If it didn’t rain yesterday, this must be Mars.

You might remember in January of 2004 when the Mars Rovers, subsequently named Spirit and Opportunity, landed after a 300 million mile, 7-month journey, bouncing along the martian soil until they came to a stop. They landed close to the equator, but half a world apart. They began their roving with a “guaranteed warranty” of 90 days, but they’re each now well past their 1100th “sol”, or martian day, and still roaming around. They’ve functioned well for over 13 times the time expected.

I check back occasionally on their progress, but like most people I tend to forget that they’ve been operating and making new discoveries for the last 42 months. Something new and interesting is going to happen in the next few days.

For the first 950 sols, Opportunity trekked in a more or less straight line from its landing site at Eagle Crater, and had travelled well over three miles when it arrived at the edge of Victoria Crater. I should say here that all images except the last two are credited to NASA/JPL/Cornell. I did not take these! You can find a great many more at the Rover Archive page.


Over the next six months it explored a quarter or so of the rim, and then backtracked to its arrival point. The amazing thing here is that the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, which itself arrived just over a year ago, was able to capture Opportunity’s tracks along the side of the crater.


Today, Opportunity is poised on the rim of Victoria Crater, having scouted at least a quarter of its mile-long circumference to find the best place to descend into the 200-foot-deep crater. This appears to be a relatively shallow slope called Duck Bay.

Here is an orbiter image of Victoria Crater, linked to a larger 130kb image that will fill up your screen. The larger image has the names of the areological features visible, along with the altitudes of the crater. I’ve blocked off two rectangles. One is at the lower left which is where Opportunity will descend into the crater. The other is at the upper right where some fantastic images were taken of a section of the crater rim.


Here’s the inset that shows Opportunity’s point of arrival six months ago, and the point of return a few days ago. It’s going to descend into the crater here. Notice the altitude measurement. Opportunity is basically at a little less than a mile below “sea level”, or in this case the average altitude on the planet, and the crater descends another 200 feet.


About 8 weeks ago, Opportunity had reached its farthest point in its exploration of the crater rim. It started back and then stopped at the Cape of Good Hope. Here’s the layout, which is the rightmost inset:


It looked out 250 feet over the Valley Without Peril, somewhat along the line of the green arrow above, and then took this photo of Cape St. Vincent:


Scale is so hard to convey here. Victoria Crater is half a mile wide, and about 200 feet deep, so the above landscape is neither outrageously huge nor microscopic. Here on Earth it would make a very impressive crater. (On Mars, it’s definitely at the lower end of impressive!) A human standing in the photo above would probably look considerably smaller than that brightest rock on the slide. As I have estimated it, it’s 250 feet to the far side of Cape St. Vincent, and that’s just a smidge of a space in the entire circumference of this crater.

I think we tend to forget the flybys, orbiters, landers, and rovers that have been exploring Mars in the last 40 or more years. NASA has a good page on this history. Each link is to a short summary that includes a further link to the mission page.

The flybys came first, in the 1960s:

Mariners 3 (failed) and 4 (July 14 1965 flyby)
Mariners 6 and 7 (flyby late 1969)

Mariner 9 launched/arrived May 30 1971/Nov 13 1971. Orbited for nearly a year. Its twin, Mariner 8, failed at launch.

Vikings 1 and 2, which featured both orbiters and landers. Deliriously successful. Launched/landed in Aug 20 1975 and Sep 9 1975/Jun 19 and Aug 7 1976 at Chryse Planita and Utopia Planita. They didn’t last so long as Opportunity and Spirit: last transmissions 1982 and 1980.

Orbiters are essential to photography, determination of landing sites, and communications with the landers or rovers. They are often paired with a landing mission:

Mars Observer: Launched/arrived Sep 25 1992/Aug 22 1993. (Lost contact shortly before arrival)
Mars Global Surveyer: Nov 7 1996/Sep 12 1997. Still in operation
Mars Climate Orbiter: Dec 11 1998/Sep 23 1999. Lost, entry burnup. This was the infamous metric/english conversion glitch.
2001 Mars Odyssey: Apr 7 2001/Oct 24 2001. Still in operation
Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter: Aug 2005/Mar 2006. Still in operation

And finally, the US landers/rovers:

Mars Pathfinder: launched/landed Dec 4 1996/Jul 4 1997. Landed in Ares Villis. Last transmission was received Sep 27 1997. This was the Sojourner Rover.
Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2: Jan 3 1999/Dec 3 1999. Both were lost. There may have been a premature landing signal that shut down the engines before they should have been.
Mars Rovers: Jun 10 and Jul 7, 2003/Jan 3 and Jan 24 2004. Still in operation after an amazing 42 months.
Mars Express/Beagle 2 lander: Jun 2003/Dec 2003. This was a NASA/European Space Agency collaboration. The Beagle 2 may have crash landed, but at any rate, was lost.

Here is rather neat rendition of Mars, along with some of the landing sites (Science Magazine):


I like the depiction, because it shows topography in colors that coincidently match what Mars would look like if it had oceans. If you’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy then you know that that’s what happened . Much of the northern hemisphere is lowlying and would be covered by ocean. That big blue spot in the southern hemisphere is Hellas Planitia, an extraordinarily low depression in the planet. Much of the southern hemisphere is highland.

And it turns out that Google Maps also has Google Mars. It’s not annotated with feature names yet, but it does have some capabilities. I labelled the lander/rover sites here:


Whether or not you’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson, you might be aware that Mars' topography is some of the most extreme in the solar system. The largest volcano, Olympus Mons as well as the largest and deepest canyon, Valles Marineris are to be found on Mars. Mariner Valley is the subject of this animation, which is quite good. I found most success with the Google Video (the low bandwidth option).

We haven’t had a Wolfskin Training Session here in a while, so I thought we’d have one today. This one actually occurred on Thursday June 14, but it overlaps in some ways with last night’s training so it fits reasonably well. The photographs are some of many taken by our civilian board member, Jerry Ledbetter, and many thanks to him for documenting the event.

A little history: When previous Fire Chief Phyllis Jackson began to revive the Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department five or so years ago, she called on old 1990s members (such as Glenn and me) to return. The monthly schedule was as before - First Thursday of the month, business meeting and Third Thursday of the month, training session. Years passed, Phyllis wore herself out writing grant proposals and obtaining equipment and by Mar 2006 that culminated in the receipt of a magnificent tanker, which you will see here, once again. And then Mike (who became fire chief at the end of last year) and The Unknown Firefighter joined us, took the Mod 1 training course early last year, and applied their considerable hardware and management skills. Our training sessions increased to a “supplemental” Second Thursday. After a couple of months, TUF said the *he* wouldn’t mind a Fourth Thursday, I immediately concurred, and so it was that early this year *every* Thursday (except the First, which is still business) became training.

