This lovely little vase is an Argiope spider egg case, and it’s still hanging there in the kitchen door frame. I was fairly certain that it was an Argiope orb weaver because the spider had parked itself there most of the late summer and early autumn last year. Googling confirmed it by presenting me in the first five hits with Bev’s Argiope and Araneus Activity photos. Googling also presented me with this abstract from the Journal of Morphology, 2002 on spiderling activity. Apparently the spiderlings work in concert to enzymatically digest the tough matrix of the case, and then are able to push aside the remaining fibrils to make their exit. I’ve been watching it all spring, and warned Glenn yesterday to leave it alone if he decides to do a frenzy of cleaning. Our Argiopes do appear late in the warm season, so I hope that somewhere in there are spiderlings busy at digesting away that old matrix.

It’s May 31, and so looking at the weather predictions I can fairly confidently predict that we’ve had all the rain we will for the month. It’s fortunate that we had some in the first week of May, but even so our total for the year amounts to 13.5 inches, officially, whereas the average from Jan-May would be 22.2 inches by this time. So we’re at 61% of normal for the year (and that on top of last year’s 82% of normal). As we’re heading into the typically dry months, Jun-Nov, it doesn’t look promising.

The culprit has been a high pressure mass hanging over much of the southeast US, something which normally doesn’t happen until mid to late summer. It effectively blocks the eastward course of cold waves and northward course of warm moist air, so that conditions for rain are not achieved. That’s why the southeast can receive no rain, but the midsection of the US can have rains and flooding.

I had hoped that RealClimate would weigh in on this NASA study that was published last month, but I’ll go ahead and present the link, briefly, and then more later. It’s one of three studies released that suggest that warming is proceeding much faster than the global climate models are predicting. It’s a little unusual in that it applies weather prediction software to projected conditions in 2080. None of these studies were in time to make this cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, and so must wait for five years to be considered.

Here are some of the photos (taken by Louis Manglass of WVFD) that go with yesterday’s post on the vehicle overturn on US 78. Click on a photo for a larger image in a new page. (Not shown are the chickens.)

All the metal you see here was part of the truck. The cab is in the center background, behind the group of rescuers. Note that everyone there is taller than the cab is now. There were at least three generators running most of the time, for supplying electricity for the implements of destruction used in the extrication.

From a safety perspective, there are some things to criticize here. There are way too many people standing way too close and doing nothing. At one point I counted 15, and at least half of them were doing nothing. I don’t know what the operating guidelines are for EMS and Rescue but firefighters are supposed to have hands, head, and feet protection, and some of the firefighters here are not in appropriate gear.


WVFD pumper (you can see why we call it the Margaritaville) on the left. We used it for fire protection during helicopter landing and takeoff. That’s Glenn operating the pumper, which he does with style. The very fine field is on the right, and as The Unknown Firefighter noted, it had no fireant hills! Not shown is the sweep we did prior to the landing to make sure there were no objects that could get sucked into the copter blades.


Wolfskin and Arnoldsville are on the hoses, just in case (I’m on hose backup crouched behind the fellow in the red helmet on the right) but the landing was uneventful (except that it was very cool). The driver is being carried to the helicopter by Crawford VFD, Oglethorpe Rescue, and Oglethorpe EMS. Again, way too many people here.

My usual blogging time was interrupted by a 6am call for WVFD to be at the scene of a large vehicle overturn. So we just got back and what could be better to write about?

The incident was on US 78 at Cherokee Corners going into town. That particular stretch has been the scene of many bad accidents. Going into town you approach the danger zone after climbing a steep hill, cresting, and then starting down a steep hill on the other side, there is a rather sharp near-90 degree curve to the right. While the speed limit on this stretch is 45 mph, traffic invariably travels at 60 mph. It is a very busy two lane road and it is heavily travelled by all kinds of heavy haulers.

This one was a large truck carrying 5200 chickens, as I discovered after parking on the side and starting down the side of 78. Dead and stunned chickens everywhere. The driver simply never even tried to make the turn, and had probably fallen asleep at the wrong time. Fortunately there were no oncoming vehicles at that moment.

Also fortunately there was no fire involved, for the driver was pinned inside the twisted cab and had to be extricated, an operation that took two hours and that I didn’t get involved with. Vehicle accidents always require fire assistance, just in case, which is why we were there. EMS generally does the extrications, with VFDs on backup.

Our fire chief convinced the incident commander that we should order a helicopter brought in to convey the driver to Atlanta - he was pretty beat up with both ankles and femurs smashed. And so that was interesting.

There always has to be fire control presence at a helicopter landing and takeoff. So our VFD, and Arnoldsville VFD, cleared a nearby field for landing, got our truck into position, connected up the hoses, and waited. The helicopter landed at about the same time the driver of the truck was freed, and that was fun to watch from up close, waiting with charged hose, just in case.

And then it took off and that was it. Someone else gets to clean up the chickens.

Of course, with a two land highway, at rush hour, traffic was backed up one way and then the other for at least a mile. Glenn reports that a lot of drivers had their cell phones out videorecording as they drove past. So at least they had something to do, which probably explained their generally good behavior.

We ended up with eight from Wolfskin showing up and assisting and that was a very good turnout for us. Crawford VFD helped Oglethorpe EMS with the extrication and fire protection at the immediate scene, and Arnoldsville VFD and Wolfskin VFD worked together on backup there and at the helipad site. All in all, an interesting and relatively nontragic event that provided a safe training experience.

Or maybe, rather, a relatively easy beetle that isn’t a ladybug. Or at least I’m pretty sure it’s a beetle!

Yesterday we got our most visible small taste of what a lot of others have been experiencing in the last month or more - smoke from fires 300 miles south of us. It’s worthwhile looking at some of the satellite photos at NASA’s Earth Observatory (it’s actually worthwhile spending a few hours perusing that site in general!). That particular day (May 17) brought us a faint haze but yesterday’s was considerably more than just a haze. The prevailing winds blew the smoke more to our west in the direction of Atlanta and (Birmingham!) by noon, but it was still an event.

The photos linked by date on the above link are pretty amazing, especially in the changes in direction of the long plumes of smoke. I can’t help but wonder if as aerosols they’re responsible for a degree or two of cooler difference. Not that that makes up for the presence of smoke, of course - yesterday they were alerting elderly and respiratorally infirm in the Atlanta area to stay indoors.

The beetles, and because of all the pollen it almost wasn’t clear that they were beetles, were scouring the Witherod or Possumhaw (Viburnum nudum), which was putting out a generous abundance of umbelliferous inflorescences.

I finally found it buried deep in Bugguide, a Flower Longhorn Beetle, Judolia spp, probably J. cordifera though there are several other possibilities.


These were clearly sipping nectar, perhaps because the sun was past the yardarm, but several sites suggest that they may also eat pollen. However these were clearly plunging their head deep within each floret for a second or two before moving onto the next one, ignoring the anthers.

However, as you can see, they were being liberally coated with pollen, and were therefore doing a fine job of pollination. It may be significant that most of the photos I’ve seen show the beetles on the large flat-topped clusters of umbel-bearing plants, like queen anne’s lace or viburnums. As large as the beetles are (approaching an inch long) it probably isn’t worth the effort of flying from one solitary flower to another.

Another thing that was interesting was that I could get as close as I wanted with the camera, and neither the looming presence nor the flash disturbed them in their labors. But if I touched the stem of the inflorescence or bent it slightly, off they flew into the woods.

