Biology – Page 36 – David Bradley

The Old Lady with the Black Underwing and the Grave Brocade

As the summer moves on, so the diversity and numbers of moths (Lepidoptera) active each night grows. We’re coming to the end of the first week of July and already one night’s haul has passed 200 specimens of 40 different species, logged, identified, and the interesting and ones new to the garden photographed.

Old Lady moth. Mormo maura, one of the larger moths of the British Isles

160+ moths of more than 30 species were drawn to the actinic light of the scientific moth trap on the night of 5th July. I had heard and possibly seen an Old Lady (Mormo maura) in the garden a few nights ago, but this morning she was nestled in one of the egg trays in the trap awaiting her photocall. This species is large (30mm along the edge of the forewing). Far bigger than the many micros that I didn’t log in detail. You can see the morning logs for the leps here.

The Old Lady, also known as a Black Underwing, and in an earlier time, the Grave Brocade, was accompanied by two Privet Hawk-moths (the UK’s largest species of moth) and a single Elephant Hawk-moth both of which I’ve photographed and written about here previously. The Old Lady is not commonly drawn to light according to the UK Moths site, although my Collins lep guide says they will often come indoors attracted by the light. Regardless, this one definitely was drawn to the light and settled in for the night. It had a chunk missing from its left forewing, so I did a little ‘shopping to tidy her up.

Why is this noctuid, or owlet, moth, called Old Lady, you are probably asking? Well, the sombre answer is that the dark and funereal colours of this moth reminded those who named it of the penchant of elderly widows of Europe for wearing black. This was long before the Victorian era though.

The delicate patterning of the moth’s wings, according to Peter Marren in his book of moth names, Emperors, Admirals, and Chimney Sweepers, resembles that kind of black lace. Intriguingly, adds Marren, the scientific name – Mormo maura – The first part of the name is the name of a hideous she-monster used by Greek parents, apparently, to encourage errant children to behave. “Mormo will come and bite you, if you don’t behave! The second part of the name alludes to the Moors. In Holland, the Old Lady, Marren tells us, becomes a black orphan – Zwart weeskind.

Pondlife clarity

Our pond has, this week, started to show signs of clarity, we can see the gravel at the bottom now and although it’s not perfectly clear it seems to have achieved some kind of balance at last. That said, it occurred to me after writing the initial draft of this blog post that the thing that did it was transplanting one of the plants into a bigger pot of aquatic soil; that was about a week ago. The low-nutrient aquatic soil has presumably added something to the water or is acting as a filter and led to this new clarification. Of course, what this now means is I need to find a way to camouflage the tubs and the hose you can now see at the bottom of the pond!

There have been sporadic sightings of at least a couple of frogs for a few weeks now. I added some water snails from a friend’s as previously mentioned, and I could actually see them moving around in the newly clear water. I also added a couple more plants including the mimulus in the photo above, maybe that helped with the clarification too.

Damselflies have been investigating again today…which is good…and there is an abundance of mosquito larvae…not so nice.

The June Gap

UPDATE: Reading Oates, I realise now that the June Gap is more widely appreciated, particularly by beekeepers rather than butterfliers. Indeed, the gap isn’t really about the invertebrates at all, it’s about the flowers. The spring flowers come and go and there is commonly a gap between their final blooms and the emergence of summer flowers.

It is this period that beekeepers think of as The June Gap, a period when there is far less nectar available for their apian charges. This, of course, means there is less food for other nectaring species, such as butterflies, and so they have adapted to cope with this in terms of their flight periods and reproductive cycles, hence the hibernators, the spring emergers, and the summer species.

However, climate change and change ecosystems now mean that much is altered from when the notion of a June Gap was first discussed and indeed, the very notions of the immutable four seasons in the temperate zones are being disturbed by global effects driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

There always seems to have been some overlap between what we might call the spring butterflies (Orange Tips, Brimstone, Peacocks etc) and the emergence of the summer species, like this Ringlet, the Heaths, the Blues, and the Meadow Browns, Skippers etc. But some of those Spring species keep going well into the summer and some of them have a second brood too.

