northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday, this is one of our biggest and most prominent orbweaver spiders, a Yellow Garden Spider I met back in 2020 [1]. I actually wanted to link to a post of these large spiders when I was talking about the much smaller Bold Jumping Spider a couple days back, only to realize I hadn't posted about them here [2]! Doing a Throwback Thursday post was the quickest way to remedy this deficiency in the blog. These are 1 of our biggest spiders and are also among our most prominent with their black-and-yellow coloring. While you can get eyestrain looking at a lot of our orbweavers (e.g. Basilica Orbweaver , Marbled Orbweaver , Orchard Orbweaver ), the Yellow Garden Spider is comparably a cinch to spot and ID. Although all spiders are somewhat venomous, the Yellow Garden Spider's venom isn't especially potent. It's generally considered about as bad and dangerous as a bee sting. It's been theorized their black-and-yellow color is an example of aposematism , ...

Last April along the Raritan River Greenway I saw a bunch of bugs on some of the greenery [1]. And while "bug" is sometimes used to refer to pretty much any arthropod from lobsters to millipedes to ants, I'm talking about the true bugs when I say this [2]. Being black and reddish orange bugs, they look a little like the milkweed bugs ( Large , Small , and False ), these Eastern Boxelder Bugs skew much more black than orange than you'll see with the milkweed bugs. Though I don't think their Western Boxelder Bug cousins live around here, they can be differentiated by the red veins on the otherwise black wings of the westerners.  These bugs can congregate together conspicuously because they smell and taste bad, keeping them safe from abundant predators like birds. They're another example of aposematism , where their black/orange color is an eye-catching signal that these guys taste bad. Their named after their favorite tree to feed on, Boxelder trees. They...

Over the course of the summer I'll usually spot quite a few Monarch butterflies. I'm sure this is due to a few factors: The bright orange coloring and decent size makes them more conspicuous than most other insects. Though their populations are trending in a bad direction, they remain one of the more common butterflies around. They spend a lot of time around wildflowers, exactly where you'd expect to see them [1]. Monarchs are considered to be a fairly classic example of aposematism , which is attention-getting signal that an organism is dangerous to eat. In the Monarch, the bright orange coloring alerts (many) predators that they're poisonous. (This probably prevents them from getting eaten by most birds, though I've seen mantises eating them.) September 8, 2022 at Fairview Farm Photo 248393626, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] Some butterflies aren't big fans of nectar and are rarely found among them. (I'm looking at you, commas . And y...

I got a pretty good picture of this Common Buckeye last September. Depending on the year, I see these butterflies somewhere between "wow I haven't seen a Common Buckeye in a while" and "huh there's another Common Buckeye". I think I see them the most on sunny, grassy trails. Because they seem to like this habitat, I sometimes find myself inadvertently herding them up the trail; as I get closer, they fly further up the trail to get away from me. (This can happen with other butterflies and birds too.) These butterflies have very prominent eyespots, including 1 very large pair on the top of their wings. It's not completely understood why they have eyespots. Generally they make a butterfly more conspicuous, which potentially makes it easier for predators to find them. Some theories: The classic explanation is that a predator sees the eyespots and mistakenly believes they're seeing the face of a much larger animal, causing the predator to break off its ...

Here's someone I forgot to mention when talking about the insects of milkweeds and dogbanes ; it's the Delicate Cycnia Moth (aka Dogbane Tiger Moth). It appears that "cycnia" is pronounced like SICK-knee-uh. If that's something you're not going to remember, there's always the Dogbane Tiger Moth name available to you. Though I don't see these guys a lot in the day, I'll sometimes see them. In flight you might be fooled into thinking they're the far more common Cabbage White butterfly, but if they sit still for you, you should be able to tell the difference. The Delicate Cycnia lacks the little black smudge marks on the wings, and has a slightly yellowish color on the wing edges. As one of their names suggests, as caterpillars these moths eat dogbanes and sometimes milkweeds. This makes them poisonous, or at least foul-tasting. This provides them protection from bats, who would normally love to snack on a moth. Their relationship with bats has ...

Here's yet another Dogbane Leaf Beetle , one of my favorite beetles. I've talked about them before, though this fella might have been about to perform one of its predator-evasion techniques. As vegetarians, they're not particularly fierce, so they defend themselves in 3 ways: Because they eat poisonous plants (dogbanes and milkweeds), they are somewhat poisonous themselves. While many aposematic insects signal being poisonous with red/orange coloring (e.g. Monarch butterflies, Large and Small Milkweed Bugs, Red Milkweed Beetles), the Dogbane Leaf Beetle might be advertising the same thing through its shiny coloring. Presumably also because of their poisonous diet, they can also spray a predator with some noxious chemicals. But when all else fails, they'll look to escape by going to the edge of a leaf and jumping off, hopefully into grass or leaf litter than they can hide in. I suspect this little fella miscalculated the threat of me and my camera, and was thinking of ...

Here's a False Milkweed Bug I met a couple months back.  These guys have aposematic coloring but in their case it's misleading. As insects without a strong physical defense and that's not poisonous, they are advertising that they're dangerous to eat even though they're not. What they do have going for them is they look like (and are actually related to) the poisonous Large Milkweed Bug (a very common bug around me) and the Small Milkweed Bug (which is less common but looks even more similar to the False Milkweed Bug). This is called Batesian mimicry , basically impersonation a dangerous species when you're not dangerous. I don't think False Milkweed Bugs have been studied enough to know why they look the way they do. Did they evolve their red coloring so they'd look like their poisonous cousins? Or did their ancestors eat milkweed, develop their red coloring, and then evolve to eat a non-milkweed diet? Interestingly the Large Milkweed Bug eats exclusiv...

Meet a Swamp Milkweed Leaf Beetle !  When I saw this beetle, my first thought was that this was some sort of ladybug; aphids love eating milkweed, and ladybugs love eating aphids. Of course, I didn't see aphids on this milkweed, but I just chalked it up to a ladybug that was performing due diligence, making sure this milkweed didn't have a meal. But apparently this is a completely different type of beetle, one that eats the milkweed plant itself. Though their most frequently used common name seems to imply they exclusively feed on Swamp Milkweed, they will actually eat most (all?) of our milkweeds, and their second most frequently used common name is actually the broader Milkweed Leaf Beetle. Though they have a different look, they're related to another eater of poisonous plants, the Dogbane Leaf Beetle . Note the red coloring. As an eater of a poisonous plants, this beetle is trying to advertise to predators that it too is poisonous. This is known as aposematism . Milkweed...