And that’s all the adults do. Other than mate and lay eggs in rotting wood, which their kids eat as larvae. They are then the first disorganizers of dead wood on its way to becoming mulch and litter and finally a part of the soil.

They’re in the subfamily Lepturinae, the Flower Longhorns, with about 250 fellow species in North America. They’re part of a much larger family, Cerambycidae, the Longhorned Beetles, which include a great many destructive wood borers such as the Pine Sawyer.

A few thumbnails to alternative views:

Heard through the bedroom window in the last couple of nights - gray treefrogs, whippoorwills, a pair of very talkative barred owls, and last night, a pack of coyotes partying down at Goulding Creek.

By day, I’ve been spending more time working around the house. Friday I shared the front area for hours with a Cow Killer, or Eastern Velvet Ant Dasymutilla occidentalis. She was the biggest I’d ever run across, at least an inch long, and she was fast. In one speed test I pursued her from one corner of the front area to the other 30 feet away in less than a minute. Consequently the images below really don’t justify being blown up much:


If you aren’t aware of it, velvet ants are not ants, they are wasps and in this case at least the female is wingless. And they will sting the hell out of you, hence the name Cow Killer. What is she doing? Looking for bumblebee nests, probably.

The Yellowjacket Hoverfly Milesia virginiensis is back, no pics yet thought I haven’t written about them here two years ago. Last year we had smaller imitations, but the larger species simply never showed up.

Once I realized what they were I began to see them as easy companions. With their large size and yellowjacket appearance they can be alarming, but there’s something rather nice about one hovering, with wings large enough to blow away the detritus on the ground. And they really are companionable - one will spend long minutes investigating me from a close distance, fly off for a bit, and then return for more.

Speaking of hoverflies, I am perplexed by this fly that settled on the porch for a few minutes. Its coloration reminds me of a syrphid, but the tapering abdomen does not. It does have the arista, the hairs on the antennae, and that suggests it is not a robberfly.


I’m really taken with the silver band between the eyes, as well as the deep purple color of the eyes themselves. It almost doesn’t look real.

It appears now that the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL) that I posted about last Sunday will be shut down. Department of Energy has apparently ignored any Congressional input and made a final decision.

Last week I wrote ten functionaries ranging from senators and representatives to the DOE Secretary to the Univ Georgia President and System Chancellor. I didn’t expect much in the way of response. I think we’ve all gotten the pro forma, canned responses when writing members of Congress. (The South Carolina senators informed me in automatic reply that I wouldn’t be getting one since I don’t live in their state.)

I will give first term (Republican) Senator Johnny Isakson credit for being the only one to respond so far, but as you can see, it could have been better:

Dear Dr. Hughes:

Thank you for contacting my office regarding the current debate on immigration reform in the United States Senate . I appreciate hearing from you and appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Illegal immigration is the most important domestic issue facing our country today. I have long been an advocate for two key principles: border security first and no special pathway to citizenship. T hese two core principles are non-negotiable . With that in mind, I am reserving judgment until we complete the debate , all amendments to the bill have been added and I see the finalized bill. I look forward to the coming debates, and as we continue to move forward in this process I will keep your thoughts in mind.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please visit my webpage at http://isakson.senate.gov for more information on the issues important to you and to sign up for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator

Just a little catchup on some items that have been accumulating for the past few weeks.

Last Thursday Glenn’s old Ford Ranger underwent catastrophic failure halfway home. A good citizen stopped and helped him push it to the side of the road and offered the use of his cell phone. I picked him up and we got the major items transferred to my car, making it just in time for Thursday WVFD training. His truck was 16 years old, 190,000 miles, and it had been a good truck, but was showing signs of collapse. Just the *previous* Thursday he pulled into WVFD and noticed that smoke was issuing from underneath the truck. Now what better place to be when you have a possible car fire than at a fire station?

It was the opportunity to explore hybrids and other high mileage possibilities. But in the end Glenn opted for simply replacing the old one with another of the same, even the same color. Radical departures from old ways don’t come easily, sometimes. It was hard enough to convince Glenn that he needed a *new* truck now, not just to add yet another bungee cord to the old one.

So it will, in all likelihood, be another ten years before we have to replace another vehicle. We hang onto ours for two or three times the length of time most people do.

The fire station was broken into sometime between last Saturday night and Monday morning, when 911 paged out for Fire Chief Mike to call them ASAP, and we wondered what *that* was all about. He spent most of Monday inventorying everything to determine what had been taken, but we got off lucky, I suppose. Only a generator and gas can had been lifted from the Margaritaville pumper. The generator is something of a major loss - it powers external lighting in the event of nighttime emergencies. It’s a big, heavy thing, and must have been hard to get off the truck. But it was saleable, and that lack of saleability was probably the reason we didn’t lose a lot of equipment we would have hated much more to have lost.

The major annoyance was the essential destruction of the two doors, about $800 worth, into the station. The thieves had pried open the side door first only to discover that the knocker, which squeezes into what used to be the kitchen/meeting room only with the greatest difficulty, blocked the entrance. We were amused at what must have been their frustration after all that hard work culminating in being able to push the door open a couple of inches. Of course then they went and destroyed the front door, ultimately got what they wanted, and that wasn’t so amusing.

Much of last night’s training session was spent in cleaning up and discussing extra security options - video cameras, motion detectors and alarms, more frequent drive-bys and activity, and so forth. The station was actually fairly secure but serves as an example that if someone wants to get in, they will.

Another reason for the cleanup, which will continue next Thursday is our planned Open House for Saturday June 2, 10am to 2pm. We plan to provide drinks and food, and entertain with demos every half hour or so, so if you’re in the area do drop by.

Also at training last night there was discussion of the proper grammatical form of the Latin phrase one of our major donors wants on the new plaque. He wanted “carpe ignum” placed next to his name, and we thought that was worthy and perfectly fine and certainly in keeping for a Classics professor. But we all agreed that as one of those strange third declension masculine nouns, the proper accusative case spelling for “ignis” was “ignem”, not “ignum”. So we got that settled before winding things up around 10pm. Only at Wolfskin.

One good thing: despite our unusually dry, hot weather, and the creeping northward of the “purple” Class Five (extreme fire hazard), we haven’t had a wildland fire so far. But then again, there is no rain in sight throughout the next week, either.

I noticed that I’ve mentioned the fly below on another occasion, two years ago almost to the day. It’s a Golden-backed Snipe Fly, Chrysopilus thoracicus. I’ve seen them occasionally for the last few days, but only this one stayed long enough for three quick shots.

I’m led to believe that they usually eat small, soft-bodied insects like aphids, so if you don’t like aphids, you’ll want these around. I suspect these snipe flies may be ephemeral, and unfortunately our aphid populations don’t seem to spike until after midsummer.

Craneflies and Hangingflies are everywhere these days. My batting average on identification of these is pretty much zero, so I’m going to say this is a Hangingfly. The question is, what is it doing? Craneflies are not predatory - they may not eat anything as adults. It’s the kids that have all the fun. The adults appear, mate, lay eggs, and then goodby. Not so Hangingflies, which are predatory. This one has the tarsi on its rear pair of legs, useful in grabbing and gripping prey as the hangingfly hangs on its other four long legs from the bottom of a leaf or stem. Given their different lifestyles, I’d speculate that craneflies probably don’t molt, but that hangingflies must, since they eat and grow. At first I thought this one was engaged in a late breakfast. But looking through the series below, which starts with its head distinctly inside the “prey”, it seems to me that this one is emerging from its old exoskeleton. The “prey's” eyes look a little too empty. The hangingfly itself looks suspiciously moist and fresh.