It’s hard to point to any one thing that transformed the fire department from something just barely functional at the beginning of the new millenium to something that is now quite healthy and competent. There have been many changes and much work by Phyllis and others in that time. But the movement to training every week must certainly be among those items, and our training officers Ed and TUF, and Mike, come up with amazingly inventive and valuable training ideas.

One of the goals that Phyllis envisioned was to hone our skills at utilizing stream and lake water sources to fortify those swimming pools we call drop tanks. We do have access to several Clarke County hydrants that happen to be on the border of our counties, but we need to be able to draft from other sources, and the last few training sessions have revolved around that.

To orient you, here’s a map of our general area that appeared, now somewhat modified, in Feb 2006. The last few Thursdays have been to develop tactics at utilizing Lake Oglethorpe, a 30-year-old artificial lake created in the early 70s by damming Goulding Creek, about a mile upstream from us (orange box). There are two routes (green), one a longer circuitous one (Route A, through the Lake Oglethorpe neighborhood) that we used in training that resulted in the photos below. We investigated Route B, the Wolfskin Road side of the dam, last night, but for various reasons (especially drafting from a vertical height of 15 feet above the lake) it will probably remain an emergency solution.


Jumping a little ahead, we’re already set up here at the edge of the lake on one side of the dam, which moves off to the middle right in the photograph. We’re drafting from the edge of the lake into the tanker through that six-inch hose. A three-inch hose is being used to simultaneously deliver water to the monitor. That’s a heavy piece of metal that operates from the ground, and can deliver a stream at 1000 gallons per minute quite some distance.


The thumbnails below open a larger version, on a new page. On the left we have R2D2, our strainer that pulls water as long as it’s a few inches deep, at least. On the right we have not one but *two* drop tanks that we connected together in an experimental setup so we could have twice the amount of water with greater access for additional trucks.



Here’s the setup after we got everything into place. The new tanker is the big red truck, and the lemon yellow “Margaritaville” is the old pumper. While the Margaritaville does have power steering it lacks the digital bells and whistles of the tanker and is therefore a more MANLY truck.


A few more views of the setup, and in operation. The first thumbnail is actually an early photograph setting up the droptanks and connecting them together. In the second the Margaritaville has been moved into place, and in the third it is pulling water from the droptanks and pumping it in a fog stream. (The fog stream is very neat - it results in a strong backdraft of air that is cooling and pleasant on a hot evening like this one was.)


The nozzle can also be operated as a straight stream of course, and Wolfskin 411 (me) is doing so here in the first thumbnail.

There’s plenty of time to botanize, and The Unknown Firefighter found a nice deep blue mint that Wolfskin 418 (Glenn) and I are discussing while supposedly on backup. Our numbers, by the way, are 400 numbers, as Wolfskin VFD is designated by Oglethorpe County. Another fire department might be 600 series. So you always know who you are. I myself was pleased to receive 411.


Just because we’ve finished at this site doesn’t mean everything’s over. We still have an hour or more to clean and roll up hoses, drain and put away the drop tanks, and generally retrieve and put away gear. And then the trucks have to be refilled and themselves put to bed.

Here’s the *other* side of the dam, with the overflow pipe draining into the resumption of Goulding Creek. That water will eventually flow past our part of Goulding Creek 0.8 miles downstream. The dam is certainly broad and massive enough for us to drive the trucks over, although we wouldn’t do it except in case of emergency need.

I present this, taken Feb 2006, because at the moment there is *no* water coming out of the pipe (we checked yesterday). Yet the lake on the other side is full, and that means that someone has turned off the drain so that Lake Oglethorpe remains full, a balance between evaporation in a drought, and inflow from the upper reaches of the interrupted Goulding Creek that fills the lake.

Yet another post on the drought in the Southeastern US. Well, that’s what we’re thinking about here. Even the students I encounter who have a consciousness level barely above functional realize it.

Here’s a neat site: NOAA’s National Climate Data Center and its section on drought, updated last in May. The front page map shows Palmer Index estimates of short term drought for the continental US. More maps and local discussion follow. For instance:

For the Southeast region, the last 6 months have been persistently dry. In fact, December-May has been drier than average for 7 of the last 9 years. Several states had the driest December-May (Mississippi) or March-May (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee) in their 113-year record.

Another neat site: University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s National Drought Mitigation Center. Its Drought Monitor presents the latest precipitation map from NOAA Climate Prediction Center, configured only for presenting various levels of dryness, not precipitation excess.

The map on that page is just for the month of May but will have looked similar to that in any of the five months preceeding May and June will look much like it too. So for long-term memories, here’s the statewide precipitation summary for the last nine years:


That big peak in the third quarter of 2004 is the glut of rain delivered by the remnants of Ivan, Bonnie, Jeanne, and Frances. The other features that are worth noting is the large red to green ratio since the end of 2005, marking significant deficits of precipitation in the last 18 months. This has to be viewed in the context of a period of drought that began with the first La Nina in 1998, which was followed by two more La Ninas back to back and extending to the beginning of 2003. Except for a bit of relief in 2003, and in part of 2005, our rainfall has been in deficit for the last nine years.

I’ve portrayed this in multi-plot form at the bottom of this April 2 post, for Athens.


It took awhile, but the local NPR affiliate is now informing us of what we already knew thanks, I’m sure, to my incessant blogging on the topic. The UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences reports June 25 that Clarke and Oglethorpe Counties have been added to the list of counties in extreme drought:

By David Emory Stooksbury
University of Georgia

Athens, Ga. –- As the end of June approaches, drought conditions continue in Georgia. A few places have experienced some relief over the past few weeks from locally heavy rains. But as a whole, the drought continues to slowly worsen statewide.

Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 104 are now classified as being in extreme drought, 38 in severe drought, 15 in moderate drought and two in mild drought. This compares to early June, when the numbers of counties in extreme, severe, moderate and mild drought were 95, 49, 12 and three, respectively.

Extreme drought conditions have expanded into the northeast Georgia counties of Clarke, Elbert, Franklin, Greene, Madison, Oconee, Oglethorpe and Stephens. They have also developed in Jones County in central Georgia.

The extreme drought now exists in Brooks, Colquitt, Tift, Turner, Crisp, Dooly, Macon, Peach, Bibb, Jones, Putnam, Greene, Oglethorpe and Elbert counties and in all counties north and west of that line. Extreme conditions continue in Atkinson, Ben Hill, Coffee, Irwin and Wilcox counties, too.

