Bug Bugged

So here's another one, seen today just below the sheep field. This time I can't even guess the Order, let alone the Family. I mean, it might be Diptera - it appears to have two wings (not four), and two short antennae, with a long and dangerous looking mouth-part. But those might be elytra (wing cases) in front of the wings, and that could make it a Coleoptera.

I fear that this bug business could get a bit obsessive...

Distinct lack of Order

I'm bugged

Beetle identification is a mystery. The beetle Family - Coleopterae - are so hugely varied, with my insect guidebook noting for example that there are 30,000 species of Leaf Beetle, each different from the other.

I had thought that this bug, found today in the bark of a pine I was chopping up, was a Snout Beetle (Curculionidae), with a mere 41,000 species world-wide to chose from. Wrong again - what I thought was the elongated snout is in fact two chubby antennae. I'm bugged if I know what this is, but if anyone out there can identify her or him, let me know.

Bored, of Barking

Klimate Kalendar Kaos

Climate change is causing chaos here at the Croft.

It's too warm for a normal October (we've had temperatures over 30º Centigrade) and the plants are reacting by producing flowers in what is officially the Autumn.

First, the plum tree came into flower - this picture was taken just a few days ago:

Plum tree, stoned

 Then the pear tree did the same - this picture was taken yesterday:

An ice pear?

The cycle is broken, and there will be obvious effects; my bees will be confused, and so will other pollinators that might try to hatch another brood when their predators have left for warmer climes - for example the Bee Eater, Meriops apiaster, left for Africa a few weeks ago. But there may be other, less obvious effects. As Dr. Josep Peñuelas at CREAF, Catalonia, showed in 2009, the volatile gasses emitted by the plants could feed back into a climate change loop, potentially accelerating the climate crisis.

The ants are our annual clock. The winged alates (the ants would probably say "wingèd"...) emerge each year to mate and form new colonies. As the Natural History Museum points out in its excellent website, ants do not always swarm on the same day each year, but rather across a season.

 
October is late for ant swarms...and I spotted no swallows or swifts in the sky catching the alates. The swallows and swifts have gone south, too early.

The climate emergency creates collateral damage all over Nature. We, Homo "sapiens", could stop that. Will we?





Source:

Peñuelas, Josep, This Rutishauser, and Iolanda Filella. ‘Phenology Feedbacks on Climate Change’. Science 324, no. 5929 (15 May 2009): 887–88. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1173004.

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.

 
And so, it turns out, do fungi.

Here's a fungus, photographed yesterday in the field (we call it “Camelot” because our friend Artur helped to create it) that the donkeys are using. Either its own spores have germinated, or it has another fungus biting it on the back.

Fungi break nature down into its component parts, so this is a melody of decomposition.

The gills are alive...