The last month has been interesting in terms of waves of insect species. I didn’t watch for this last year (who could have thought that I would be paying so much attention to arthropods?), but I’ve been more attentive to diversity at this time of the year so far. Ebony jewelwings are still everywhere, and my recollection is that they will persist for quite some time. I’m not so sure about craneflies but suspect there will come a time soon when I will see many fewer of them. I’ve seen a fair number of damsel dragonflies of different species, some easily recognizable, and will have to keep watching to see if those persist throughout the summer. The other day I saw a very tiny Eastern Pondhawk (a startlingly green dragonfly), and recall that last year I was seeing pondhawks flying about way late into the cool and even cold autumn. I think I have a small list of certain easily recognized flies, such as the snipe fly above, to be able to note whether those persist, or decline in population.

I generally have a number of stops that I have to make during the course of my little daily hikes. Keeping track of the mayapples before they disappear is important, taking at least a quick examination of Troll Rock and the attendent boggy areas, and a stop at Goulding Creek are all on the agenda. Just above Goulding Creek, on the floodplain and to the west (but not the east - that’s Crownbeard territory) is a population of Bear’s Paw, or Hairy Leafcup, Smallanthus uvedalius.

For several years the Microstegium vimineum had gotten so thick that this population was disappearing, but it’s now back in force.


It’s not yet flowering - that will come later - and the plants are only a couple of feet tall. They’ll end up at 5-6 feet with sunflower-like flowers. Right now it’s the leaves that are of interest. They’re relatively flat and broad, and with their slightly hairy surfaces are great places to find arthropods.

Sometimes the arthropods are sucked-out husks, and sometimes they’re the perps of invertebrate carnage. This little fellow seems to be a male Dimorphic Jumping Spider Maevia inclemens. After a wealth of Twinflagged Jumping Spiders, it’s nice to see a new one.


As soon as he became aware of me he became very pugnacious. The palpi are those boxing gloves he’s presenting to me, and he looks very fierce with his little topknot crown. This male is a dark form male - if you look at the above Bugguide page, you’ll see that my male has a white face, compared to that one. There are photos of similarly white-faced males, but most are of entirely black-faced males. (The other male form is gray, hence the name “dimorphic”.)


He was alternately aggressive, and then fearful of me, running under the leaf periodically until I’d coerce him back up on top by waving my hand underneath. But he absolutely refused to leave his perch. No green fangs yet, I’m afraid, but great boxing gloves.

For some reason, spiderweb photography and I don’t seem to get along. The young Orchard Webweaver, Leucauge venusta, at the the center here had slaved all night to build me the perfect, near-horizontal web though, so I photographed it once without much thought. Then was a little surprised that it turned out reasonably well.


There was some interest yesterday in how to go about recording animal sounds. I’m elevating a few of the discoveries from yesterday’s comments, just in case someone knows more about putting together a simple, functional packet. Please correct me if I’m misadvising, or suggest other strategies. See below for some updates that might affect the following (especially the one here!:

It seems like digital voice recorders are just fine for storing though apparently not for recording. There is a bewildering array of them. Some think the Olympus are the best quality recorders, and I searched on “digital recorders”, opting for “Olympus”, at Amazon.com.

The DM-20 is one most passionately argued for, but this is for reasons that generally don’t have to do with our needs - we don’t need all the tracking and query bells and whistles, and software for finding folders and selecting songs, for instance, nor (unless you want to use it as a music player ipod equivalent) do we need a huge amount of storage capacity.

The WS-320M/331M also come highly recommended, but again, not for any criteria I’d be thinking on. Much cheaper would be the DS-30.

How a recorder stores recordings may be of interest. Of course, recorders used to store them on tape, and some people still use that. Others store on flash cards, memory sticks, or minidiscs. You have to be able to read any of those. The ones I prefer store them in permanent flash memory, so you have to have a USB port and cable for the computer to read them.

The recording quality is usually of some importance to those who use them for music, or use the internal microphone only. I don’t know how important that is if you use an external microphone. The speed of data acquisition might be the only important aspect - the faster the better (and the more memory it takes up).

The internal mic on a voice recorder is probably not good enough for recording birds/frogs under most circumstance. It’s not selective or sensitive enough, and cuts off high and low frequencies. You need an external microphone, and two sorts are used: shotgun and the more expensive, bulky, parabolic.

Most of the frog people don’t like parabolics, arguing that you don’t need the distance or amplification so much as the selectivity. And so they recommend shotgun microphones, like this one, suggesting that it’s more important to prevent noise from the sides and select for where you point it. That’s what a shotgun does for you. Birds may be different, as flighty as they are.

So: being able to plug in a mic and transfer to the computer is essential, so any recorder has to have an external microphone jack, and a USB or other port to communicate with your computer. How fast the recorder listens to and records the subject may be important. Huge amounts of memory, and probably a certain amount of internal sound quality, is probably not, unless you want to use the thing for playing music.

I should add that the Wildlife Sound Recording Society Webpage has a good selection of writing on methods and equipment, with explanations. I’ll have to resolve some of what look like differences with the above, including the use of digital voice recorders.

UPDATE: OK - one of the main considerations is the sampling rate of the recorder. For catching those very high frequencies it should be 44khz. This is very fast and is probably higher than the “XQ” mode on a digital voice recorder (16 khz is usually given for that). That XQ mode will give you very high quality recording of a voice, but not necessarily of the higher pitch range of certain birds (or frogs). This means that the memory size on a digital voice recorder is more important than I emphasized - the higher quality recording mode requires much more memory.

For whatever reasons, WSRS seems to prefer other recording devices, and especially pushes Mini Disk (HiMD) recorders, though that technology may not be around forever and it can be a pain to download into a computer.

WSRS addresses use of digital voice recorders here. I have a feeling they are looking at much higher performance (and cost) items that would be dedicated to this hobby, but they’re quite adamant about voice recorders.

A couple of afternoons ago, while sitting on the front stoop reading, I caught out of the corner of my eye a falling object and heard a soft “plop”. It took awhile to locate the fallen object but it turned out to be my favorite amphibian, a Gray Treefrog. She, likely, is still mussed a bit but was probably gratified to be returned to her tree.


Some photos I’ve taken show the amazing yellow coloration on the undersides much better, but you can still get a hint of it here.

It’s probably appropriate that the drama took place next to the Hyla Pond, as she is either a Gray Treefrog, Hyla versicolor, or Cope’s Gray Treefrog, H. chrysoscelis. I suspect both are found here in northeast Georgia but if you go by Amphibiaweb’s range depictions here and here, this would probably be H. chrysoscelis.

What’s the difference? It’s very hard to distinguish the two without a microscope or a good ear.

H. chrysoscelis is a diploid animal, as are by far the most of animals. By diploid, we mean that each of the animals cells contains two sets of chromosomes, for a total of 2N=24. H. versicolor is a tetraploid, and so its cells would contain 48 chromosomes. Polyploidy is something which occurs quite frequently in plants, resulting in tetraploids, triploids, pentaploids, hexaploids, and so forth. But it occurs seldom in animals other than occasionally in insects, fishes, and amphibians, but never (apparently) in mammals.

