Cedar Grove Bugs
August 9th, 2015
After reading Gillian Mastromatteo's many accounts of Cedar Grove Nature Trail, I finally decided to go there and see what I could see. The trail is located near North Gower on Roger Stevens Drive, part of a large conservation area called Marlborough Forest.
The first thing to say is that this is the most deer fly infested place I've been, topping even Larose Forest. I'm learning not to get psyched out by deer flies in Ontario, since the variety we have here seldom seems to bite (seldom--not never, seldom. I do not recommend letting an Ontario deer fly be at leisure on your body.) As opposed to, say, the deer flies at Outer Banks, which very much bite and bite hard. But when there are fifty-some flies buzzing around you and getting tangled in your hair, it gets old fast even when they don't bite.
Gillian has told stories of walking through these woods attended by a swarm of deer flies, until a group of large dragonflies comes along and picks them off one by one. I thought it sounded like fun to be a dragonfly feeder, so I waited...and waited, but my knights in shining chitin failed to show. So I doused myself in about a gallon of bug spray. Which helped, though not nearly as much as you might think.
The good news is that the trail was also teeming with interesting, less obnoxious insects. It was in fact more rich with small insect life than anywhere I've been. Many of them were attracted to the black-eyed susans that were abundantly in bloom. Most were too small for my telephoto lens to properly capture (which drives my hunger for a macro lens), but here are a few I did manage.
1680x1050 wallpaper
When I first arrived these little insects were so perfectly arranged, they looked like part of the flower. I was stumped by them and figured they were probably in one of the many categories of miscellaneous small bugs (treehoppers, leafhoppers, planthoppers, plant bugs...) that I was little familiar with. The folks on BugGuide were finally able to enlighten me: they are in the "flower moth" family, probably Landryia impositella. I would never have guessed that these tiny little guys were a type of moth! Clearly an understudied insect, since you can't even find a Wikipedia page until you get up to the Family level (Scythrididae), and even them it's little more than a stub.
A Goldenrod Crab Spider. Crab spiders are ambush predators, lying in wait with their long front legs wide open ready to grab. They can slowly change color from white, to pale greenish-yellow, to bright yellow, or back, to camouflage against the flower they're on. (The camouflage is both a hunting aid and a defense against their own predators.) This one wasn't quite a match yet to the deep orangey-yellow of the black-eyed susan, which is probably why every small insect I saw land on the flower quickly took off again!
This one's color was so off it decided its best course of action was to hide.
August 9th, 2015
After reading Gillian Mastromatteo's many accounts of Cedar Grove Nature Trail, I finally decided to go there and see what I could see. The trail is located near North Gower on Roger Stevens Drive, part of a large conservation area called Marlborough Forest.
The first thing to say is that this is the most deer fly infested place I've been, topping even Larose Forest. I'm learning not to get psyched out by deer flies in Ontario, since the variety we have here seldom seems to bite (seldom--not never, seldom. I do not recommend letting an Ontario deer fly be at leisure on your body.) As opposed to, say, the deer flies at Outer Banks, which very much bite and bite hard. But when there are fifty-some flies buzzing around you and getting tangled in your hair, it gets old fast even when they don't bite.
Gillian has told stories of walking through these woods attended by a swarm of deer flies, until a group of large dragonflies comes along and picks them off one by one. I thought it sounded like fun to be a dragonfly feeder, so I waited...and waited, but my knights in shining chitin failed to show. So I doused myself in about a gallon of bug spray. Which helped, though not nearly as much as you might think.
The good news is that the trail was also teeming with interesting, less obnoxious insects. It was in fact more rich with small insect life than anywhere I've been. Many of them were attracted to the black-eyed susans that were abundantly in bloom. Most were too small for my telephoto lens to properly capture (which drives my hunger for a macro lens), but here are a few I did manage.
1680x1050 wallpaper
When I first arrived these little insects were so perfectly arranged, they looked like part of the flower. I was stumped by them and figured they were probably in one of the many categories of miscellaneous small bugs (treehoppers, leafhoppers, planthoppers, plant bugs...) that I was little familiar with. The folks on BugGuide were finally able to enlighten me: they are in the "flower moth" family, probably Landryia impositella. I would never have guessed that these tiny little guys were a type of moth! Clearly an understudied insect, since you can't even find a Wikipedia page until you get up to the Family level (Scythrididae), and even them it's little more than a stub.
A Goldenrod Crab Spider. Crab spiders are ambush predators, lying in wait with their long front legs wide open ready to grab. They can slowly change color from white, to pale greenish-yellow, to bright yellow, or back, to camouflage against the flower they're on. (The camouflage is both a hunting aid and a defense against their own predators.) This one wasn't quite a match yet to the deep orangey-yellow of the black-eyed susan, which is probably why every small insect I saw land on the flower quickly took off again!
This one's color was so off it decided its best course of action was to hide.
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Mike
August 9th, 2015 at 9:06 am
The spider is indeed cute, in a miniature menacing way!
mustangsallie
August 9th, 2015 at 9:43 pm
Pretty well camouflaged spider on that second pic. At first glance, I would have mistaken it for a slightly distorted part of a petal.