Category: Invertebrates

TL:DR – The etymology of a caddisfly name.

While most of my invertebrate photography focuses on Lepidoptera, it’s also fun to get shots of other insects, such as this large caddisfly, Stenophylax permistus, which turned up in the moth trap overnight. I’ve seen it several times before, but hadn’t previously felt inclined to take a photo until this morning.

The scaly-winged Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies, same thing) and the hairy-winged Trichoptera (caddisflies, also known as sedge-flies or rail-flies) share a common evolutionary ancestor. The former group evolved to have scales on their wings while the latter has ostensibly smooth, albeit veined, wings, that have hairs. The two together sit within the superorder Amphiesmenoptera. There are about 14500 species of Trichoptera and 160,000 species of Lepidoptera.

This large species of caddisfly is, I believe, Stenophylax permistus. I don’t believe there’s an official vernacular, or common, name for this insect, but if we look at its scientific binomial literally, we could invent one. Steno means “narrow”, phylax means “guard” and permistus means “permitted”. So the common name for this caddisfly could be the “Permitted Narrow Guard”? Perhaps…

The caddisflies have aquatic larvae, which is handy as we have a garden pond, but the adults are terrestrial.

TL:DR – A new study has demonstrated the ability of red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) to recycle water in their rectums. This feat allows the beetles to survive in some of the driest environments on Earth.

The research team of Kenneth Halberg and colleagues built a transcriptomic atlas of the beetles’ life stages, which allowed them to systematically compare gene expression across tissues and stages. By searching the atlas for genes with enriched expression in the rectum, the researchers were able to identify a specific gene associated with this phenomenon, Nha1.

Electrophysiological experiments confirmed that Nha1 plays a crucial role in ion transport in rectal cells and water uptake by the rectum. In fact, silencing the expression of Nha1 led to water loss, emphasizing the importance of this gene in the beetle’s survival.

Red flour beetles have a large surface-to-volume ratio that makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental water loss. However, the beetles’ rectal complex enables them to recycle water from their faeces and even harvest water from moist air. This remarkable ability is key to the beetle’s survival in arid settings.

The findings of this study shed light on the evolution of water recycling and conservation mechanisms in insects. Furthermore, the transcriptomic atlas of red flour beetles, known as BeetleAtlas, can be used to address a range of unresolved questions on Tribolium biology. Overall, this research highlights an intriguing adaptation that allows insects to thrive in challenging environments.

“NHA1 is a cation/proton antiporter essential for the water-conserving functions of the rectal complex in Tribolium castaneum,” by Muhammad T. Naseem et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci

TL:DR – The waggle dance of the honeybee carries more information than scientists previously thought, allowing the bees to find known food sources even if they start their journey from a place other than the hive.

Here’s the buzz…

Scientists and beekeepers have known for years that honeybees have a way of communicating the location of food sources that involves hitting the dancefloor in the hive. The dance that the bees use to communicate is called the waggle dance, and the moves tell other bees where to find food, specifically nectar and pollen-rich flowers. The dance conveys both the distance and direction of the food source, allowing other bees to follow the instructions and find the food.

Now, Charles Gallistel of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA and Randolf Menzel of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues have studied a hive of nearly 2,000 honeybees in Germany. They watched as foragers (always female bees) returned to the hive and recruited other bees to the food source using the waggle dance. But then, they did an interesting experiment. They captured the recruited bees and released them far away from the hive. They tracked the bees’ location using radar and watched to see what they would do.

Even though the bees were released a long way from their home hive, they still flew in the direction indicated by the waggle dance. Moreover, the bees didn’t fly in a straight line, instead, they flew in a direction that was biased towards the true location of the food source. This suggests that the bees were able to use the information in the waggle dance to create a “cognitive map” of the food source’s location. This means they could presumably find the food source from any starting point going from A to Zzzzzz.

This new work published in PNAS suggests that the information contained in the honeybee waggle dance is even richer than was previously thought. This could have important implications for our understanding of how bees navigate and find food, which could have implications for everything from agriculture to conservation.

There was a bit of a buzz in our local Dissenter’s Cemetery here in Cottenham. Cemetery trustee James Blunt got in touch to tell me a bit about it. Turns out hundreds if not thousands of apian non-conformists had turned up and were partying at the rear of the graveyard.