And so you could distinguish the two by examining some cells under a microscope and doing a rough chromosome count. The other way is by frog calls. Apparently H. versicolor has a slower trill than H. chrysoscelis. But in the absence of expertise, this would necessitate making comparisons of recordings. This means the next gadget has to be a digitial recorder, with which I can compare recordings taken elsewhere by kind folks willing to record *their* gray treefrogs.

The Animal Diversity Web has quite a good treatment of H. versicolor. I was particularly interested to read about the evolution of the two species. They seem to have diverged from a common ancestor recently - perhaps as little as fifty thousand years ago. An isolated population of the ancestor doubled its chromosome number and then diverged reproductively, unable to get to the main population during the last ice age. When all that was over, the two populations could no longer hybridize, and these two species are the result.

(Notice that even if they are able to mate and produce a zygote it is a 1N+2N = 3N triploid zygote, and even if it develops and matures, it will be sterile. To be fertile the triploid set would have to be doubled into a 6N hexaploid. While we do this with plants all the time, the chances that it would work in animals are very small.)

I can’t say for sure that we didn’t have Gray Treefrogs 15 years ago when we moved out here - it’s possible, but we did notice the general lack of frogs, other than a very low density down to the creeks. We did build those ponds though, and their occupation by a number of species was immediate. The Gray Treefrogs do the reproduction thing at this time of year, and then when they’re all done with that they move out into the woods. They’ll continue to call occasionally throughout the warm season when a thunderstorm is about to occur, or sometimes for no reason at all.

The Bush Administration is getting ready to insert a trophy feather of yet another eagle into its anti-science, anti-ecology cap. The eagle in this case is the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, and it’s not quite dead yet, but the torturing process which has been going on for at least three years is about to have its final lethal result.

SREL has been primarily funded by the Department of Energy, and administered by the University of Georgia*. Two years ago, according to Eli Kintisch of the journal Science, SREL received $7 million in funding. (Science citations may be behind a subscription wall.) Last year it received $4.5 million. And this year its funding of $1.8 million is likely to result in shutdown at the end of May.

SREL employs over a hundred scientists, including 20 faculty members engaged in SREL’s ecological and monitoring mission. But the effects go way beyond that. SREL is an internationally recognized Laboratory, and hundreds of researchers depend on the Laboratory for the opportunity to do research. SREL has an active outreach program, is accessible to the public, and touches the efforts of tens of thousands of students and teachers. Its independent research results over a half-century are staggering. In searching for identifications for organisms I inevitably find SREL’s webpages to be primary sources of information, especially for Reptiles and Amphibians.

SREL works with and monitors the Savannah River Site, an area of over 800 square kilometers located along the Savannah River, a bit south of Aiken, South Carolina. The Savannah River Site is a government nuclear facility for producing radioactive materials, and for processing and storing nuclear waste. The SRS has been in operation for over 50 years, and although it doesn’t do so much of this now, produced much of the nuclear material for atomic and hydrogen bombs, and continues to produce radioactive materials for other purposes. Note that SREL is at least theoretically an independent entity - it does not justify or protect the SRS, it monitors the Site. (Note: both SRS and SREL are funded by DOE, or its equivalent in the past. This has not proved a problem before, but the theory of independence must now be questioned, as must so many such things in this Bush Era.)

As you can imagine, the environmental effects of this kind of industry are potentially very large indeed. The Savannah River flows between South Carolina and Georgia, and pours out into the Atlantic Ocean. The surrounding areas are environmentally essential and delicate. Release of toxic materials, or even the heating up of rivers used to cool the reactors at the SRS, must be minimized and the effects studied.

In 1951, Eugene Odum ("the father of modern ecology") founded the Savannah Research Ecology Laboratory for the dual mission of monitoring and working with the SRS facility, and for engaging in pure ecological research. For more than fifty years, SREL has carried out those missions and provided both basic research and practical methods to avoid contamination of land, air, rivers, and groundwater. It’s likely that SREL’s work has saved us billions of dollars in avoided cleanup costs, by preventing the release of hazardous waste in the first place.

All you have to do to judge the success of SREL is to compare the environment around the SRS facility to that of its sister facility in Hanford, Washington. Hanford Site also produces radioactive materials, but its legacy is an environmental nightmare, resulting in some of the most contaminated land in the world, and devastating effects on the Columbia River. It’s currently the focus of the largest supercleanup project ever.

Hanford, unlike the Savannah River Site, did not have an Ecological Laboratory to monitor and inform it. And now the Bush Administration wants to shut SREL down by withdrawing Department of Energy funding. On Thursday, the Aiken Standard reported that there has been something of a move to determine what’s going on: Congressman John Barrow (D-GA) has been involved in this, and has successfully convinced Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., and Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, chairmen of House Committee on Science and Technology subcommittees, to investigate the situation. It isn’t clear what Georgia Senators Saxby Chambliss and Jonny Isakson, or South Carolina Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, are doing.

In view of the billions of dollars in cleanup that SREL’s work has saved us, in view of the practical measures that SREL has come up with to minimize toxic releases, and in view of the inestimable worth of a pristine environment it helps to protect, it seems like it deserves $10 million in operating costs each year. That paltry sum represents just a bit more than one hour equivalent of the money that’s been poured into and wasted in the Iraq War every hour of every day for the last four years.

I have placed a word document containing contact information for relevant parties here.

*Disclaimer: We work at the University of Georgia. However, except for sympathetic leanings, we have no connection to SREL.

A couple of days ago, I posted some photos of this critter, which Jason at xenogere (and I see Jason has cats too!), and then Bev, suggested in comments was a Tiger Cranefly, perhaps Nephrotoma ferruginea. Thanks for that!

These are probably some better photos taken yesterday down in the floodplain between the two creeks:


The woods are literally thick with craneflies, and of more than just this species. They’re now mating (first thumbnail, with female on the left, I think, and that’s a female above too). They seem easy prey for something, and it turns out that a number of birds consume them, as do bats. What do adult craneflies eat? Apparently little or nothing, and I imagine that they’re ephemeral then. I notice that in this post I tentatively suggested, if that’s not redundant, that the large larvae I find at the bottoms of the creeks were cranefly larvae. Probably not - apparently cranefly larvae prefer moist soil or soft, perhaps rotting, wood, and are not aquatic per se.

The second thumbnail was yet another attempt to get a wing photo. Not entirely successful, but apparently the Rs vein, which is unusually short, identifies this genus Nephrotoma. There is some discussion of this on this page and other related ones at Bugguide.

The last two are croppings of the head and thorax, female is the third one, male is the fourth one. Dig those green eyes!

Everyone is mating these days. They talk about the birds and the bees, but they really should include the flies in that. These are a pair of Phantom Craneflies, in a different though related family from other craneflies. I posted photos of singletons last May 28, but why not post more? They don’t look or act so ghostly here, but as they’re flying about they definitely do. The grasses and sedges of Troll Rock Bog were, as last year, full of them. As with the regular craneflies, the adult Phantoms don’t eat either.

And finally, though I posted on Eastern Red Damsels earlier, I can’t resist another photo of a male:

While I don’t think our American Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) were out earlier in the spring than usual, they do seem to have started calling earlier than usual. I usually peg them for midsummer rather than midspring.


