Online Show & Tell for the week of August 14 - 20, 2022

 Online Show & Tell for the week of August 14 - 20, 2022

Many thanks to the ramblers who sent in photos and stories for this week's Online Show & Tell! Keep sending your stories to LCHAFIN@UGA.EDU and put "Show & Tell" in the subject line so I can keep track of them. 

Reading  (From Donald Culross Peattie's An Almanac for Moderns) 

 

AUGUST FOURTEENTH 

 

    As soon as the green and violet hour of summer dusk is at hand and the bats begin to sweep the sky for midges, the voice of the whippoorwill rises out of the hollow below my house. This will be but the beginning of his whipping of poor Will (that luckless lad) and when first I hear it I can very nearly enjoy it. For it is a nostalgic and intensely American sound, and one that goes back, as we find nearly everything precious does, to childhood.

    How often have I wakened gently, to hear, down in the valley, the strange, contented calling of the whippoorwill, and lain awhile to breathe the wind of the night fields, fresh with dew and the scent of sweet clover, and drifted again to sleep, while he sang, thinking of the benediction of night after the burning summer days.

Bill Sheehan sent in the following text and photos on August 18.... "I had a fun day yesterday looking under leaves for galls. Two particularly exciting (to me) finds:

Sawfly egg chambers and larvae! 

An artsy Water Oak leaf embroidered by a Sawfly mama.
Sawflies are a kind of herbivorous wasp. Turns out the “saw”
is part of the ovipositor used for inserting eggs in the EDGE of the leaf.

Evenly spaced Sawfly egg chambers on the edge of a Water Oak leaf.
Bits of egg shell are protruding from the slit EDGE of the leaf.
Who would have thought?

Sawfly larvae busily eating a Water Oak leaf

You can see Bill's iNaturalist page documenting this find here. He provided this link to a video from France showing a female Sawfly ovipositing in the edge of a leaf.

The second find by Bill....

Pitch Gall Midge on a Loblolly Pine sapling

A gall created by a Pitch Gall Midge (Genus Cecidomyia)
According to this website, the female midge lays her eggs on the twigs of pines in the spring. Tiny larvae hatch from the eggs and bore into the twig, causing resin (pitch) to flow out and envelop the larvae. The larvae then develop inside this mass, subsisting on the resin until they become adults.

Close-up view of the gall
The Gall Midge larvae grow up in the sticky white resin, each with a breathing tube. Who would want to mess with them in a mass of semi-solid turpentine?!

The breathing tubes become escape hatches when the adults are ready to fly. Close-up of the pupal skins left behind in the gall
when the adult flies away

Bill's iNaturalist page documenting this find is at this link. Further information on this fascinating species can be found here.

And some caterpillars from Bill....

The oh, so aptly named Laugher Moth caterpillar

 

Pretty funny from the top too.

White-streaked Prominent (Ianassa lignicolor)

THANK YOU, BILL!

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On August 19, Catherine Chastain wrote "I have been noticing fungi lately - such a strange and beautiful kingdom."

THANK YOU, CATHERINE!

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From Ed Wilde, on August 19....

"A few days ago, Sue and I were walking near one of the retention ponds here at Presbyterian Village, and we noticed that there were two little frogs in the bottom of a rain gauge that hangs on the fence surrounding the pond. There were 3-4 inches of water in the gauge, but the frogs were trapped beneath the red "float" ring that allows you to see the measurement from a distance - they were agitated and struggling to move. We took the top off the gauge, shook it onto the ground, and the frogs fell out and hopped away.

 

Today I was back at the pond, and there were two more frogs trapped in the gauge - also below the float ring!  I dumped them out like we did last time, and took a photo of them on the ground - one bright green, one dark grey - the same colors as the first two. What is going on here!?" Was it raining frogs? Some answers here....

Update from Ed on August 20: "There was another frog in the rain gauge this morning.  I guess they are crawling up the fence post and then into the tube through the top openings (below) - which are quite small.  Wonder what is attracting them to it - maybe some kind of smell left by the original 'inhabitants'?"

THANK YOU, ED!

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