Severe drought conditions continue in Lowndes, Lanier, Clinch, Ware, Bacon, Jeff Davis, Telfair, Wheeler, Montgomery, Toombs, Tattnall, Evans and Bryan counties and in all counties south and east of that line. Severe conditions also exist in Baldwin, Berrien, Bullock, Candler, Cook, Dodge, Glascock, Hancock, Houston, Pulaski, Taliaferro, Twiggs, Warren and Wilkes counties.

Moderate drought conditions have developed in Burke County. They continue in Beckley, Emanuel, Jefferson, Jenkins, Johnson, Laurens, Lincoln, McDuffie, Screven, Treutlen, Washington and Wilkinson counties.

Chatham and Effingham counties have benefitted from local rains and are now in moderate drought conditions. Columbia and Richmond counties remain in a mild drought.

Athens-Clarke County went to Level 3 in water use conservation earlier in the week. This means that outdoor watering can only take place one day a week, Saturday or Sunday, depending on even or odd addresses, and only between midnight and 10am. Glenn asked if that included car washes. Good question. It’s hard to evaluate which is a more frivolous use of scarce water - washing your car? Or watering your chemically treated well-manicured lawn?

UPDATE: Well this answers it, I guess:

These restrictions do not include commercial and industrial use of water critical to the conduct of business such as commercial car washes, tree farms, and garden supply nurseries.

The 100K population of Athens receives its water from three sources, the North Oconee River, where intake was shut down yesterday because of low levels, the Middle Oconee River, which will come next, and Bear Creek Reservoir in Jackson County north of us. And then that’s it.

Finally, the UGA Climatology Research Lab assures us that there is no improvement in sight. All we can hope for is lucky rain - that which may or may not pass over us from remnants of tropical storms that so far have refused to appear.

For balance, Jason at Xenogere tells us about the other extreme, more than bountiful rainfall excesses in Texas. Today’s NPR Morning Edition reported about that here. Floating fire ant colonies, ugh!

I’m going to be lazy today. Just a couple of photos, but they’re both *real* dragonflies, suborder Anisoptera, and they’re in the same family of Common Skimmers: Libellulidae. There might be puny spreadwings and damsels, but these are the real thing.

Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis, in characteristic “hot daddy hot” pose. That’s what’s nice about rushes (Juncaceae): dragonflies love perching on them. That particular one has flowered and is making fruits now.


Previously photographed on 23 June 2006 along with a nice Cow-Killer, or Southern Red Velvet Ant, Dasymutilla occidentalis. The latter have been very active around the front stoop this year and you really have to watch where you sit and walk barefooted.

Eastern Pondhawk, Erythemis simplicicollis. I have seen these just about every month in the year past, including on warmer days in the winter.


We saw these first last year on 12 July 2006 and in keeping with the red and green theme of that day, Coral Honeysuckle Lonicera sempervirens berries. Which reminds me, any day now, before the birds get all of them.

First, the weather, of course, because that’s always topical. The unexpected can happen. Yesterday afternoon just before I left for work I enjoyed the dual experience of observing the map of an oncoming series of storms making their way from the south toward us, and then as I drove into Athens westward catching the sight of those storms with thunderheads to the south. Shortly after arriving in Athens the storms arrived with a fair amount of rain, but when I arrived home last night it was clear that they had missed us here in Wolfskin. Nonetheless another series of little bursts did catch us later in the evening and in the morning. By the time I was awakened at 4am by a very loud cloud to cloud lightning that terminated in a strike somewhere in our “backyard”, wherever that might be, we’d had 0.1 inches of rain. At a time when we’ve had just about 50% of the expected rain since the beginning of the year, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Second, the Bear’s Paw, or Hairy Leafcup, Smallanthus uvedalius, that sunflower-like plant that maintains a vigorous colony down to Goulding Creek. I’ve posted an earlier report a month ago on its progress as a 2-foot-high bunch of plants, and now it’s easily 4-5 feet tall. It gave me the mild heebiejeebies walking cautiously through it. The neat thing is that this population was nearly extirpated from competition with Microstegium several years ago, and now look at it:


This colony, on the southwest side of the roadcut, mirrors the now equally tall and extensive colony of Crownbeard, Verbesina occidentalis, on the other side. May the two never compete. The hairy leafcup above has not yet flowered, and at the moment its vegetative growth is pristine and largely unmunched by arthropods (though they do use the large horizontal leaves as landing and hunting pads). This will change as soon as they flower - the flowers and developing fruits are major targets for all kinds of pollinating and chewing insects.

Third, this photograph reminds me that Microstegium eradication season is nearly upon me. Now in Year Five, I will be scouring 20 or more acres pulling up evil weed. I’ve already been doing so occasionally, but this will be an eight week near-daily effort.

And that’s what this sk*pper is settled upon. I have so many photos of sk*ppers that it’s not at all funny. Last year I was trying to identify one and the best we all could come up with was that it was either a Zabulon or a Hobomok Skipper. They’re an undercurrent of embarrassment in a way, in that they’re beautiful little butterflylets but terribly difficult to identify.

I do think though that this one is a Least Skipper, Ancyloxypha numitor. The patterning, and especially the golden margins, fit very well.


The sk*ppers I see are mostly grass-skippers. They tend to lay their eggs on grasses and that’s the caterpillar food.

And so that brings up the fourth and fifth points. If I look up Least Skipper on the Lepidopteran Hostplants Database, I get a number of plausible grass species, including the delicate Rice Cutgrass, Leersia oryzoides, which we identified last year and so that’s certainly satisfactory.

So I looked up the caterpillars that might host on Microstegium. When confined to the US, there are no hits, but if I open up the entire world there are quite a few hits on skippers. The skippers they hit on are supposedly confined to Asia, where Microstegium originates, but the connection is interesting, and I wonder if some of our native sk*ppers might be feeding on Microstegium.

That fifth point is connected and addresses the term “Nearctica”, which is new to me. Here it is in the context of the Least Skipper, and that page also addresses the larval food preferences, confirming the Hostplants Database. And I’ve already mentioned most recently the Spider WebWatch and the Nearctic Spider Database.