Yesterday, on my walk, I came across this female eastern box turtle (Terrapens carolina) on her own walk across the Kat Sematary.


It’s always something of an event to encounter one (and even more of an event to encounter a pair, scampering after each other). We seem to have a low density population, and I might run across two or three every year.

I’ve been photographing the ones I do run across for tracking purposes (much better than carving my initials into their shells - isn’t digital photography wonderful?). This female, judging by the lack of a concavity in the plastron, makes the sixth on the roster that I compiled last October:


Her carapace is slightly similar to one I found last fall, but not similar enough - there are definite differences. I should note that I *have* found one again, Sylvia.

A few thumbnails, mostly for my own documentation.

Predators as metaphor, perhaps, in view of yesterday’s news.

In the case of nonhuman predators though, it delights me everytime I find a predatory arthropod. It means that there are upper trophic level species that are doing quite well, despite the biological amplification that can obliterate them. Whether it’s a dragonfly or their unseen nymphs, a wheelbug, a ladybird, a parastic or predatory fly, it means there are also at least ten times more victim:


This presumptive Laphria saffrana, or “Death’s Head Bumble Thief”, one common name I found, was not pleased to have me interrupt its meal of beetle. It allowed me to take exactly three photos, from my usual initial 3-foot distance, before zooming off to enjoy its lunch in peace.

Its common name comes from the ornate decoration atop its thorax, which resembles a human skull upside down. I understand that this and related species will take down horseflies and deerflies on the wing, and so I can’t complain. Quite a ferocious fellow, and I’m glad to add it to my collection of robberflies.

Then there’s this fine fellow, who darted in wholly unexpectedly in a dry area fairly far from any source of water:


Surely it is a narrow-winged damsel, tiny (a little more than inch long), but as to which of three genera it belongs I haven’t been able to determine. Could be a Dancer, a Bluet, or a Forktail, although I doubt the latter. Most of the above three have considerably brighter abdomens, and I haven’t found any photographs of the dorsal and side stripes connected by a band. The postoptic blue spots on the eyes are not connected by a blue band. But there I fail in identification. And there is always the frustrating problem of one sex being drabber than the other, or immatures without having yet developed the full color.

UPDATE: In comments Bev at Burning Silo suggests female Blue-Tipped Dancer, Argia tibialis and based on the shoulder stripe and lack of a blue tail tip, I think that’s about right. Thanks, Bev!


In the case of nonhuman animals, the sole motivation is acquiring food, and the victims do their damnedest to avoid being food. How odd that in the case of human animals, the victims ignore the motivation, and flock to serve it.

Earlyish morning - I came upon this cluster of half a dozen rousing insects. Three of them wafted off as I approached:


The light was not extremely good, and they were somewhat nervous. The antennae were highly banded, the mouthparts were an elongated beak, unfortunately not focused well enough, and what is that mess of a thorax? Bodies about 2 inches long.


And the eyes were really really green. I’m guessing a Hangingfly, Bittacidae, but can’t locate any photos that look like this.

And what properly raised child could resist a gift of a couple of new flies!


There were actually a half-dozen of these (tiny tachinids?) scouting atop and under the leaves of a violet beneath a canopy in the woods. I admit this is a recycled gift - I saw others like these for the first time a year ago, closer to the creek, stationed on a Leafy Elephant’s Foot.

UPDATE: Lauxaniidae, thanks to Joe and Keith at Bugguide.


Baby chicks and bunnies can’t compete with a cute jumping spider, especially when it’s Anasaitis canosa, Twinflagged Jumping Spider. Having only two eyes is just a little *creepy*, don’t you think? This one has proved itself to be our April-May House Jumper. I only wish it had bright green fangs, everything would then be complete.


The temperatures yesterday were around 90F by the time I finished dealing destruction to a portion of the house garden taken over by a terrible mint, oxalis, and indian strawberry, all alien and invasive. I had everything shaped and in position when I quit for the day. Rain chances were 40%, which is to say, HAHAHA.

And yet, about 3pm, thunder started to rumble and the rains came and last until well after 6pm - a total of 1.8 inches. I estimated perhaps 30 lightning strikes within half a mile of the house, some much closer, oh it was quite a production. None hit the immediate area of the house though.

And that’s good, because we’re unlikely to get rain for the next week or two, it seems. Today, with temps in the upper 80s, it will be steamy and close, but I bet the arthropods will be out!

This is Truck #3, the stepchild, some might think, compared to the new tanker. In keeping with the season, Mike and Ed organized the training session last night (and probably for a good many Thursdays to come) around using and operating it.

We were supposed to dress for the occasion. The season is wildland fire season, of course, as plants grow and temperatures climb and rain doesn’t fall. Ed is in proper uniform - our lightweight yellows and greens, with helmet. Glenn is protecting his eyes. They’re messing with the generator, which is supposed to operate the krieg lighting, which some of us contemplate may actually have seen use in World War II.

The open compartment behind the cab is storage of various implements of destruction - McLeod rakes, shovels, fire rakes, and ...flappers. I should have taken a photo of the flappers. You’ve seen old photographs of pioneer women beating out a prairie fire with the household broom? That’s sort of what a flapper is like. As TUF says, we have the entire free world’s supply of flappers cornered right here in WVFD.

Back of the storage compartment is that trapezoidal part of the truck that Ed and Glenn are sitting on. That’s the water tank, and it holds a respectable 900 gallons of water. That’s another reason you don’t make sharp turns.


The truck is usually referred to as the “knocker”, I guess because it’s used to “knock down” brush fires, and we also refer to it as the “brush truck”, if we can’t remember its ordinal. It’s a joy to drive - it has no power steering. As FC Mike says, you don’t make sharp turns in this baby, you *can't* make sharp turns. However it will go places we wouldn’t want to take the other two trucks, and it does hold a complement of tools that we wouldn’t ordinarily have at a structure fire.

That round thing at the back is a hose reel, for booster hose, which is sort of like super duper garden hose. We put another 50 feet on last night, as well as another 100 feet of conventional firehose for those hard to get places.

Unseen to the left of the hose reel is the pump itself. It’s external, puts out quite a good stream, and a lot of noise. We emptied the entire tank last night practicing with it. Then refilled it from the tanker (since no one wanted to drive the knocker over the county line to fill it from a hydrant).


The knocker doesn’t live in the spacious bay to the right in this photo. That’s for the tanker. The knocker lives in the space you can barely see to the left of the open bay, in what we used to refer to as our kitchen. I detailed the results of that demolition before. There wasn’t much choice - three big trucks fit into the firehouse you see in the background, and they all fit *snugly*.

I was delighted yesterday to spy these Baptisia australis, Wild Blue Indigo, finally flowering in the Little Prairie Over the Septic Field. The seed from which these plants came were planted four years ago, and while the plants have been visible, growing a little bigger each year, this is the first year they flowered. Despite the plantings, the species is native to Georgia - I just haven’t seen them growing anywhere else in a wild state around here. Missouri Botanical Gardens has some interesting things to say about the plant. The pod, for this is a legume in the family Fabaceae, will turn a charcoal black color and the seeds will rattle around in the pod. This was apparently our grandparents' and their parents' childhood playthings in place of videogames.