Female Ringlet butterfly, with swollen-thighed beetle bottom left

So, while there may have been a June Gap in flowers (that too is changing), insects and plant life don’t tend to obey our qualitative rules. Indeed, many years there are commonly more butterflies and more butterfly species on the wing in June than in the earlier spring months or later in the summer.

For more of my butterfly photos, check out the Lepidoptera galleries on my Imaging Storm website.

Coastal Lepidoptera

UPDATE: The huge numbers of very worn, migrant Painted Lady butterflies that we and many other people saw at the end of June and into July. It was an irruption and is a good indicator of a coming long, hot summer.

Apparently, this species which migrates into Europe from North Africa never gets its weather forecast wrong. They only turn up in such large numbers here when the weather is going to be good. Their larvae feed mainly on thistles, including the notorious creeping thistle, the bane of the allotmenteer with a bad back. #AllotmentLife.

Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, North Norfolk, 29 June 2019

The second generation will hatch from eggs laid on those thistles and will be much more richly coloured than their migrant parents who lose so many of their wing scales on their journey to these shores.

However, we need to talk about Vanessa. Vanessa cardui is the Painted Lady in Cynthia’s group. No, not the backing singer in an all-girl 1960s Northern soul outfit, she’s a butterfly. On our hike from the campsite in Stiffkey to the pine-backed beach huts at Wells, a ~16km round trip along the coastal footpath, we saw dozens of V cardui and very few other butterfly species. There were a few Small Tortoiseshell and lots of Meadow Brown, and the occasional Speckled Wood.

I don’t recall ever seeing so many Painted Ladies at one time. They migrate to Britain and Europe from North African and the Mediterranean region in Spring. For whatever reason, there seems that a large number has arrived on these shores.

One of many Silver Y feeding on and pollinating wildflowers along the Norfolk coastal path at dusk.

On the return journey from Wells, as dusk ultimately fell we also saw plenty of grass moths of different species and dozens of feeding and pollinating wildflowers Silver Y (Autographa gamma) and one Yellow Shell (Camptogramma bilineata), and a Cinnabar (Tyria jacobaeae).

Stiffkey campsite to Wells and the pine woods, 10 miles there and back

Spooning in Stiffkey

Mrs Sciencebase and I visited our peripatetic holiday house* to High Sands Creek campsite in Stiffkey, Norfolk, this weekend, turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. Lots and lots of rather worn looking Painted Lady butterflies during the day and Silver Y pollinating the wildflowers at dusk.

A long, hot walk to Wells-next-the-Sea from the campsite was peppered with the usual seabird suspects of summer in this area – Oystercatcher, Curlew, Red Shank – and quite a few warblers in the trees along the footpath. It’s quite a hike from the east end of Wells to the pine-backed beaches of golden sand and beach huts to the west. The aroma of the pine and the heat of the day might make the somnambulant visitor imagine dreamily that they are on a Mediterranean island. It is quite beautiful and one of the many reasons we make return visits to this part of the world and have done so for almost thirty years.

Anyway, we had at various points along the hike seen what we thought were large, odd-looking herons overhead. It was only on seeing one wading and feeding along the shore of the inlet, East Fleet, that we realised that what we had been watching were Spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia).

There are a few of the birds at Holkham, further west around the coast, perhaps one might describe it as a breeding colony and ironically enough they were spotted at Stiffkey Fen a couple of days before our arrival. The “spoon” shaped bill of this bird, Mrs Sciencebase remarked is quite something, but perhaps a more apt name would The Spatula-billed Heron.

Sadly, this species is of European conservation concern and is actually only a rare breeding bird in the UK. It is thought there are only up to 4 breeding pairs in the UK. That said, on a fairly recent visit to RSPB Minsmere we caught a glimpse of around 30 Spoonbills (out of breeding season some of them arrive here to over-winter). I’ve seen two previously at RSPB North Warren on the northern outskirts of Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

But, on this more recent coastal trip to North Norfolk we may have seen a total of half a dozen, with one or two spotted in flight at different times over the weekend and the individual above I photographed in Wells-next-the-Sea.