Wikipedia has a good explanation for this. The “nearctic” refers to the North American ecozone, consisting of four large ecoregions - the Canadian Shield, the Eastern US, the US west of the Rockies, and Mexico and the southwestern US. Each region consists of a number of biomes: grasslands, forest types, and so forth. It makes some sense to me to refer to ecoregions, which while they may be diverse in biome types, are still geographically connected and so organisms may move more or less freely (less so in human populated areas) from one biome to another. I’ve noticed many times in my plant searches how one species might occur in one of these rough geographic divisions but not in the others, and they clearly map out to be good selections for formal regions.

The origin of the word seems to be Nearctic, the name of a Canadian thoroughbred racing horse born the year before I was. How his happened to become the name of an ecozone I can’t say, but I really like the use of it.

And last - I received an email this morning, one of those out of the blue that makes me glad I write a blog. Some time back I wrote on the sea urchin genome, which was largely decoded by Eric Davidson’s CalTech lab, where Glenn was a graduate student in the early to mid 70s. (He did finish, and went on to meet his fate (me) in Athens in 1978.) I can’t find the details on the blog or comments, for some reason, but I do recall mentioning (and this correspondent did find) that on the long list of authors was NOT included some of the characters in Glenn’s stories, including a good friend of Glenn’s, Barbara Huff. (There’s no reason why she should have been included in the sequencing, but she did have quite a long history of contributing the basic work that led up to that.) At any rate, the email passed on the info that Barbara Huff died in March, and I was able to pass that on to Glenn, who reminisced this morning a bit about her and their friendship.

It was on Thursday that I noticed the Pisaurina mira brevipes, Nursery Web Spiders, guarding their web-enclosed egg cases. On Friday morning I noticed that the adults were gone, and later that day that a few babies had appeared.

Yesterday the situation looked like this:


Now I guess it’s a coincidence that I would have noticed the guarding adults on the day before emergence of the young. Either that or the development period in the egg is very short.

I’m also wondering if the web has a temporary function for providing food that has bumbled its way into the web, as well as for protection of the babies. I’ll have to keep an eye on them for the next few days.

At any rate, it looks like we’ll have plenty of Pisaurina spiders.

More from the bog gardens: Argiope aurantia, Black and Yellow Argiope or Yellow Garden Spider.

A commonly seen and easily recognized web builder, I’ve written about this one before a couple of years ago July 2, and now that I look at that photo I see that it hadn’t developed its full yellow coloration either. Or maybe we have a color morph here. There seems to be an impressive range of variation in the patterning, abdomen shape, and extent of yellow. This one looks much more like ours. There must be something more fundamental that unites this species, when to the superficial gaze those above links look fairly different from each other. In the yellow color morph photo, the banding on the legs stops well away from the entry of the legs to the body, whereas in ours and the latter link the banding continues right up to the body. But the cephalothorax, the head, looks the same in all cases - that weird medieval shieldlike shape. At any rate I’m assuming this is a young female, she was only about 1 cm body length and will get larger. At first I thought she might be a Silver Argiope, which I’ve never seen here, but no. She was one of two that had strung up her impressive web, again between several pitcher plants. I spotted her on Friday, and then she and her companion were gone all day Friday. I was afraid that the mud daubers had found them - they’ve been around in massive numbers in the last week patrolling about for spiders. But she turned up on Saturday again, looking just fine.

I’ve never seen these appear before the last week or so in June, but I notice on Spider WebWatch that Bev has observed these appearing in March! That’s pretty amazing.

Now I’ll have to add my observations to Spider WebWatch and to the Nearctic Spider Database.

The bog gardens, one 50 sq ft and one 75 sq ft located just off the east side of the house, have been a source of pleasure and discovery for four or five years now. They’ve been the subject of a number of posts, and along with artificial ponds I highly recommend them as arthropod magnets. They’re filled with pitcher plants, and pitcher plants (in addition to their passively carnivorous nature) are also splendid arthropod platforms and, in this case, nurseries.

This large spider was frustrating, because the markings are so clear that she should have been easy to identify, but browsing through Bugguide didn’t net anything. I should have done more than just use the browse function.


This thumbnail is a more dorsal view. She’s built her web surrounding and extending down into the pitcher trap, Where I assume she’s hidden her egg case. Clever girl.


I had the feeling it was one of the Nursery Web spiders, perhaps one of the Fishing Spiders, Dolomedes, and though she isn’t that, she’s a cousin: Pisaurina mira. The problem was that this species is fairly variable and so I wasn’t hitting on images of my particular variation.

UPDATE: This is almost certainly Pisaurina brevipes. I realized this when I found a real P. mira today, Aug 17 2007.

She doesn’t build webs to hunt, but she does build them as protection for her eggs and spiderlings, and she guards them besides, which is what she’s doing now. Looking about, I found two others using the densely clustered pitchers as foundations for their nursery webs.

One of the clues came in the eyes, and by the way I found a hidden treasure on Bugguide on spider eyes. Unfortunately she was intent on hanging down and I could not get a great picture of the eyes, but enough to convince me that they correspond to nursery web spiders. These are unlinked blowups (and therefore terribly fuzzy) of what little I could pick up on the eye patterns. I’ll try to replace them with something a little better today.


UPDATE: She seems to be gone this morning, but there are spiderlings now evident. I’ll work on getting some shots of these.

A happy Summer Solstice to everyone. According to various calculations the sun concludes its northernmost advance and begins to creep back southward sometime around 18:11 UT, which is about 2pm Eastern Daylight today. And so (for us in the Northern Hemisphere) the days now become shorter and shorter every day until December 22 at 1am EST. The opposite is true for those in the Southern Hemisphere.

(BTW, I notice that the first opportunity for today’s landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis comes at 1:55pm EDT, almost precisely at the time of the Summer Solstice! If people listened to my euphoria at getting over the hump, this would be a good omen indeed.)

I suppose that for most people, if they notice it, this may be a melancholy time, while the winter solstice is a psychologically uplifting time. For me it’s the reverse. Increasingly lengthy days weigh heavily on me, and there’s something sad about the end of shortening days in the winter. Perhaps it’s because of where I live and that it’s very cheap for me to take this attitude.

So for me this is the psychologically uplifting time of the year, but it certainly doesn’t imply that things are going to instantly get cooler, far from it. Thermal inertia being what it is, we here in Athens won’t reach the peak of high temperatures until sometime around Day 212 of the year, July 31, while June 21 is only Day 172 of the year. June 21 lags the peak of high temperatures by 40 days, and we have that much longer to go before the high temperatures begin to slowly and erratically drop again.

For those farther north that lag time may be shorter. And of course there are always peaks and valleys in-between.