A little ways over, nestled in the top and hugging close to a newly minted milkweed leaf, was this yellowjacket mimic. I could tell it was not a yellowjacket, but then completely overlooked the lack of gauzy wings, thinking it an artifict of the photography. I assumed it was a sort of a syrphid fly, like an American Hoverfly. I submitted the photo to Bugguide, and Guy kindly identified it as a Zebra Longhorn Beetle, Typocerus zebra. A beetle! Well, of course, now that you mention it, it *does* have long antennae, and it *doesn't* have the single gauzy wing pair you’d expect of flies, nor the pairs of most bees and wasps.

This beetle was doing something interesting. It was pretty sluggish in the cool morning, so I tapped the other side of the leaf it was sitting on to wake it up. Not much of a response, so I continued to photograph it. After I looked at the photographs I saw at the base of the post-harrassment leg a drop of white liquid.

Chuck at Bugguide explains this too, as reflex bleeding. It’s a secretion of hematolymph, and probably contains some nasty components for predator deterrance.

Yesterday marked the end of finals for Spring Semester 2007. Lots of graduates, lots of happy people, lots of grandmothers convening at UGA on Saturday to attend graduation. For me it’s a month-long vacation before summer classes start June 8, and I have all kinds of plans to clean up indoors and out, harvest and catalog plants, and generally get my life in gear.

Right now I’m involved in some vaguely purposeful weeding and digging and planting and I’m spending a lot of time on the front stoop, where Lady Seymour holds dominion. Lady Seymour is a two-step metal folding ladder that has accompanied us around for at least twenty years. Glenn purchased two for the lab, and they were so useful that we had to have our own Lady Seymour at home. It’s one of those general all-purpose useful devices that sits in the middle of our comings and goings because we can grab her to put up hummingbird feeders, hammer a nail into a wall, fill the birdfeeders, do some low pruning, and so forth.

She’s also a perfect cat perch, and yesterday I discovered she’s very popular with Leafcutting Bees, Megachile species. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view.


This one was entering through the mysterious little holes that appear at the bottom of the main metal strut loop that acts as the front legs and as a handle. I’d seen it coming and going for a couple of days and it gradually became clear that it was carrying something. Leaf pieces!

Apparently leafcutting bees as adults sip nectar and eat pollen, and so do their kids. The adults are solitary, but do congregate to build nests in any available cavity accessible by a hole. They cut out a perfectly shaped leaf piece to fit the inside tunnel as a septum, or inner wall, lay an egg, fortify it with pollen and nectar, and then return with a new piece to wall the previous chamber in. Here’s a site that talks a bit more about leafcutting bees.

They could be considered a pest since they do cut round sections out of leaves, but they also pollinate plants at the same time, and so (especially now) might be considered rather important.

While I was waiting for the leafcutting bee to return I noticed this bright little spider wandering about the front porch, perching on the cart wheels awaiting repair for a broken axel:


This seems to be a Magnolia Green Jumping Spider, Lyssomane perhaps viridis, although there’s only a hint of the bright red cephalothorax patch seen in most of the photographs at bugguide. But the eyes are right, and so are the spots on the abdomen.

This one was hard to get a photograph from any viewpoint other than the front since the flash would immediately cause it to face in my direction.

Last night, and the night before, was coldish, 45 degF, but yesterday the air was dry and the temperature 75 degF. Why can’t all summer be like this?

I’m having to relearn photography under a canopy now, and fiddled with the ISO, upping it from 200 to 400 so as to get a shorter exposure time. I was surprised at how much more grainy the photographs were on blowup. Last year I had decided that small a change didn’t make that much difference. I don’t favor flash - it tends to either miss a macro shot or blow out the exposure on the object. More tweaking! At any rate, none of these photos deserves a large presence, so I’ll just use smaller thumbnails linked to larger pics if you want to click.

Quite a bit of arthropod wildlife around today, beginning with this ball of spines found under a log. I’m not finding any better resemblance than to a Great Leopard Moth larva (Hypercombe scribonia) but it lacks the distinctive red bands between the segments. It must still be overwintering, as it was quite sluggish and certainly not out chowing down. If not a Leopard, then presumably some sort of Tiger Moth larva.


(Under the next log were at least four slimy salamanders of varying sizes but they zipped out of sight into burrows before I could photograph them.)

Close by was some sort of Pearly-eye, a Nymphalidae. Maybe a Northern Pearly-eye, Enodia amphedon.


It seems to me that this can’t be any other than a Sphex pensylvanica, a Great Black Wasp, but I’ve found no images that show the amazing white portion of the antennae that this one had. It was scurrying about the leaf litter deep under the canopy just above SBS Creek, and the antennae were in constant motion. With the white contrasting with the black it was something of a light show.

UPDATE: Bev at Burning Silo has suggested that this is an Ichneumon, one of the parasitic wasps, and indeed it appears to be so. See here. The white band in the middle of the antennae, plus the frenetic motions, give it away. As to what species? Even Bugguide throws its collective and competent hands up in bewilderment.



The highlight of the afternoon was Troll Rock and its environs. We last saw it on March 4, after the deluge (photos at bottom) but I’ve done a bit more documentation of it here. It’s quite a special place, with its enormous exposed rock blocking SBS Creek and diverting it over a little waterfall into a pond a couple of feet below. The margins on one side are swampy and filled with dozens of plant species, and there are even more on the slightly higher elevation that is just a little less moist.

And today it was filled with damselflies. I had already been dodging Ebony Jewelwings during the walk - they’re literally everywhere. And the other day I photographed a Red Damsel male, Amphiagrion saucium. I’m pretty tentative on most of the three species I saw today. Giff Beaton has a nice page on damsels, and Bugguide was a help too, but my photographs are not really good enough for me to make matches.

Today one of the three species was the Red Damsel female, or so I think (it could be an immature male):


Both the Red Damsel and the other two species are very small dragonflies - not more than an inch long, and fairly hard to track and see. I think the first two of the thumbnails may be of an Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis) and the third of a Fragile Forktail (I. posita). I wrote on the latter last July.


On the bank above the top pool, I caught sight of a flier that quickly landed. It’s a tiny thing, less than 5mm in size, and although I figured it was a beetle, it didn’t resemble anything on Bugguide. I submitted it and Phillip quickly identified it as a Scooped Scarab, Onthophagus hecate. This is a scarab beetle that is also a dung beetle (though it may feed on fungi). The ecology portion on scarab beetles here gives a good summary of the flexible lifestyles (no pics, though).


Can’t get away without a couple of flies, surely. These were lurking atop adjacent to each other on the same plant. The first is quite small, less than 5mm, and the photo is not very good. I’m guess it’s one of the Longlegged Flies Family, Dolichopodidae but further I cannot go. Similarly for the possible Syrphid in the next panel. This one was somewhat larger, but still under a centimeter and not nearly as large as the American Hoverflies that act as constant companions in sunnier areas in the summer.

A few items to add or clear up today:

If I had only noticed these two surprises in time, they could have gone on the bioblitz tally, as could the raccoon I spied last night.

In December I posted on an ancient “white oak” that had previously been identified as a Shagbark Hickory. I had scrounged around the base of the tree and could find no evidence of compound leaves dropped. Well, the spring leaves are in, and it is indeed a Shagbark Hickory Carya ovata, the only one that I know of on the property. With the very shaggy bark and few leaflets (5), the identification is certain. The sad thing is, as I wrote in December, the massive tree is in decline.


