#280 days of urbpandemonium

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I’m gonna try to post about animals and other living things, but since it’s the dead of winter and everything is dead and pointless I’m dipping into my blog archives. BEAUTIFUL ANIMAL!

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...humidity, stopping the production of spores in dry times, resuming when it gets wet again. You can find it basically year round in the places where it occurs.

That's another thing, it's found basically everywhere. Anywhere on earth that it gets above freezing long enough for spores to get in and start growing. The fungus feeds on lignin, a very durable component of plant cell walls that few other organisms try to break down. Wood, straw, hay bales, cheap paper (not the expensive bleached stuff--that has the lignin chemically removed) all contain it. The fungus is also known to invade animal tissues, including humans, though what it specifically is feeding on in these cases is not clear to me. Humans in the tropics feed on the mushrooms in turn, though field guides to temperate species list it as inedible. The only person I know who tried some (at a market in Indonesia) found them to be rubbery and flavorless.

The most fun fact about the split gill mushroom Schizophyllum commune* of course revolves around its sex life. In fact, I use it as an example in my mushroom classes, when describing how different fungal reproduction is from plants or animals. Say you found yourself stranded alone on an island, tasked with repopulating the earth or whatever. If one other person arrived, there is just about a 50% chance that you and this other person with have compatible reproductive types that can result in offspring, on account of our crude binary sexes. Now compare that to split gill: there are more than 28,000 different kinds of mating types, meaning the chances that any two mycelium that encounter each other will be of different types are much greater.

(I blogged about this fact before, and the comment thread is golden)

* "Splintered leaf; Shared"

Current Music:Fiona Apple - Across the Universe

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I first noticed these very small (less than a mm long) flies when I was at work softball games. It turns out that sitting in a grassy field in summer is surefire way to encounter them. You increase your chances if you bring a dog with you, as the flies are drawn toward the mouth, ears, eyes, and anus of your companion. These are Chloropidae*, variously called frit flies, grass flies, or tellingly, eye gnats. Their larvae feed in the stems of grasses, while the adults seem to slake their thirst on sweat, tears, and other vertebrate bodily fluids. Some species, I am alarmed to report, are known to be vectors of conjunctivitis. * "green eyed family"

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280 days of Urbpandemonium #226

When I saw this animal I wasn't sure if I was seeing a wasp or a fly or some other kind of insect. The illusion is intentional--well, maybe not--the illusion has resulted from evolution. This fly resembles a wasp because it helps it survive. The illusion extends to the fly's front legs, which are marked with white segments, and moved in a way to suggest that they are the wasp's antennae. This is the entirely harmless stilt-legged fly Rainieria antennaepes.

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..."blister beetle," and set upon handling it very carefully. Blister beetles are named for their ability to exude a chemical that can cause chemical burns to human skin. This big one here is in the genus Meroe*, a group known as "oil beetles;" presumably the yellow hemolymph they ooze is more memorable for its alarming oily appearance then for blistering naturalists. These beetles are noteworthy as well for their life cycle: a mobile larva hatches from the egg and makes it way up to a flower where it will hitch a ride on a non-colonial bee. Some oil beetles release a scent that attracts male bees. Then the "triangulin," as this life stage is known, gains entry to the bee's nursery. It metamorphoses into another intermediate stage, less motile and more suited to lazily consuming the fruits of the bee's labor. Eventually it becomes the glorious animal pictured here. As to why it was waltzing down Mountain Road in Suffield in the dead of winter, I blame Climate Change. (Thanks to @ankhanu for ID help!) * Origin obscure, may come from early medical literature (the term melloes appears in the writings of Paracelsus);

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280 days of Urbpandemonium #224 The presence of the jeweler's loupe here is a hint that this is a very small organism. We generally think of ants as small animals, but this species is the smallest I've ever seen. Each worker is just about 1 mm in length.  Their size and distinctive coloration--dark in the front with light legs and abdomen--identifies them as ghost ants Tapinoma melanocephalum*. Like many inhabitants of the great indoors, their origin is not precisely known. They are from the Old World Tropics for sure, narrowing it down to roughly a third of the surface of the planet.  A colony could form in a pile of dead leaves, or in between a plant pot and it's protective liner. As long as the place is warm and humid, the ghost ants can live happily, feeding on miniscule amounts of sweet things and dead insects. When a colony is successful, some amount of it departs to become a new colony--"budding" instead of the complex new colony creation that some other eusocial insects endure. Besides all the tropics and heated greenhouses in the world, ghost ants live in Florida and Texas, and appear to be spreading. * Humble and dark-headed

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280 days of Urbpandemonium #223 The edges of the thallus of this fungus suggest hammered metal, or at least they did back when such things were common, and lichen common names were up for grabs. Anyway, this is called "hammered shield lichen," Parmelia sulcata* Most of the visible part of it, and the part that we call Parmelia sulcata, is a fungus. The color comes from a green alga called Trebouxia, which is safely cared for within the flesh of the fungus, protected from drying out and blowing away. Or perhaps it is a prisoner, prohibited from living a free life apart from it's symbiont (there are free-living Trebouxia out there, apart from the lichen symbiosis). The fungus depends entirely on the algae living inside it, to photosynthesize and make food for both organisms. * Little shield with grooves

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I'm currently using a second-hand point and shoot camera with a passable macro feature--and here I've put a hand lens in front of it in an attempt to visualize a very small animal. The animal is a globular springtail (Order Symphypleona*), less than a millimeter long. These charismatic relatives of insects walk about grazing on edible particles, but can jump away suddenly with a lighting-quick flex of their springy appendage, the furcula. Because their predators are also very small and necessarily nearsighted animals, this escape method is virtually teleportation. This pair of springtails may be eating mold spores growing on the surface of this damp moss. Their surprisingly complex behavior is explored on the BBC series Life in the Undergrowth. *New Latin symphy- (from Greek symphyēs grown together) + -pleona (from Greek plein to swim

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280 days of Urbpandemonium #221 There are only a handful of cockroach species that are adapted to live indoors with us. This one will only live indoors if the indoors in question contains warm humid air and moist soil with plants in it. Perhaps that explains the common name "greenhouse cockroach" Pycnoscelus surinamensis*. This species also goes by the name "Surinam cockroach," maintaining the long held tradition of naming pest roaches after places that are NOT where they came from. Surinam roaches surely occur in Suriname (a former Dutch colony on the northeast coast of South America you goon), as they occur everywhere on earth with the conditions described above. They are thought to be native to Asia, down around Malaysia somewhere, and spread around the world with tropical plants. These roaches are burrowers, so it would be very easy for one or more to hide in the rootball of a Ficus or Lychee. And one is all that is needed to establish a colony, because these insects practice parthenogenesis--giving birth without sex. In fact, in North America, no one has yet found a male Surinam roach. A few have been found in Australia, but all female colonies appear to be the norm. The one pictured here is a wingless subadult; adult females grow tan wings over their dark brown abdomen. *Thick-leg from Surinam

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280 days of Urbpandemonium #219, 220 Nature walk participant Keith pointed them out to me. "Fairy pins!" he said. I suddenly wished I had my reading glasses with me. With the naked eye I could see only the greenish white surface of the Trichaptum biforme*, a superabundant thin polypore mushroom. But through the loupe (good thing for a naturalist to carry) I could see the miniscule burnt matchsticks of Phaeocalicium polyporaeum.** These tiny mushrooms are the fruiting body of a fungus that parasitizes the Trichaptum biforme. *Double-formed, bound in hairs **Dark buds of polypore