In this plot, the green line indicates the 5-day running average of daily highest temperatures for Athens, GA. The running red and blue lines are for 2006 and 2007. The black dots are for daily high temperatures over the last 87 years:



It’s a little odd to think of somewhere around July 31 as being the peak of summer heat, since we usually think of August as being the hottest month of the year, but I think the answer to that is two-fold. First, the “peak” is actually a rather broad plateau - trying to find a single day that is the peak is folly, really. Second, psychologically we first welcome warmer days early in the summer and don’t notice them as oppressive, but after a couple of months, they become tiresome and so August seems hotter though it really isn’t. (A third explanation might be that August, the period of “dog days” really is more oppressive as the relative humidity climbs and though even though the temperatures themselves aren’t warmer on average, the feeling of a hot day really *feels* more oppressive.)

Summer is a long way from being over!

Heat and sweat, drought and pollen, all come together.

There were storms sweeping across much of the southeast, and though we had great dark cumulus clouds massing in the sky they did not drop rain at our house. That seems to have been our sole chance for the next week or so, although summer is a fickle time in which it seems most anything can happen unpredictably.

To add insult, the National Weather Service persisted in telling us all day that it was to be *much* cooler yesterday, in the low 80s, but by 11am it was 94 degF, a condition that held true throughout the day.

We can at least identify those plants that seem to be luxuriating in the dry heat, and Shrubby St. Johnswort Hypericum prolificum is among them. This is a very pleasant shrub, now about four feet tall (can grow to 10 feet) and globular in shape. I planted a few of them around several years ago, and this year discovered the reason behind the epithet “prolificum”. I suppose it just took a year or two for the seedlings to grow to be noticeable but there seem to be hundreds scattered about each older plant. The roots are very tenacious, and weeding them (which I’ve done somewhat, without rancor) is not easy without snapping them off at ground level. I would guess that this tenacity would add to whatever adaptations make this plant something of a xerophyte.

Speaking of which, it surprises me that Hypericum is not considered as a planting for dry locations. Although not all species are so drought tolerant, a great many of the 75 or so species are. I suppose it’s because the flowers are fairly small and not always so grand, but they are noticeable, the plants are generally attractive (to my mind, anyway, though to others they might appear to be scrubby), and so, well, it just surprises me.

The flowers of the shrub are fairly small, maybe a centimeter across, but there are hundreds of them. They appear at intervals along the inflorescence so the shrub remains in flower for several weeks and must supply a great deal of nectar and pollen.


The opportunistic insect appears to be one of the 500 species of sweatbee (Halictidae), possibly a Lasioglossum. That would make it related to some of the other halictid species of green metallic bees, which look just like their names, that appear later in the season.

As you might guess the pollen of Hypericum is yellow, and regardless of which plant I find various species of bees on, their pollen collectors are filled with yellow pollen. And so the hundreds of small flowers the Hypericum are currently displaying are covered with sweatbees and bumblebees. This little one is displaying a fine collection of pollen - the clutch is nearly as large as her abdomen. She’ll cart it off to a nest in the ground and store it away for the larvae that will emerge from her eggs.


So these tiny bees are some of the alternative pollinators that we hear talk of in these days of honeybee problems. And true to the family name, they are attracted to sweat, at least with me (some say they’ve never noticed this). They’re fairly persistant, and the females will give a tiny, not very painful sting is molested, so I can imagine that most people would slap them off. I suppose that if we’re concerned about pollinators, we should reconsider that impulse, as we should with a great many unrecognized pollinators like many species of flies, beetles, and bugs.

It was just about a month ago that I posted on the robberfly Laphria saffrana, the Death’s Head Bumble Thief. Here’s another Laphria, in characteristic hunting pose. He (and from the abdomen I’d guess it is a male) may be L. virginica or possibly L. flavicollis. Giff Beaton has a great page of a large number of Laphria species here.


In the last week or so I’ve rescued two of these (or maybe it’s the same one twice) from the kitchen and released them outside. I understand that the large robberflies like this one can give you a good bite if you handle it roughly, so don’t. Otherwise they’re harmless and certainly beneficial from our point of view.

Back when we had a couple of beehives, many years ago, we learned that robberflies will opportunistically sit in front of a hive and catch honeybees on the wing. This is entirely possible, but I doubt a robberfly is going to make much of a dent in a hive’s population.

When I first encountered this individual he had set himself up on a horizontal buttonbush leaf. I ran in to get the camera but he took off as I approached. A couple of hours later, there he was again, same leaf. Gradually over the next hour or two in the late afternoon he’d switch back and forth from the buttonbush to a perch on the top of a pitcher plant hood. Other than flipping his head around at any flying insect (and the heads are remarkably mobile) he never went after any of the butterflies, digger wasps, bumblebees, or dragonflies that flew about in abundance.



I’ve already done Great Golden Digger Wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus, last June 6, but they’re always worthwhile reminding people about. I think I first started seeing them here a couple of weeks ago, so the timing is just about right. You’ll generally encounter these moving about rapidly on the ground. This one has dug out her little hole into which she’s going to continue to dig out little cells into which she’ll stuff crickets and katydids and such, and then lay an egg on each. You know what happens next.

She was fairly tolerant of my presence, but did challenge me a couple of times, advancing on the ground and buzzing her wings at me. A very nervous little critter. Well, not so little really, somewhat larger than a paper wasp.


Two really beautiful photos, here, one by Dan Tenaglia, formerly of Missouriplants and now of Alabamaplants.

Today is Father’s Day, and so a good Father’s Day to all fathers out there.

One quintessential American event deserves another, and what could be more American than an American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis)?


Found from as far south as Central America and as far north as the southern half of Canada, it also spreads from sea to shining sea. In its northern range it is, admittedly a migrant, but still.

American Lady is only one of the hotbed of insects that are now appearing with dizzying rapidity. Yesterday was a flurry of activity centering around the Buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis. It’s now in flower, with its peculiar spherical inflorescences, and seems to be an attractive nectar source and landing pad for a great many flies, bees, wasps, and butterflies. The holes in its leaves bear evidence of earlier lepidopteran munching and so this is a fine butterfly and moth plant.

While I probably have seen American Lady in its adult form before I haven’t recognized it, but in searching through the archives I do discover that we observed its large, spikey larvae feeding on rabbit tobacco late in September of last year.

The underside of the wings has a complex set of rectangular and circular patches that are variously, about half and half, depicted in drawings and photographs as pink or orange. This one is clearly a nice rose pink.


An earlier, different individual, found puddling, had a distinctly orange patterning. (First thumbnail below.) There may be some lighting artifact here. Those patches may be somewhat translucent and the colors vary depending on whether you’re viewing them with a dark background versus a fully lit one. But I don’t think that explains it fully - I think there really are orange and pink individuals.

