Today's Ramble was led by Dale Hoyt.
Here's the link
to Don's Facebook album for today's Ramble. (All the photos in this post are
compliments of Don, unless otherwise credited.)
Today's post was written by Dale Hoyt and Linda Chafin.
Today's
emphasis: Flyin’, Hoppin’, Jumpin’
and Crawlin’ Critters and Crane-fly Orchids
27 Ramblers met today.
Tuesday, August 6th,
Betsy Collins and Kathy Stege are going to paddle at Tugaloo Lake at Tallulah
Falls State Park.
Meet at Kathy’s house at 9
to carpool or caravan. Address is 255 Rocky Dr. which is a right turn
just before Sandy Creek Park if you’re coming from town. Or, meet at the
boat ramp at the end of the dirt road by the entrance to Tallulah Gorge
State Park at 10:30.
Let Kathy know you're coming;
email: kath22steg AT gmail.com; phone: 478-955-3422
The water is cool and crystal
clear. On weekdays there are only a couple of fishing boats and only forest
surrounding the lake. We will paddle for several hours up to the Chattooga
River discharge to the lake and then back.
Today's reading:
Dale read a passage from William Bryant Logan’s Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of
the Earth. 1995. P. 97
Everywhere, creatures and minerals together make their characteristic soils. Where the grand
circulation exposes different bands of rock in juxtaposition, so the plant communities that come to live on them differ, and the resulting soils do too.
On a field trip once,
the great soil scientist Hans Jenny had me drive down a side road in
Sonoma County,
California. Beside us ran a field of wild grass with oaks scattered on the knolls. Abruptly, the vegetation turned into a scraggly stand of digger pine. We stopped the car to look for the difference. Beneath the oaks, the broken rock was schist; underlying the grassland were
sandstones; but the sparse pines grew on a pretty, green stone. Serpentine is the state rock, it's so attractive, but it is also full of chromium and nickel, discouraging to most plants.
Here, we used our eyes to
conceive the livingness of the world. I had driven past that landscape all my life, my eyes on the road ahead,
noticing the "beauties" but really observing nothing
at all. Here, by
an oily roadside, with traffic sweeping
by, I stepped out of time and into beauty, thanks to a ninety-year-old man who
actually knew something. I could feel the Earth spinning on
its axis.
We spend our lives
hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. "It must be somewhere up there on the horizon;”we think. And all the time it is in
the soil, right beneath our feet.
Show and
Tell: Susie asked
about the tall, leaning Bald Cypress at the Visitor Center and Linda showed a
cone from the tree.
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| Bald Cypress cone (click to enlarge) |
Today's route:
Through the Visitor’s Center to the Herb and Physic Garden. Then down the
Purple Trail and back to the Flower Garden via the Purple connector Trail. Then
back to the Visitor’s Center.
Herb and Physic Garden.
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| American Toad (click to enlarge) |
Nathan discovered a small American Toad hopping
over the red bricks. Someone wanted to know if they were good to eat. I said,
“Only if you skin them first,” referring to the fact that behind each eye is a skin
gland called the parotoid gland. When a toad is threatened, as when a dog takes
it into his mouth, the toad releases a milky fluid from the parotoid. The fluid
is filled with toxic substances, some of which affect the mammalian heart and
can cause death within a short time.
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| Carolina Anole (click to enlarge) |
On a Cana Lily we found a Carolina Anole, also
known as Green Anole, or American Chameleon. The question everyone has is how to
pronounce Anole: “Ann-oll,” “Ann-oll-ee,” “Ah-NULL-ee,” or “Ah-NULL.” Answer:
any way you want. The Chameleon name is misleading because the true Chameleons
are unrelated and are principally found in Africa and Madagascar, with a few
species in other parts of the old world.
The lizard we found today was a female, probably with an
egg nearly ready to be laid, judging by how plump her abdomen was. We knew her
to be a female because she lacked a dewlap, a fold of pinkish-red skin in the
neck between the two lower jaw bones, found only in males. The males can flip
the dewlap open, revealing the red skin, which they do to attract females and
warn other males that they are trespassing on their territory.