I met up with James mid-afternoon and he directed me to the patch where Ivy Miner Bees (Colletes hederae) were actively mating and laying eggs. The bee is pretty much harmless, a solitary, as opposed to social, species that regularly adopts quiet patches of ground to “mine” hundreds of holes. The holes being the repository for new life among the granite and graves. The bees are noisy and fast-moving, but not an aggressive insect, all buzz and no bite, you might say.

The species is a recent arrival to The British Isles, having been first noted by entomologists in 2001, it having arrived from the continental mainland. It has been spreading its wings ever since and mining a home for its eggs on these quiet patches usually where a steady supply of autumnal blossom on ivy plants is nearby.

The Dissenters’ Cemetery as many residents might remember featured in an early episode of TV crime drama Silent Witness, which was originally set in and around Cambridge. Today, the cemetery’s gates, flanked famously by a huge pair of monkey puzzle trees welcomes all for long-term rest and respite. The site was established when Anglican burials of non-conformist parishioners was no longer possible. Back in the middle of the Victorian era. At the time, the Anglican priest was not allowed through the gates.

The Cemetery now welcomes mourners and other visitors who might in the spring and early summer notice the standing yellow spikes of mullein plants, the rare yellow-berried holly, and earlier still various species of snowdrops. At any time of year, they can puzzle over the meaning of life in the shadow of the trees and they might imagine the tragic tales of those who served in two World Wars who are buried here. Come the autumn, it is a small part of the apian world that might hold a visitor’s attention briefly. Life, as they say, will out…even among the graves.

If you’ve spent even just one of the recent spate of sultry summer nights outside, you may, if you closed your eyes briefly, be forgiven for imagining that the village had been lifted wholesale and transported to a balmy beach resort, a little farther than Bournemouth and certainly not northwards to Barnard Castle, say somewhere on The Mediterranean coast. But, it’s not so much about the heat and humidity that has led to perspiring gents and glowing local ladies, rather it’s the sound.

Have you heard it? The chirping, chirruping as the dusk settles and the night draws on? The sound seems to bounce from garden to garden as one perambulates the pavement. It’s as if someone is playing a trick on you, first it’s to your left at number 12, then it’ over the road at number 15 and back to 11 and, bizarrely, no, it’s definitely coming from number 18…probably the back garden.

The sound is quite evocative, it’s the sweet monotonically melodic note of the House Cricket, Acheta domesticus. Specifically, it’s the sound of the male of the species rubbing his wings together (termed stridulation) to make a sound to attract a female. It’s a mating call, in other words.

The House Cricket species is thought to be native to Southwest Asia and has been kept as a pet in China and Japan and probably elsewhere for centuries simply for the charming evocation of its chirping. After World War II, the species began its inextricable worldwide spread carried on the waves of human globalization that broke on international shores in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, it might be found almost anywhere and certainly when there is a run of days that top out somewhere above 30 Celsius and the nights don’t chill to below about 20 Celsius, we hear them in Cottenham.

Dry-roasted house cricket is a great source of high-quality protein and could be the future once we accept that the carbon footprints left by mammalian livestock are far too big for our boots. Indeed, as with all insects the animal provides a complete protein, in other words it contains all nine of the essential amino acids we need in our diets. Unfortunately, there has been a viral pandemic in the cricket world, cricket paralysis virus has devastated the cricket-breeding industries of North America and Europe. Thankfully, the industry discovered that the Jamaican field cricket is resistant to this virus and has usurped the house cricket as the invertebrate of choice in the industry.

Unfortunately, I am yet to get a photograph of one of the Cottenham house crickets, but I have made a recording of the sound for your delectation, in case you have not had the opportunity to sit a spell in the rocker on your porch on one of these summer nights. It’s worth noting that the faster the chirps, the warmer it is…or vice versa…when it gets warmer the crickets stridulate faster.

Yesterday, I had my birding lens (150-600mm zoom) on the camera when I snapped those invertebrates feeding on the ivy overgrowth in All Saints’ churchyard in Rampton. Today, I took a 90mm macro to get a different type of closeup of the butterflies, bees, flies, and hornets. No hornets in sight and no ivy bees either.