The last two thumbnails are of the dorsal side of the wings, first in the puddling “orange” individual and then in the “pink” feeding individual. The dorsal surfaces are all distinctly orange.


Our omnipresent Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) is also a buttonbush fan.


Judging from the lesser amount of blue dorsal highlights and the smaller orange marginal spot, I’d guess this is a male, rather than the female yellow form. (Females come in two forms - dark and light. The dark form can be very confusing, similar as it is to a number of other dark swallowtail species.)


The larval preference for leaves of tall trees, especially (in my case) Tulip Poplars and Wild Cherry probably explains why I’ve never seen a larval form - they’re 50 feet up!

Grass skippers (subfamily Hesperiinae) are everywhere, and have been since midspring. I despair of identifying them without destructively capturing them. This one would not open its wings, so I wasn’t able to get a view of the dorsal surface, but even so the undersides are remarkably devoid of patterning. I have no idea what it is, but it probably isn’t our usual Skipper.


The flies and bees and wasps will have to wait another day.

If you listen to National Public Radio, you’ve probably been hearing a number of pieces on climate change in the last few months. I’ve only gradually become aware of it as a year-long series called Climate Connections, and it’s a joint project between NPR and National Geographic. The pieces on NPR are listed on the Climate Connection Main Page, and there are now over 50 of them. I listened to a dozen or so for a couple of hours this morning, trying to get a big picture of the work, and the variety and quality are pretty astonishing.

The series technically kicked off on May 1, with a preview of a the coming year: including short segments on drought in Africa, sea level rise in Fiji, and warming in Antarctica. May 1 was a particularly rich day for stories, and the first actual piece seems to be a clever introduction to carbon and global warming. Also on May 1: prehistoric climate change, the rapid and the slow.

There’s plenty for policy wonks, including a piece on one of the most polluted cities in China, Linfen, May 28’s story on China’s attempts to combat emissions, June 5’s piece on carbon trading, June 6’s search for the biggest Producer of greenhouse gases in the US, which seems to be a power plant 80 miles south of me. On May 15: an interview with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, hoping to cut emissions by more than a third by 2020.

The main page also links to stories not technically a part of Climate Connections. NPR continued it’s coverage of the the IPCC Fourth Assessment releases on April 6 with a chilling summary of the Working Group II Report: “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. This was preceded by an equally disturbing piece on March 28: more than 600 million people live in low-lying coastal areas.

May 20 brought us a piece on research on the Arctic ice sheet, 200 miles north of Alaska. This was followed May 21 with a review of six scientists from Arrhenius to Keeling involved with early research leading to a realization of climate change.

My favorites so far are these:
May 1: Phenology!, and yes, they actually use the word, Bev! Bluebells flowering times in Monks Wood, England. Connections of bluebells with cuckoo bird and orange-tipped butterfly declines. Mention of invasive species.

May 11: More phenology! A really lovely piece on people like Aldo Leopold and his student James Zimmerman who began collecting phenological data in Madison Wisconsin in the 1940s. There’s mention of the National Phenology Network and Project Budburst. We’re treated to discussions of observations of flowering times, insect hatching, firefly flashing, and cricket chirping.

May 1: Probably the nicest of all, at least to me, is a wonderful treatment of Charles David Keeling, obsessed with measuring carbon dioxide and who began sampling the world’s purist air on Mauna Loa in 1958. His relentless efforts resulted in the Keeling Curve, probably *the* iconic figure in climate change.

There’s little here to complain about. I imagine the webpages will become more streamlined, but hopefully the above links won’t die. The interactive map isn’t much to speak of at the moment, but that should change. You should probably be aware that the written transcripts tend to considerably shortened from the audio.

This is probably a Sleepy Orange, Eurema nicippe, one of the Sulphur Butterflies. It’s a bit ragged, and probably on its last legs (though it still has all six!), which explains why I was able to photograph it. Normally Sulphurs are hyperactive little things and easily spooked. And they have the annoying habit of keeping their wings closed while at rest so you seldom see the dorsal color patters. Perversely, my little Golden Guide (Mitchell and Zim), otherwise so useful, shows almost all the Sulphurs in the uncharacteristic open-winged pose, with only one depiction of the invariable close-winged posture. Fortunately the aforelinked Bugguide shows plenty of undersides!


Sulphurs, along with Whites, are in the Family Pieridae, and Sulphurs lodge in the subfamily Coliadinae. They’re a year-round presence here, as several species, including this one, may overwinter as adults. If you go to Hostplants Database and search on any of the genera you’ll find that the vastly predominant host family of plants is the Legume Family, Fabaceae. (Actually Hostplants still uses the old set of family names, Leguminosae, Compositae, etc. Drives me nuts.)

Interesting to me, anyway, the Sulphurs' cousins, the Whites (subfamily Pierinae), specialize on plants of the mustard family, Brassicaceae (which Hostplants calls Cruciferae, of course). Although attractive, these can be destructive of planted crop mustards - broccoli, cabbage, and so forth.

So for the Sulphurs, soybeans, alfalfa, clover, locust, partridge pea, and for this species, Senna spp., and we certainly have a lot of that here, and therefore we have a lot of Sulphurs (Cloudless Sulphur here, March 2006). We don’t, however, have a huge variety of mustards, and so we don’t see Whites all that often.

Sulphur butterfly larvae are pretty, bright green caterpillars, usually with tasteful racing stripes of various colors. The larva of Cloudless, along with the equally attractive bright yellow wild senna flower, was the subject of one of my first posts in August 2004.

I was delighted to come across a new eastern boxturtle (Terrapens carolina carolina) a month after the last new one. The patterning on this female is clearly different from any of the other six that I’ve documented in the last couple of years.




This makes the fourth female, as well as three males. Box turtles don’t range very far within their lifetimes, staying within a few acres. I don’t imagine they defend their territories (or at least if I could, I can’t imagine a battle of the box turtles, though I should say I have seen one box turtle scampering after another, I mean that literally, truly, they were scampering, and I suspect what was going on there), so territories certainly can overlap. And since they need a source of water, I would guess about 3/4 of our 40 acres are frequented by them (the remaining ten being relatively dry upper pineland).

I’ve seen more than seven box turtles in the last 15 or 20 years here, of course, but it’s only in the last two that I’ve documented them. Still, even seven box turtles over 30 acres sounds like a healthy population.