Anoles can change color between green and brown, but
there is no simple explanation of what color will be displayed under any
circumstance. Color of the vegetation, air temperature, level of anxiety – all
these interact to determine the lizard’s color. It only takes a short time, 5
to 10 minutes, for the change to occur.
When I was a child a circus came to town every year. Outside
the main entrance men were selling anoles for $1. They carried large boards
covered with green cloth and, pinned to the cloth, were the anoles. Each lizard
had a piece of thread tied around its body, in front of the hind legs; the
other end of the thread was tied to a safety pin, which was pinned to the
cloth. The barker had a spiel that went something like this: “Chameleons, Chameleons,
get your Chameleons here. They change color to match where they sit. Put ‘em on
grass – they turn green. Put ‘em on dirt – they turn brown. Put ‘em on plaid,
they go crazy!” And, of course, you needed food for your chameleon which the
barker was willing to sell in a box labeled “Chameleon Food.” On arriving home,
you opened the box and discovered it was only partially filled with the bodies
of dead flies. They looked like they had been swept up from the window sills of
disgusting restaurants. Apparently, the barker didn’t realize that his
chameleons only ate living insects.
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| Obscure Bird Grasshopper (click to enlarge) |
Climbing among the Cana Lilies was an Obscure Bird
Grasshopper, a beautiful green grasshopper with a yellow stripe down the
middle of its back and lustrous brown fore wings. We knew this was an adult because
it had fully developed wings. Many people noticed the spines on the tibia of
its hind legs (the jumping legs). In addition to jumping, the hind legs can
also kick. I imagine that the spines make such kicks more effective.
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| Twice-stabbed Stink bugs mating (click to enlarge) |
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| Silver-spotted Skipper (click to enlarge) |
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| Silver-spotted Skipper showing the upper wing surface (click to enlarge) |
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| Robber Fly (click to enlarge) |
Purple Trail
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| Beech Sooty Mold fungus (click to enlarge) |
Beech Sooty Mold fungus, Scorias spongiosa,
is found only in association with Beech trees that are being attacked by Beech
Blight Aphids, Grylloprociphilus imbricator. The aphids feed on the Beech tree by sucking its sap
with their piercing, sucking mouthparts. The sap runs its course through the
aphid’s body and emerges as what we call “honeydew,” a sugary solution. A group
of aphids can produce quite a bit of honeydew. It falls on the leaves and
branches beneath the aphid colony and forms a sticky, sweet coating. Mold
spores land in the honeydew and begin to digest the sugars, eventually growing
into a black scum. This scum eventually grows into a black colored object that
looks like a black kitchen scouring pad. This is the stage in which the spores
are produced. The spores will be carried through the air and those lucky few will
land on another patch of honeydew.
For more information check
out Tom Volk’s fungus of the month for September, 2007.
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| Cranefly Orchid (click to enlarge) |
Now is the time to search for Cranefly Orchid (Tipularia
discolor) flowers, so our route today was where the orchid had been seen in
years past. Ramblers are most familiar with the Cranefly Orchid in fall and
winter, when each plant is visible as a single, oval leaf (2-4 inches long)
rising directly from an underground corm. The leaf is dark green on the top
surface, rich velvety purple on the lower surface, and pleated and dotted with
black warts. The leaf appears in the fall and overwinters, photosynthesizing
via the sunlight that shines through the bare canopy. After the canopy trees
leaf out in the spring, the orchid leaf withers and disappears. Then in late
July or early August, one leafless flowering stem appears, bearing up to 40 tan
to brownish-purple flowers. The spike-like flower cluster is really hard to spot
amongst the brown leaf litter from which it emerges. The delicate flower, with
its thread-like stalk and narrow spreading petals and sepals, must have
reminded an imaginative someone of a cranefly (the genus name, Tipularia,
is also the genus name of the Cranefly, an insect). The flowers are pollinated
by noctuid moths; a known pollinator is the armyworm, Mythimna unipuncta,
formerly known as Pseudaletia unipuncta).
As with most orchids, Tipularia pollen is packaged in a
sack called a pollinium. Each pollinium contains thousands of pollen grains.
When a noctuid moth visits the flower for nectar it bumps into the pollinium,
gluing it to the moth's eye. The pollinium will be transferred to the next
blossom the moth visits, where it gets scraped off and the contained pollen
fertilizes thousands of tiny orchid seeds.
