Saturday, June 9, 2018

Milkweed Metropolis! Part 2.



The neatest thing about prairie restoration is all the life that comes in when exotic plants are replaced with native ones.  It's not that we conjure it up.  It's more that we remove the non-native, monocultural barriers, and then LIFE comes flooding in!   I trained a camera for a few minutes on a patch of common milkweed that now stands where invasive crown vetch used to be.  Then I tried to learn from what I found!

The camera showed quite a throng of nectar- and pollen-lovers, as well as a few creatures that might dine on the diners. A few were old acquaintances; I enlisted the generous help of bugguide.net to identify the others. That's a wheel bug nymph going up the stem, and a leather-winged beetle among the red-eyed tachinid flies. (There were no monarch caterpillars on this profusely blooming plant--it wouldn't have been safe for them with all those parisitoids around!) The video shows a male eastern black swallowtail ceding ground to a beetle, while a banded hairstreak sips nectar amid the flies. In two separate clips, if we look closely, we can see why that fly in the center isn't moving: there are well-camouflaged spider legs beneath it. Two tachinid flies hook up, and tiny iridescent green jewel beetles wander about. Ants swarm on a dead moth, and unidentified others (a tiny lady beetle? a crane fly?) put in appearances.   Thanks again to bugguide.net for help with identification!   And yet behind and around all the identified ones are unidentified winged- and crawling creatures still in the realm of mystery.  So much still to be discovered!

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