This is a smooth sow-thistle, which I have already posted, but I took a photo as it looked quite impressive and purple. Then I noticed the leaf-miner tracks on the leaves. Leaf miners are the larvae of tiny flies like the Liriomyza sonchi, which mines the leaves of sow-thistle species. Leaf miner flies are very tiny – 2-3mm. The larvae mine small white corridors between the upper and lower surfaces of the leaf and leave their droppings ‘frass’ as black dots in the leaves.
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Ground Beetle
There were some small beetles on an old wooden bridge that we had carried up the watermeadow for the winter, so that it didn’t get washed away. Black and shiny with reddish legs, a longer shape than the bronze beetle that I spotted in October. Ground beetles have long filiform (thread-shaped) antennae and five-segmented feet. They live in moss and leaf litter in marshy habitats and wet woodland. I think it might be a Bembidion gilvipes beetle looking at the colour and shape, with a relatively broad, chunky thorax.
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Littoral Whiplash Rove Beetle (Paederus littoralis)
There are four types of Paederus beetle in the UK. This was Paederus littoralis because it was larger than 7.5mm (around 10-11mm) and had black mandibles. Littoral means shore: and these beetles can be found in marginal areas of wetland. They live in decaying plant matter and leaf litter but climb up plant stems and foliage to feed on smaller insects like aphids and mites. These, they grip with their mandibles and pre-digest before consuming them (like houseflies). They also exude a defensive toxin, so any direct contact can result in skin irritation or dermatitis.
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Black Oil Beetle (Meloe proscarabaeus)
Mr C was working on the ramp and spotted this beetle. He brought it up the garden for me to photograph before letting it go again. There are a few different types of oil beetle. The black and violet oil beetles are most similar, but the black has a straight lower edge to its thorax, so I think that is what this is.
Oil beetles are nest parasites. The female digs a nest in the ground and lays up to 1000 eggs. The larvae are called triungulins, which means three claws, after their hooked feet. The larvae climb onto flowers and wait for a solitary mining bee, which they then latch onto, and hitch a lift back to the bee’s nest. Once there they climb off the bee and eat the bee’s eggs and stores of pollen and nectar. The larva grows in the bee’s burrow and emerges as an adult the following year ready to mate and start the cycle again.
They are most often seen from March to July on bare ground, such as footpaths. Their preferred habitat is grassland and heathland, as the adults feed on soft grasses.
Oil beetles are named after the bitter oil-like fluid that they produce from their knee joints to deter predators.
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Flea Beetle (Altica lythri)
The flea beetle is a small jumping beetle in the leaf beetle family. It can be distinguished by its thick and powerful back legs, (see picture below) which mean it can spring out of the way of predators. Hence its name.
Flea beetles can be pests, the adults feeding on the leaves of the host plant and the larvae on the roots. The adults appear in the spring after hibernating, and lay eggs at the base of the host plant. The next generation of adults emerge by midsummer. Altica lythri is a dark metallic turquoise flea beetle which favours Great Willowherb.
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Blue Shieldbug
The Blue Shieldbug is a smaller species – 5-7mm only compared to around 12mm for the common green one. It has an attractive metallic blue-green with dark wings. It is widespread and favours heath and grasslands, living on low vegetation. It is omnivorous and eats the larvae of leaf beetles, and moth caterpillars, as well as plant matter. The bug overwinters as an adult and lays eggs in the spring. New adults appear from July. There is only one brood per year.
I also spotted an adult Common Green Shieldbug and have added an update photo to that post, as the original was a 4th instar.
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Seed Weevil (Apion frumentarium)
Unmistakeably a weevil, with a head the same shape as an anteater’s. This Seed Weevil was bright red and caught my eye, as it scurried down a fat blade of grass and across the step. The only bits that weren’t red were its black eyes and claws. It was textured with tiny dimples and ridges. They are usually found on the leaves of large docks, on the underside of the leaves, but mainly from April till early June. They lay a single egg in a hole in the stem and seal the hole. The next generation adults emerge from June and then aestivate over the summer, re-emerging in the autumn to feed up before they overwinter on or under their host plant.
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Early Bumblebee
I spotted this bee on the grass in a rare patch of sunshine on Monday. I assumed it was a buff-tailed bumblebee because of its orange bottom, but it turns out that buff-tailed bumblebees have a white tail, which I should have remembered from my white-tailed bumblebee post. So, which bees have an orange tail? And stripes? The red-tailed bumblebee is black apart from its tail, so no stripes. The bilberry bumblebee has a fiery red tail but is in decline and prefers higher altitudes.