The box turtles I’ve seen have all been about the same size, and probably two or three decades old, if I count the scutes (not necessarily a good indicator of precise age). This female was probably the smallest so far - about 2/3 the size of previous turtles. I think I mentioned earlier that I’ve never seen a small, i.e., yearling box turtle. I suspect it’s because finding a box turtle is more a matter of surprise than intentional searching. You simply come upon them, and it’s unlikely to be because they’re moving and thereby catch your eye. That was the case here. And a very small turtle would probably be close to invisible.

As I indicated to Jason at Xenogere, I am a weather whore, a nomenclatural gift from my sister. I’d modestly protest the bestowment a bit - I don’t get paid for it. At any rate it won’t come as any surprise to anyone even faintly familiar with me here.

The weather has been quite erratic here, and the forecasts on the several good websites that I visit change practically by the hour. Case in point - Weather Underground, probably as reliable and sensitive to update as any, gave us a 20% chance of rain in the morning today a few hours ago. Now it’s a 50% chance in the afternoon, and they have a frequently updated, though terse, jargon-filled, and grammatically incorrect “scientific forecaster discussion” that is good fun to read through. There are long stretches of days when I don’t even bother to look at the weather, and we’ve had at least two several-week periods of that even now. But in times like this I can check in on it quite frequently.

So following up on the total bust of Monday came another unexpected promise of severe thunderstorms last night. While the maps showed considerable activity all around us, with 60mph winds forecast for areas just tens of miles away, we had little more than a fine lightning show and by this morning a miserly 0.25 inches of rain. But I’m not complaining - it’s a pittance, but welcome nonetheless.

After years of living in Tallahassee, and then moving to Athens in 1977, I viewed for some time my new home as being a radically different environment. Rolling hills, what seemed at the time cooler air, it all seemed so idyllic. And at this time of the summer it is, compared to most places. It may get dry for long periods in the spring, it may be hot as hell, but the moisture content of the air is at least low during those hot periods.

Soon to come though will be the Bermuda, or Azores, High, which will settle upon us in July and August, maybe even into September. Humidity and heat will be high, the air will be still, the weather sites will be little visited, and life will seem not worth living. I will have little feeling of living somewhere different than Tallahassee, which remains my personal calibration point for summer misery.

I will say this - Tallahassee did get fine afternoon summer thunderstorms, usually about 5pm, and like clockwork. They generally served only to drive up the humidity but offered a diversion that could be counted on. That’s not the case here.

I can’t help but marvel - what did I do before the internets and the ability to spy on weather events on a realtime basis? Nothing, really. When I was a kid, and even into adulthood, rain or heat waves simply appeared, or not, and we had not the slightest idea of what was going to happen. We couldn’t, from the comfort of our little offices under the stairs, instantly call up maps of what fronts and precipitation patterns looked like five minutes ago. I couldn’t do what I did last night - remark to Glenn that there was a particularly red area north of us that looked like it was going to impact us in 25 minutes. And in 25 minutes, we got our good thunderstorm.

This isn’t a profound realization, but it is a profound reality and extends to much of everything I’m interested in. Instant information access for me to all my interests: weather, insects, plants, fire danger, and a myriad of others habitual and spurious. What an amazing thing.

And, more fun, we couldn’t conceptually ameliorate the summer heat by clicking on and vicariously enjoying the view of the weather at this very moment in a place like Ushuaia, my current favorite sister city.

Alas, yesterday was a bust as far as rain was concerned. Although we were on a severe thunderstorm watch from noon until 10pm, and although storms raged in central and south Georgia (and still are) and a band of rain descended from the north, it all split and moved around us. Maybe next time.

The odd flowers of Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) are about to open, and this fellow just couldn’t wait:


It’s one of the many scarab beetles, and is in the subfamily of Cetoniinae, fruit and flower chafers. This is probably one of the two or three species of Valgus found in our area. The common name for this little (< 1cm) beetle, if it exists, is just valgus. This one is probably hoping for flower nectar, but many of the species in the subfamily, including such familiars as June Beetles, can be destructive pests.

The larvae, and even the adults of some species are inquiline, new word for the day! They inhabit the nest of another species, and Valgus beetles specialize in termite nests. Apparently the larvae feed on the walls of the galleries. Even termites have termites!

Normally I try to get at least a Family identification on arthropods, but in this case I’ve thrown all eight hands and feet into the air.

Both spiders were observed and photographed Sunday morning, perched several feet in the air, engaged in their own activities. It seems to me that the presence of bristles on the legs, the relative shapes and patterning of the abdomen and cephalothorax, and the pattern of eyes are important. Neither of these spiders seem inclined to build webs so that also reduces the possibilities. These look to be hunting spiders, as opposed to trappers, so could be in one or another of the following families:

Crab Spiders (Thomisidae): 2 rows of four eyes each.
Running Crab Spiders (Philodromidae): 2 rows of four eyes each.
Jumping Spiders (Salticidae): 8 eyes in 3 rows, the top row has the largest pair, the middle row a much smaller pair, the third row 2 pairs.
Nursery Web Spiders (Pisauridae): 2 rows of four eyes each.
Wolf Spiders (Lycosidae): 3 rows: the first row has four eyes. Most live on the ground.
Lynx Spiders (Oxyopidae): a hexagonal arrangement of eyes.

(In addition there are Giant Crab Spiders: 2 rows of four eyes each. Probably not in our range.
Selenopid Crab Spiders: 6 of their eight eyes are in one row. Probably not in our range.)

The first one was quite small, about a centimeter in size, and was dining on some poor unfortunate syrphid fly, I would guess, about 3 feet off the ground on a buttonbush leaf.


The head is elevated, and it definitely has two rows of four eyes each. (This photo is linked to a much larger version that will appear on a new page).


That would seem to eliminate several families, leaving us with a Crab Spider, a Philodromid (perhaps Philodromus), or a young Fishing Spider (Dolomedes). Unfortunately there are reasons why I would think that none of these could be the case.

The second one was also small, less than a centimeter across. This one has parked herself on a Common Rue leaf. The arrangement of eyes is ambiguous in all photos, so I conclude the other six eyes are very small. My first impression would be that it’s a jumping spider, but usually the two middle eyes in the first row are prominent, with the flanking pair only slightly less so.


In this case I think she’s guarding a cocoon of eggs, and not feeding. This would be consistent with female jumping spider behavior.


Two other observations: the reddish tipped abdomen, and the prominent bristles on the legs. I haven’t run across any jumping spider photos with that combination of characters.

24 hours later - they’re practically in the same space.

Spider #1: a little clearer, without yesterday’s fly, but there is something dark and sweet that I don’t want to think about. The image is linked to a larger version of the same.