Another miss: a colony of Mockernut Hickories, Carya tomentosa, with their larger number (9) of leaflets. These are on the east-facing west slope above SBS Creek. Some are pretty small and ratty-looking but a few of the trees are as large as the White Oaks surrounding them.

(And BTW - Bill Thompson found the common name very amusing. It seems a good substitute for a more common vulgarism, and particularly appropriate for bloggers in this age of climate change denialists and right wing nuts: “Mockernutter, mockernutter!”)


The White Oaks, Quercus alba, which suffered the worst of the cold spell at the beginning of April, are finally putting out new leaves, a month late. (The Northern Red Oaks, Q. rubra, began recovery a week or two ago.)


And finally, and because I haven’t posted one recently, a crossed-eye stereo view (click pic) of the East-facing slope west of SBS Creek. This is one of those strange steeper concavities where large trees don’t particularly like to grow, and so there is relatively open space. Otherwise the photo would just be of a mass of vegetation.
(Instructions for Viewing)

Our Event early Saturday morning delivered 0.55 inches of rain, and on top of the 0.5 inches on Thursday evening, totals 1.05 inches. For the most part it was gentle rain, and therefore useful in replenishing soil levels. And the accompanying temperatures have been cool, with clouds and little wind, so the moisture has been able to penetrate into large combustible fuels for three days without being dried out. All good news.

Do you automatically, involuntarily count the seconds after a flash of lightning? Divide by 5 (or 3) to get the distance in miles (or kilometers)? I do. I think a lightning strike on Thursday night must have been what happened to gouge this tulip poplar so freshly. I can’t think of anything else that would do this.

Yesterday’s walk didn’t net much in the way of insects - the cool temperatures on Saturday, not topping 65 degF, seems to have put them to sleep. But I did find this, a dozen specimens growing along the ground at the top of the slope on the opposite side of SBS Creek from the house: Carolina Spinypod, Matelea carolinensis.


Now I’ve walked past this area many times in the past but have never seen this little colony. This isn’t too surprising - it happens all the time that I see something new in a well-observed area. Perhaps it was that this was in flower, and more noticeable. That’s unusual because all these plants were confined to the ground, and usually the vine types don’t begin to flower until they’ve begun to climb.

This group of plants is called a bewildering variety of intersecting names - milkvine, angular fruit milkvine, spinypods, what have you, and the scientific name confusion isn’t much better.

First, the whole milkweed family, Asclepiadaceae, has by some authorities, Weakley, for instance, recently been subsumed into the sister family, Apocynaceae (dogbane). Others, USDA Plants (above link) have not yet done this and retain the milkweed family assignment.

Second, there are two genera involved: Matelea and Gonolobus, and there is a lack of agreement again among authorities such as Weakley and whoever USDA Plants uses (I used to think this was Weakley, now I’m not so sure). My own posts reflect this confusion.

When we first moved out here we observed both Spinypod and Angularfruit Milkvine - the two very distinct by whether their fruits had spines or not. Subsequently both sort of disappeared for a few years and it wasn’t until a few years ago that the Angularfruit (smooth fruit) milkvine reappeared. I’ve blogged on it several times since. Warning: Here follows plantgeektalk:

Milkweed Tussock Caterpillars (Sep 2005), in which I incorrectly refer to the smooth-fruited plant as Matelea carolinensis, when it should be Gonolubus suberosus, via Glenn. However USDA Plants says that G. suberosa was incorrectly applied and should be Matelea gonocarpos. It lists several more synonyms, including Gonolobus carolinensis, Gonolobus gonocarpos, AND Matelea suberosus, that should now be called M. gonocarpos.

Milkvines (June 2006), in which I used Matelea gonocarpos, which is ok with USDA Plants but is what Glenn says should be Gonolobus suberosus.

Nice Pods! (August 2006), in which I wrote the following:

In the comments to the previous post, Glenn agreed that the species was previously Matelea gonocarpos, but according to Weakley(2006) all anglepods are now Gonolobus, their own genus. So it is now called Gonolobus suberosus - Eastern Anglepod. According to USDA Plants, which usually keeps up with these things, the situation appears to be reversed - what was *previously* Gonolobus suberosus has become my original classification - Matelea gonocarpos. So it’s possible that we have a conflict between two authorities. Or that what was originally G. suberosus became M. gonocarpos (recognized by USDA Plants here) which then was returned by Weakley to G. suberosus and has not been updated by USDA Plants.

This seems to clear up the basis for the confusion, if not the confusion itself. (Why on earth would we want to do that??) Weakley and Glenn would like Gonolobus to be anglepods and Matelea to be spinypods. USDA Plants has only one US species of Gonolobus, and it occurs only in Puerto Rico. It has taken all the Gonolobus species, and thrown them into Matelea, which according to USDA Plants now is the only genus of milkvine, including both anglepods and spinypods.

Decisions, decisions. What to do?? I suspect the answer lies in the USDA Plants FAQ, which is quite interesting reading besides. As I understand it, and if you believe it, USDA Plants incorporates the latest *published* corrections, and it’s possible that Weakley’s corrections have not made it into accepted standard. Now I think the USDA Plants website is an invaluable tool, so would tend to go with that under most circumstances. I trust them. However Glenn goes by Weakley, primarily, for our part of the country, and USDA Plants secondarily. And for the time being, that’s all there is to that.

Now to my find of yesterday: we all seem to agree that this is not an anglepod, but a spinypod, Glenn (via Weakley) would argue that for this reason it should be Matelea carolinensis, and not Gonolobus carolinensis, which actually none of us has tried to call it, and, finally, USDA Plants agrees (because they put *everything* into Matelea).

I see in the last link above that I speculated that yesterday’s find might have been Matelea alabamensis, which is rare and threatened/endangered. That it’s actually “only” M. carolinensis is good enough for me - it’s also threatened/endangered, and though “common”, is only so locally. *You* try and find it .

We’re having a Significant Weather Event at the moment, and so I’m finding it difficult to enter a suitablly complaining frame of mind.

Here’s the monthly summary of the climate of the month of April 2007, here in Athens and US-wide.

New England states, and the US midsection especially south received considerably colder weather in April. Right next door to the left the west, and especially the south west, was considerably warmer than average, except along the Northwest Pacific states. For the southeast, we were somewhat cooler on average than usual for April.

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this April above or below the average for April over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.


Areas of above-average rainfall generally coincided with those areas that had below-normal temperatures. That wasn’t the case for us in the Southeast US, and we’re still experiencing very dry weather conditions. Swamp fires have been a problem in south Georgia for much of April.

Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US:


For Athens:

April continued the extreme of dry weather begun in March.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of April. The red line is the average over 80 years of Aprils, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. Our 1.64 inches of rain April 13-14 were the last we received until May 3. That continues the drought that has been our lot since the beginning of last year.


Here is my plot of low temperatures for the month of April in Athens. April was quite cold in the first third of the month, and increasingly warm after Tax Day. We broke low temperature records officially on April 8, the middle of a cold period that lasted four days. We’ve already talked about the devastating effects that has had on a number of leafing plant species. As usual, the green line is for this year, and the red line is for last year, 2006. The blue line declares the average low temperatures for each day.


In the end we had only 3 days during April above the 17-year average for that day. That is under the 4.3 days above average temperatures historically experienced during April. There were 9 nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s compared to the 5.6 low nights in an average April.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update: After sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific dropped below normal in March, they returned to normal state in April. Nonetheless indications are for a La Nina to develop in the next several months, just in time for summer!