Amazingly, only one other person in the town walking along the East Fleet seemed to notice the bird, he ran down to get a photo with his phone shouting about it being a “dessert spoonbill” to his friends and, of course, he spooked it and it took flight…which did give me an opportunity to snap it in flight much closer.

*Our tent.

A hint of flint

The Lepidoptera, the scaly-winged insects we know as moths and butterflies, have become something of a citizen science preoccupation for me over the last year or so, hopefully at least a few of you noticed.

I’ve talked about how many of these insects are perhaps dowdy and drab but there is such huge variety in their form, shape, patterns, and behaviour and so many are brighter and more colourful and intriguing than the moths we call butterflies in English. With more than 2500 species in the British Isles, what’s an amateur naturalist going to do, but study, photograph, and write about them?

Yesterday one of my colleagues on the Facebook group “UK Moths Flying Tonight” posted a photo of a moth known as Buff Arches, Habrosyne pyritoides (Hufnagel, 1766). I was envious and hoping to see one today, and there here we are, there was one in the trap, hence my photos. The UK Moths site says of Buff Arches:

The combination of smooth grey, white and russet-brown make this delicately-marked moth one of the prettiest, especially when observed at close range.

Now, many Lepidoptera are patterned and colourful. Often the markings help camouflage the insect making it look like a leaf or a piece of twig. Buff Arches is particularly well marked and intricate and, at first, I couldn’t see through its disguise.

My expert lep friend Leonard Cooper pointed out that it’s not trying to look like a leaf or a twig, it actually resembles a shard of flint. Buff Arches, in other words, has evolved a disguise that makes it look like a piece of naturally napped stone. It is common in wooded areas of the southern half of Britain but is absent from Scotland. There’s a clue in the species’ scientific name as to what the people who named it thought it looked like – Habrosyne pyritoides, that term “pyritoides” literally means resembling pyrite (the mineral iron pyrite, iron sulfide*). And, if you didn’t picture it as a sherd of flint, then thinking of it as a lump of mineral might fool you.

Incidentally, The Cinnabar is so-called for another mineral connection, the red of its wings is very same hue as mercury sulfide, commonly known as cinnabar.

Meanwhile, that Citizen Science stuff I mentioned, well it’s basically about recording what turns up in the garden, I’ve had at least a couple of Cambridgeshire rarities – Light-feathered Rustic and The Spinach – so those have been logged with the County Recorder. You can keep up to date with all the other leps in my logbook here.

Birds of the Fen Edge Festival

The biannual Fen Edge Festival took place midsummer weekend 21-23rd June 2019. As ever, exciting but exhausting with lots of music and other events, stalls, etc. I side-stepped being an official photographer this year in favour of doing a bit more “musical” performance, but I still managed to get a few photos of the birds that The Raptor Foundation had brought along.

The Bataleur Eagle (Terathopius ecaudatus) is one of Africa’s snake-eating eagles. It’s a medium-sized eagle but up close and personal looks quite huge. Mainly black with distinctive white on the underside of its enormous wings. More distinctive still are its red face and feet. These are brightest when the bird is comfortable and happy, but it can withdraw the blood from these parts of its body when agitated leaving the face and feet yellow. This is presumably an adaptation that protects it from a snakebite. The blood being withdrawn from vulnerable exposed parts that might sucumb to venom.

The Bataleur that the team brought to FEF19 was a female called Captain Scarlet. The bird has a foreshortened tail which is an adaptation that allows it to walk backwards on the ground. This it does when hunting snakes. A snake will perceive another animal backing away as being vulnerable and likely prey.

The eagle backs away enticing in the snake and by this time it will have withdrawn the blood from its face and feet. It will strike the snake with its talons but if the snake tries to retaliate by biting the bird before its demise, there is no blood in the vulnerable extremities to carry the snake’s venom into the bird’s system. Once it has dispatched, the snake, the bird will eat it and in the meantime, the blood will flood back into its face and feet pushing out any venom through the puncture wounds!

The Raptor Foundation also brought along a European Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo) called Klunk. Its scientific name is one of those tautonyms I keep mentioning. The double of the scientific name like this means this species is the archetype, the type, of the family.