Wild orchids are famous for taking a year or two or even
ten off, their corms or rhizomes lying dormant in the soil. You may wonder, as
do plant biologists, what is the benefit of such long dormant periods, when the
plant can’t photosynthesize. It may have to do with the fact that orchids are
mycorrhizal–their roots are attached to an underground fungus. The fungus may
also be attached to another plant that is actively photosynthesizing and
passing the sugars to the orchid’s underground storage organ via the fungus. If
this is the case, the orchid is parasitizing the mycorrhizal fungus, as well as
the fungus' other partner. Though not confirmed, this three-way relationship
between the orchid, the fungus, and the aboveground plant may provide enough
nutrients for the orchid to build its strength in preparation for the next
flowering period.
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| Dog Vomit slime mold (click to enlarge) |
Dog Vomit slime mold, Fuligo septica, looks
quite alarming when it appears on the chopped wood mulch you just spread to
make things “look nicer.” It is entirely harmless and quite an interesting
organism. Before I tell you anything about slime molds a little background is
necessary.
Slime molds used to be considered fungi. They reproduce
by spores, lack chlorophyll, and are usually found in damp places like rotting
logs and leaves. But fungi are made of thread-like cells, called hyphae, that,
collectively, are the fungal body, called a mycelium. It’s the fuzzy mound you
see on your bread or the mesh of fine, white threads you can find under a
rotting log or a pile of decomposing leaves. The way the mycelium works is that
some of the hyphae secrete digestive enzymes into the environment. Just like
the enzymes in your digestive tract, these enzymes break down the organic
material they contact into much smaller, simpler molecules. Then other hyphae in
the mycelium absorb these products of digestion. (If you collect abstruse
terms, this is called absorptive heterotrophy.)
Slime molds are not limited to absorbing small molecules
from their environment. They eat bacteria and they do that by surrounding the
bacterial cell with their own cell membrane, forming a pocket with the
bacterium inside. The pocket is then pinched off to form a bacteria-containing
bubble inside the slime mold. (This method of feeding is called phagocytosis.
It’s the way an amoeba feeds, if you remember this from a previous biology
class.)
When this became known scientists decided to kick the
slime molds out of the fungi, but where to put them? They wound up in a group
called the Kingdom Protista, a collection of mostly unicellular organisms. Some
protists you might have heard of before: Amoeba, Paramecium, Euglena.
Dog Vomit slime mold is an example of what is called a
plasmodial slime mold. A plasmodium is a single, giant cell that contains
thousands (or even millions) of nuclei. Not your standard cell, which has one
nucleus per cell. The plasmodium forms by the fusing together of many thousands
of smaller, individual, amoeba-like cells, that have hatched from single
spores. The plasmodium wanders like a giant amoeba through piles of rotting vegetation,
feeding on bacteria, until it finds food scarce. Then it crawls out on top of
the leaf litter and starts to produce spores. That’s the stage we saw today.
The Dog Vomit Slime Mold will slowly dry out and crumble up, the spores will be
carried away by the breeze and those that land in an environment
For more information on Dog Vomit slime mold check out Tom
Volk’s fungus of the month for June, 1999.
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| Bess Beetle (Betsy Beetle) (click to enlarge) |
Where there are decaying logs you usually find Bess
Beetles (AKA Betsy Beetle, Patent Leather Beetle). Bess Beetles are social,
living in family groups. They communicate with each other by sounds produced by
rubbing body parts together. Over a dozen different sounds have been recorded,
but the meaning of each is largely unknown. The adults feed the larvae a
mixture of chewed wood fibers and their own feces. This sounds disgusting, but
to digest wood the larvae need symbiotic microorganisms in their digestive tract.
The only way to get them is from their parents’ dung.
A small but spreading patch of Sericea Lespedeza (Lespedeza
cuneata) has become established near the Flower Garden end of the Purple
connector Trail. This species is an Asian import brought to the U.S. in 1896 to
control erosion. It has turned out to be a terrible invasive, nearly impossible
to eradicate once established due to its long-lived seed bank, woody taproot,
and deep, widely spreading roots. Several folks were interested in how to tell
Sericea Lespedeza from our native species (eight in Georgia). Like all
Lespedezas, this species has compound leaves: each leaf is divided into three
leaflets.