The Early Bumblebee is described as the only bumblebee to have a truly orange tail. It has two yellow stripes, which in males can be wide enough to cover a good part of its head and upper abdomen. It lives up to its name by waking up early in the year. In fact, new queens do not hibernate at all, but start a nest straight away. This bee likes white clover, lavender, sage, thistles, and flowers in the daisy family. It is quite common and favours flower meadows and cultivated gardens.
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Ruby Tiger Moth Caterpillar
With rosettes of long ginger hairs, and a black face with white markings to make it look fiercer, this was identified as a Ruby Tiger Moth Caterpillar. The caterpillars eat dock, dandelion and plantain, and also broom, ragwort and heather and can be found in a variety of habitats including moorland, heathland, open grassland, sand-dunes, gardens and watermeadows.
The moths can be seen April to June and August to September. They have a flame red body with black spots and ginger wings.
I was concerned that this caterpillar looked in a bad way with a large wet patch. I thought it might be a wound. We spotted it near to the Nursery Web Spider, but I couldn’t find any references to the spider preying on a caterpillar twice its size. Then I found out that caterpillars can start to liquify before they pupate, as the cocoons are smaller than the caterpillar and they have to squash in somehow. The lack of stripes and plumpness of this caterpillar indicates that it may be a 5th instar, which means that it is due to pupate next. It will spin a cocoon of silk and incorporate some of its hair as well.
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Unarmed Stick-insect (Acanthoxyla inermis)
Today is one of those grey, miserable, wet winter’s days. It’s mild-ish at 11°C (on the shed roof) but feels colder inside. Outside, the Egret pair have been flying around all morning – and yesterday I spotted the two herons flying back up the valley. Fingers crossed both pairs nest nearby – it’s looking more hopeful.
Whilst I haven’t spotted anything new for a few days, it was on Saturday that we were strolling home from posting a letter. Our local post-box comes with a sea view, so we’d lingered down at the cove getting a bit of fresh air. As we reached our front garden, we saw this stick-insect on our garden wall. Under my blog rules, I can’t count it as it isn’t in the watermeadow. However, I had to post the picture, as I was so excited to see it. We kept Indian stick-insects when the children were at primary school and there was a year when “everyone” was keeping them as pets. It was fun, apart from trying to clean out their jar without them escaping.
In Cornwall, stick-insects roam free. The two main types are the Prickly Stick-insect (Acanthoxyla geisovii) and the Unarmed Stick-insect (Acanthoxyla inermis). This is the first ‘wild’ stick-insect I have seen since we moved to Cornwall 4½ years ago. I wondered where it had come from, as there is no likely plants nearby to my knowledge.
I found out that they eat bramble. Mr C had been pulling up bramble from behind the house. Could it have been dislodged from there? The article I was reading encouraged me to report my sighting to Malcolm Lee of the Phasmid Study Group. (Phasmid is the order of insects which includes species that resemble leaves and sticks.) My sighting was noted and he kindly sent me lots of information about Naturalised stick-insects.
To start with the only reason I had spotted it was because it stood out so strikingly against the white background. Living on a plant, they are well-camouflaged looking like twigs. They travel very little and few live long enough to survive the winter. This one was identified as juvenile Unarmed Stick-insect. They usually lay eggs in the autumn, which simply drop to the ground below the plant and hatch the following spring. The tiny nymphs (first instar) are leaf green with a brown stripe down their back. They climb up into the nearest plant hoping it will be their food-plant. It most likely will be – and there they will stay – never moving further than a few dozen meters in their life.
To find out which plant it had come from, Malcolm gave me clear instructions as to when to look for the hatchlings, so from late-March to mid-April I will be looking for a spell of dry weather to go out with a torch at dusk, as that I when I am most likely to see numbers of the tiny insects feeding. We don’t have many plants in our front garden, so it is most likely to be from our roses or from a neighbour’s plants, as it turns out that they can eat a variety of plants including roses, bramble, raspberry, even conifers.
The roses were ordered from a well-known garden company and that’s another clue as the most common way for stick-insects to spread in the UK is as eggs in plant pot soil from nursery and garden centre plants. The first naturalised Unarmed Stick-insect recorded in the south-west was in Truro in 1979, but then it was discovered that Treseder’s nursery 100 metres away had, in fact, been home to them since the 1920’s, which just goes to show how compact their geographical range is left to their own devices.