They brought with them a tiny Southern White-faced Owl (Ptilopsis granti) from Southern Africa, called, ironically, Goliath. Mrs Sciencebase and myself certainly heard this species in Botswana many years ago, but at the time they were known as White-faced Scops Owls.

There was a Barn Owl (Tyto Alba), and a Tawny Owl (Strix aluco). The female of this species is the one that calls out to the males “Too-wit” and the male replies “Two-woo”. You can usually then know if there are at least two Tawny owls, a male and a female around. Except, of course, confusingly the females also sometimes make the call back to themselves.

A green moth that’s almost white

TL:DR – There are numerous green moths, they have evolved to mimic leaves and so evade predators through a simple camouflage mechanism.

The Light Emerald, is a geometer moth (its larvae are inchworms, measuring the earth). It is a delicate green, but not always, sometimes the green is stronger, sometimes it’s almost not green at all, but you can still tell that it is Campaea margaritaria. I had a very pale specimen to the scientific moth trap in June 2019 and posted a photo along with other interesting moths that were drawn to the actinic light.

A colleague, Martin Honey, on the Moths UK Flying Tonight Facebook group commented that he was aware of chemical research into the green pigment in this species and how it is known to be a less stable compound than any of the green pigments in an entirely different group of moths that sometimes have green, the noctuids, also known as the owlets.

An almost white Light Emerald, it’s green pigment has degraded

The paper is from 1994 and explains the chemistry of the Light Emerald green: The chemistry and systematic importance of the green wing pigment in emerald moths (Lepidopera: Geometridae, Geometrinae). You can read about the research here. It’s definitely something I might have written about back in the day when I was doing weekly chemistry news for New Scientist magazine and others.

The green pigment in question is called geoverdin and it is the only green pigment the moth needs. Chemically speaking it was once thought to be a bile pigment, but it turns out to actually be a derivative of the green pigment from photosynthesising plants, chlorophyll, consumed during the moth’s larval (caterpillar) stage. The researchers in the paper cited used good-old thin-layer chromatography to give the elusive moth pigment a little TLC and discern its characteristics.

Unfortunately, the team does not show the structure in their paper and a search for any other reference turns up nothing. However, I did find reference to the original PhD thesis from which the research paper was derived wherein it suggests that geoverdin is derived from neither bile pigments nor chlorophyll. I’ve contacted one of the team to find out more and will hopefully be able to update this post soon.

Scientific binomials in biology

I’ve talked about scientific binomial nomenclature here before especially in the context of tautonyms, where each part of the binomial (or trinomial even) is the same word e.g Carduelis carduelis, Bufo bufo, Gorilla gorilla gorilla. The repetition lets you know the species in question is the “type of the family.

People often call these scientific names, the Latin name for a plant or animal. However, they’re rarely Latin, they are Latinised, made to look like Latin words, but they’re often derived from proper Latin, assimilated from Greek or simply faked. Heteropoda davidbowie is a good example of why these aren’t really Latin names.

Anyway, a point that I’d overlooked in recent years is that the scientific name for an organism has to be qualified by the name of the person that named/discovered the organism and the year that was first recorded. So, for example, the full name of the spider with the orange mullet should be as follows: Heteropoda davidbowie, [JÃ¤ger, 2008]. In printed works, the binomial should be in italic lettering and the name and year in brackets.

Now, that I’ve remembered this point, I’ve made a start updating the lists associated with my bio photo galleries at Imaging Storm: Lepidoptera,Â Birds, and other Wildlife to include the discoverer/namer and year. It’s going to take me a while so please just in enjoy scrolling through my photos for now.

Four Elephants on the Bottom Lime

Scientific moth trap haul was much improved during a wet but balmy June night: 105+ moths of 31+ species. My hunch had been right based on the activity I’d seen around the actinic light after midnight. Despite the drizzle, it was almost balmy.

Never thought I’d see so many HMs at once: 4 Elephant Hawk-moths and a Lime Hawk-moth. Also, had my first Ghost Moth (M), first Light Arches (2x), first Mottled Beauty.