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| Sericea Lespedeza leaves (click to enlarge) |
Sericea Lespedeza leaflets are wedge-shaped – widest above the middle
and tapering to a narrow base.
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| Virginia Lespedeza leaves (click to enlarge) |
Our native Lespedeza leaflets are widest at the
middle and have rounded bases.
Images are from Janie Marlowe’s Name That Plant website, http://www.namethatplant.net, with her
permission. Link to Sericea
Lespedeza. Link to
Virginia Lespedeza.
The Flower Garden is planted with many beds of flowers
that are attractive to butterflies and other insects. It was still a little
cool this morning but we were able to see a number of species: Fiery Skipper,
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Common Sootywing, Red-spotted Purple and Horace’s
Duskywing.
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| Fiery Skipper (click to enlarge) |
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| Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (click to enlarge) |
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| Common Sootywing (click to enlarge) |
As we get into mid to late summer the aphid populations
are booming and that abundance means that their predators become more common. The
most well known of these are the ladybugs, more properly called ladybeetles
because they are beetles, not bugs. (I realize that it is a fool’s errand to
expect anyone to abandon the name of a beloved creature known from childhood. I
won’t insist on it. But please do remember that they are beetles.)
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| Mating Asian Multicolored Lady Beetles (click to enlarge) |
Today, on the Sorghum leaves in the Heritage Garden, we
found a pair of ladybugs mating, one with red wing covers and the other with
orange wing covers. These are not two different species, just different color forms
of an extraordinarily variable species, the Asian Multicolored Lady Beetle.
(The British common name for this insect, Harlequin Lady Beetle, is much more
elegant.) As the American common name implies, it is a non-native species,
originating in east Asia. It was imported to control scale insects that were severely
damaging citrus orchards. It was highly successful, but there was a fly in the
ointment, to use a mixed metaphor. All ladybugs are predators of not only
aphids, but insect eggs, including their own and those of other ladybug
species. The AMLB coats its eggs with a poison. Our native ladybugs are
sickened or killed when they eat AMLB eggs. Over time, we have witnessed a
decline in almost all of our native ladybug species. Now the AMLB is the most
common ladybug to be found.
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| All of these beetles are the same species, the Asian Multicolor Lady BeetleAttribution: ©entomart via Wikimedia commons |
The AMLB gets its name from the extreme variability in color and
pattern, as seen in these photos. Identifying the AMLB is best done by looking
for a black letter M or W, depending on your orientation, on the body segment
just in front of the wing covers. The letter is usually surrounded by white, but this is
not always the case. It’s the best method of identification.
SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES
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American
Toad
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Bufo (Anaxyrus) americanus
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Obscure
Bird Grasshopper
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Schistocerca obscura
|
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Eastern
Carpenter Bee
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Xylocopa virginica
|
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Carolina
Anole
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Anolis carolinensis
|
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Twice-Stabbed
Stink Bug
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Cosmopepla lintneriana
|
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Bearded
Robber Fly
|
Efferia
sp.
|
|
Silver
Spotted Skipper
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Epargyreus clarus
|
|
Black Sooty
Mold
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Scorias
spongiosa
|
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Crane-fly
Orchid
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Tipularia
discolor
|
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American Hophornbeam
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Ostrya
virginiana
|
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Slugs
(unidentified)
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Class
Gastropoda
|
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Dog Vomit
Slime Mold
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Fuligo
septica
|
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Bess Beetle
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Odontotaenius
disjunctus
|
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Fiery
Skipper
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Hylephila phyleus
|
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Eastern
Tiger Swallowtail butterfly
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Papilio
glaucus
|
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Butterfly
Bush
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Buddleja
davidii
|
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Common
Sootywing butterfly
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Pholisora
catullus
|
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Blanket
Flower
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Gallardia
sp.
|
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Megachilid
Bee
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Family
Megachilidae
|
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Red Spotted
Purple butterfly
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Limenitis
arthemis
|
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Horace’s
Duskywing butterfly
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Erynnis
horatius
|
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Asian Lady
Beetles
|
Harmonia
axyridis
|
|
Sericea
Lespedeza
|
Lespedeza
cuneata
|
