are from my house here in Michigan.
First up is an Antlion larva, Brachynemurus abdominalis. One can find the conical pits that these little beasties make all over what I call the Magic Field. How they use their pit to ensnare passing insects is shown in this video. Although they are easily extracted with a spoon to be taken home for pictures, actually getting pictures was not that easy since they generally want to scuttle backwards in an attempt to bury themselves. Right now, I am keeping a few larvae in cups of sand and feeding them ants (which is always entertaining), with the aim of later photographing the pupal stage. Antlion pupae are interesting in that they are still ill-tempered and they bite:
I came upon this wasp-mimicking beetle (Necydalis mellita) along a woodland trail. That it is indeed a beetle is proven by its elytra, even though they are very short. I’ve seen these before but could never get a picture because they are alert and flighty (wasp mimics tend to be wasp mimics all the way). But this one allowed a few pictures. It belongs in the longhorn beetle family:
Next up is a Big Sand Tiger Beetle (Cicindela formosa). These lovely but very alert beetles are common around here in sandy areas. Some days, nothing will get you a picture of one, but on this rather cool and overcast day the task was pretty trivial. Tiger beetles used to be in their own family, but now they have been absorbed into the ground beetle family:
Another challenging beetle is shown next. This is a tumbling flower beetle, Mordella marginata. Tumbling flower beetles belong to their own rather obscure family, and they are normally found on flowers where they eat pollen. There, the least disturbance will cause them to live up to their name as they curl up and fall to the ground:
Next are two grasshoppers because I really like grasshoppers. The first is a ‘hopper nymph of uncertain identity, but it most resembles the Two-striped Grasshopper, Melanoplus bivittatus.
Over the previous summer, I made it a regular habit to scour the front porch in the morning to look for insects that were drawn in overnight by our porch light. Among the more common squatters were these very small Mayflies which I believe to be Callibaetus ferrugineus. First are two females. The close-up picture is focus-stacked with my super macro lens, as are all of the remaining pictures here. She looks pretty strange, as all Mayflies do, but get a load of the male in the next picture.
Here is a male. I still remember my astonishment seeing the first of these! The upward turret-shaped portion of their compound eyes are thought to be used to watch for females:
This set finishes with a couple spiders. First up is a Slender Crab Spider, Tibellus sp. These are shaped to stretch out along grass blades:
And finally, here is a Ground Crab Spider, Xysticus sp. The super macro lens lets me peer into a new world, but I wasn’t expecting that face to look back from it!:
Today sees the return of Robert Lang, physicist, origami master and, today, photographer. Robert’s narration is indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
More local animals
The Los Angeles basin is a vast urban/suburban metropolis, but its natural boundaries of ocean and mountains are abrupt with sharp transitions created by water and steepness. The northern boundary is formed by the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains (collectively, the Transverse Ranges) and they rise steeply from many back yards along the range. My studio is about 20 feet from the edge of the Angeles National Forest; this gives rise to many wildlife encounters, both at the studio and on the trails that climb up from the back property line. Most of these pictures are fairly recent.
One from last fall that I’ve been saving for RWP is this California Tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.). Probably a male, because he was out and about; in the fall, the males go on walkabout looking for females (who mostly stay hidden in their burrows):
Then we turn to a couple of reptiles. The Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) is one of the most common lizards around; just walking down the front steps, I’m likely to see one (although it’s rare that they stay still enough to be photographed). They are highly variable in color, and the same lizard can appear either light or dark. In the morning, they are dark to absorb the sun’s rays; then in the afternoon, after they’ve warmed up, they lighten their skin and their lovely iridescence becomes visible:
I was pleased on a recent hike to see a Blainville’s Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma blainvillii) at an elevation of about 4000 feet. They used to be more common in the San Gabriels, but earlier in the previous century their numbers were reduced by collectors gathering them for the curio trade, and they’ve never fully come back. I really should have taken a wide-angle photo of this one; it would have been a great candidate for the “Spot the …” series, as it was so perfectly camouflaged against the sand and gravel I nearly stepped on it:
Another reptile that I’m glad I didn’t step on was this Southern Pacific Rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus helleri), who was stretched out across the trail. He was pretty chill, though; didn’t budge as we approached, and so we gingerly stepped past. A nice set of rattles on that one!
We have three kinds of squirrels around; ground squirrels, gray squirrels, and the (introduced) Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger). The local rattlers are happy to dine on any of them.
We also have both crows and ravens; crows are more common down in the neighborhoods, while ravens like this Common Raven (Corvus corax) dominate up in the chapparal. This one is perched on the top of one of last year’s blooms from the Whipple Yucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei):
Larger creatures sometimes come visit the meadow behind the studio. A not infrequent visitor is the coyote (Canis latrans). Although this one was (barely) within the National Forest, they come far down into the adjacent neighborhoods, where they find plentiful food in the form of dropped fruit, loose garbage, and the occasional domestic animal whose owners ill-advisedly allow them to roam free:
Another frequent large visitor is the California Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus californicus). This time of year, the bucks are in velvet, like this one. We had a very wet spring, so there is a lot of browse in the mountain canyons and not much to lure them into the meadow, but in the fall, when the acorn crop starts to fall, they’ll be visiting twice a day:
In much of California, the urban/wilderness interface usually exists in one of two states: (1) recovering from the last wildfire; (2) stocking up for the next wildfire. A year ago we had a relatively small wildfire just across the canyon; fortunately, it was a cool day with not much wind, and the fire crews held it to just a few acres:
I spent the afternoon watching the firefighters dragging hoses for hundreds of yards up the ridges while helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft dropped water and fire retardant. I am in awe of the firefighters, who were clambering up cliffs that I wouldn’t even try to scramble under the best of circumstances, while they were wearing and/or carrying 50 pounds of kit and dragging hoses. Within a few hours, they had things under control. The drifting smoke and red fire retardant gave things an almost surreal appearance as they were mopping up:
That was a year ago. One thing about the chaparral is it recovers quickly from fire (indeed, many plants rely on it), and after this spring’s wet rains, the formerly bare ground is covered in new growth, and the burned bushes have resprouted. They’re getting ready for the next fire, which is bound to happen sometime; it’s the nature of this bit of Nature.