UPDATE: Mike at Iowa State kindly offered in comments his identifications of two of the fly species below. The “robberfly” is actually a syrphid fly, possibly Chalcosyrphus pigra. And the “cranefly” is actually a hangingfly, Mecoptera of the Bittacidae. So that augments our fly representation by one family I wasn’t aware of, and adds to the hoverflies that visit every summer. Thanks for that!

The animals must have heard the Bioblitz was over, sighed in relief, and came out of hiding. Or maybe it was the weather. Until yesterday it was hot, in the 90s, and May 1 set a 100-year high record of 92. And then yesterday it was somewhat cooler, 87, and mostly cloudy and humid. Perhaps they sense what was to come last evening - a very nice thunderstorm, the first rain since April 14.

(That happened to be in the midst of our monthly WVFD business meeting. When the lightning and thunder started, everyone got rather tense and then relieved as the rain started and came down rather hard for half an hour. As FC Mike said, he’s been expecting wildland fires for the last week or two and it’s amazing that they haven’t happened. It was refreshing to have some rain, finally.)

This one was rather surprising, down to Goulding Creek:


A Yellow-bellied Pond Slider, probably female. Certainly not uncommon but I was surprised to see her in Goulding Creek, which is just deep enough to cover her in most places. About 12 inches shell length. Very cooperative.

She or someone else was presumably responsible for this tragedy, but as it gave me my first indication of mussel activity in Goulding Creek. I’ve no authority in identifying mussels, but from Bev’s Excellent ID Links Page it looks like a possible Elliptio.




The horrows of the insect world. Looking through the robberflies at Bugguide can be grueling, but I believe this turns out to be Lampria bicolor. We had a merry chase before I managed the above and below photos, capturing the stunning red abdomen.

From Mike: this turns out to be a syrphid, perhaps Chalcosyrphus pigra.


More lying in wait - a possible Sarcophaga, or Sarcophagid Fleshfly, though I’m going mostly by the eyes and gray striping. These do not bite, at least not humans.


The Ebony Jewelwings (Calopteryx maculata) are out in the last day or two, and they’re everywhere. I caught this one in the act of leaping into the air to catch some poor victim, which is even now being dismantled (click pic for closeup).


A couple of not-so-good photos of two spiders, probably tetragnathids, but then there was this, which was kind of creepy when I opened it and released it was watching me the whole time. A cranefly, I would guess, given all those legs, and possibly Limonia triocellata although I haven’t convinced myself that they have these odd hind legs. From Mike: a hangingfly, in its own family, Bittacidae, and probably Mecoptera. It captures insects with the hind pair of dangling legs.

I finished my Bioblitz excel sheets and handed them in today. I feel like I’m revisiting my past as a student , but maybe it’s because it’s finals week here.

I was most annoyed to be majorly through with my post this morning and have the monitor die on me. I suppose it didn’t lose the post, but because I couldn’t see anything, the post eventually got lost as I tested things. It’s the monitor, all right, and for a large flatscreen monitor well cared for and plugged into voltage suppressors, it shouldn’t have died at less than three years of age. It’s just a throwaway though, right?

Today is much the same as yesterday - temps in the 90s, F, but supposedly will get cooler tomorrow and through the weekend. We might even have rain Thu-Fri, but it’s a small chance. April saw 1.6 inches of rain, a third of what we should have had, and the year so far has delivered about 2/3 of the normal amount, that on top of last year’s drought.

Yesterday, walking along SBS Creek, I caught sight of a weakly fluttering insect that eventually plastered itself on the underside of a low hanging branch:

I was pleased to be reminded immediately of this post, of a Summer Fishfly, and immediately went to that family in Bugguide. And it appears to be a Dark Fishfly, probably Nigronia serricorus. That species has a similar relation, N. fasciatus, that is a bioindicator in the sense that it is only found in areas that exhibit very pure water. Whether this is true of N. serricorus isn’t clear. I was happy with the find, though!

That brings to mind a post I ran into by Josh Rosenau, of Thoughts From Kansas. I don’t much follow Scienceblogs, as they seem to self-promote quite well and will neither notice nor miss any links from me, but I do read TFK regularly.

This particular post is an answer to a 5-question blog meme, but Josh’s answers include certainly the nicest and clearest descriptions of niches and habitat occupation that I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, you get his ideas on strategies for ecological conservation, which center on habitat conservation. This is in some contrast to species conservation, and he makes the good argument that you can try to conserve endangered species, but where will they go if you don’t make a higher priority of conserving habitat?

And then, as if by magic, I ran across a notice of this fellow: Ted Scambos. There’s a rather lengthy but informative article about him that makes the essential points, but do as I did and google him. I’m getting the feeling that he’s NOAA’s equivalent of Jim Hansen.

Scambos is a glaciologist specializing in Antarctica, but has tight connections with a colleague specializing in the Arctic. What is especially convincing to me is that a couple of years ago, Scambos was, not a climate skeptic - he could see that vast changes were occuring in the Antarctic and witnessed the collapse of the Larson Ice Shelf a couple of years ago. Rather he demurred at guessing at the cause, but he’s convinced now.

And he feels that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, has greatly underestimated the rate of change. Rather than the 2050 date given by the IPCC, he predicts that the Arctic will be ice free during the summer by 2020. This is an enormously important thing, if it happens. It means that during the time of summer when reflection from Arctic summer ice would reduce heat entrapment, well, that will no longer happen. Besides the ecological considerations, the Arctic Ocean will become an absorber of heat, rather than the reflector, and in just a bit more than a decade.

In the last year or two I’ve been getting the uncomfortable feeling that changes are occuring much more rapidly than we’ve been led to believe. And I don’t just listen and read opinions from experts and naysayers - I actually download data and analyze it for myself, as much as I am competent to do. Watch for Scambos - there are several NPR interviews in the last couple of years.

Watch too, for Scambos to be pilloried by the Bush Administration much as Jim Hansen has been. We can’t hold the US totally responsible for what’s happening with climate, but we can hold it responsible for punishing governmental scientists who have spoken out, and for placing roadblocks in the way of finding solutions for the last six years. This Administration has been a complete disaster in every sense of the word, and it might just be too late to compensate for its monumental mistakes.

Is it too much to hope that Americans will think next time, before they vote?

Several folks have probably heard me say that I really really wanted to find a red dragonfly, and so I did yesterday, a male Eastern Red Damsel, Amphiagrion saucium, a tiny little thing, flitting about at SBS Creek, Troll Rock.

All I have to say is, where were you two days ago??!!??


I’m identifying, organizing, and tabulating the data today, and was pleased to find the identity of this plant. It’s Rattlesnakeweed, Hieracium venosum, discovered at the Bot Gardens on Saturday. With its delicate green foliage and pretty purple veins, it’s unmistakeable. A new one for me, but it was Bill’s sharp eyes that spotted it first!


On top of that it has brilliant yellow flowers. It was the notching in the petals that clued me in on sight:


I am, however, having trouble with this one (and a few others). It’s a fleshy-leaved plant, growing singularly on the bank of a deeply shaded creek at the Bot Gardens. Flower just about to open, I assume.

Thumbnails open into a new window. If you have any ideas, let me know, and thanks!