Spider #2: a clearer picture of the face, but still the eyes are ambiguous. She’s clearly guarding an egg sac, surely she is. Hasn’t budged an inch since yesterday. Quite a bundle of bristles.

Some of the discussions in comments in the last few days here, and amplified by Bev here, have had to do with the differences in appearance of arthropods as they go from egg to adult. Of course, caterpillars and adult butterflies or moths are obviously different, but even the early instars of a larva may look quite different from the later ones. Or they may not.

I keep a few plants of the alien, but relatively good citizen, Ruta graveolens, Common Rue, for this reason:


I’m fairly certain that this tiny (1 cm) caterpillar is an early instar stage of Papilio polyxenes, Black Swallowtail. Later instars will look quite different. I’ve actually photographed a later instar stage two years ago on September 1 (!), and that one was feeding on the same set of plants.

At first I thought this might be an Anise Swallowtail, P. zelicaon, but that species is a western one, and is not found in our area. However I was able to search on Common Rue in the Natural History Museum’s HOSTS (a Database of the World’s Lepidopteran Hostplants) and found not only Black and Anise Swallowtails listed, but also Giant Swallowtail, P. cresphontes.

(That Hostplants Database has proved to be an excellent resource, btw. As a product of the fusion of two groups of knowledge it appeals to me. I have the feeling that those interested only in plants may not use it, nor those only interested in insects. And yet it’s provided me with some excellent clues as to identity of caterpillars that would otherwise be very difficult.)

I’ve also photographed a later instar Giant Swallowtail, on the same set of rue plants, about 3 weeks earlier, two years ago. This is the one that looks like bird droppings in its earlier instars, and that’s probably a cryptic defense. Bugguide didn’t have any early instars of this species, so I couldn’t eliminate it as a possibility for today’s specimen, but I did find this, which features “an early instar” photo. The younger larva looks mostly like a small version of the older larva, so I think it’s safe to conclude that today’s caterpillar is not Giant Swallowtail, but rather Black Swallowtail.

Nonetheless it’s nice to know that we not only had both species two years ago, but that we still do. The odd thing is that I’m not convinced I’ve ever seen adults of either!

Another btw: that above link, from University of Florida’s Featured Creatures, has a lot of interesting stuff on Giant Swallowtails, including the composition of the chemicals that the osmetria put out - basically (to our olfactory-brain setup anyway) the odor of rancid butter.

Final btw: Getting back to the plant, Common Rue, there is this page, which has more than you ever wanted to know about the chemicals found in rue. The home site is INCHEM, and the Poisons Information Monographs index contains an interesting list of toxic plants and animals.

UPDATE

In comments Bev has confirmed the identity as Black Swallowtail. The earlier photo was taken on June 4; I went out this morning and hunted down the single individual that seems to be plying this planting of rue, and lo and behold, it was still there. Or so I imagine that it was the same it. So this photo is taken June 10, six days later. My guess is that it hasn’t achieved the full caterpillar maturity, and has some intermediate characteristics, but it’s getting close!

Of course it’s a given that we must harrass the poor thing to make it extend its osmetria. But you have to be quick, they retract rapidly and this one has nearly fully done so:

RealClimate summarizes the climate change accomplishments of the G8 Summit. As usual, they decline to get much into policy issues, but the comments in the above link are worth reading, and #17 wraps it up pretty well.

(Update: #25 encapsulates my own feelings about RealClimate, which, though invaluable, is either far too timid, or is ignoring current data in favor of their GCM models. Sometimes RealClimate just rots my socks (TM, Bev, she’s not responsible for that usage). I’m still waiting for them to comment on the several areas of concern, including this NASA publication, peer-reviewed, several weeks ago, *rather important I should think*, as well as reports that the Greenland and Antarctic ice coverages are lubricating far faster than thought. Just some thoughts on the validity of the rapidity that has been unexpected would be nice.)

Now - back to the G8:

All the other runners are to come back to the starting line. President Bush, having had a lot of trouble deciding just *which* brand and color of running shoes he wants to use, is now having trouble tying the laces. Everyone’s waiting for him because everyone knows how fast he can run. Everyone’s waiting for His Incompetence, or, more likely, His Deliberate, Well-Considered, Intransigence. So we all have to start over again, and *that* is what the G8 managed to accomplish. Bully for them for giving in to this ignorant thug, and then humbly submitting to this charlatan in being pushed back six or more years. Way to go. Way to go.

The last few days have seen temperatures reaching the low 90Fs by 11 am, and peaking and holding steady at 95F around 1 or 2pm until 4 or 5pm. I’ve been rather pleased at the level of tolerance I’ve accrued, and this will be the third summer without A/C. I use the Cat Activity Model for working outside - out by 7am, and then we all come in by 11am. After that it’s sitting on the front stoop with a fan and reading, sipping mint juleps, or some such. Summer classes started on Thursday, but I don’t think that exposure to A/C is going to harm me.

Insects do not seem to follow the Cat Activity Model. Dragonflies, real flies, wasps, and others seem to relish the heat, and are most active during the hottest parts of the day, committing all the more their little acts of brutality and violence on each other.

Tiny storms dot the weather maps in the afternoon, but none has moved over our immediate area although I did hear thunders yesterday afternoon, which is almost as good. It does look like MarkP in Rome might have gotten some rain day before yesterday, and maybe even yesterday.

The other day in comments Robin reviewed the concept of relative humidity, and that has had me watching the change in %RH over the course of the day. It might be 70 degF at 5am, but it’s also 70% RH, and though it’s the coolest and only time you want to be working, it’s also the muggiest and sweatiest.

As the temperatures climb into the 90s, the RH drops to 25%, or even 20%, and even though hot, it’s not at all uncomfortable. I note that if the RH is even as high as 30% at these temperatures, the comfort level plummets distinctly.

I am finding the Menopause Refresh Kit to be very handy!

Two points here, first the photography. When I see bugs of this sort, I usually find them in sunnier, drier locations. I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that there are species adapted to this sort of shady, moist area:


At the bottom of the hollow that SBS Creek runs along the canopy is very thick in most places. Unlike the sharper photos I can get in a bright sunny location where I can decrease aperature to maximize depth of field, focus more easily, and not have to use flash, conditions here are less ideal. I generally have to let the camera choose the aperture and exposure time which means decreased depth of field, and I have to use flash, which I dislike.

So it is that the bug pic here, the second point, isn’t so good as I’d like it to be. But I haven’t seen one like this, so I’m curious as to what other opinions are as to identity. It was found prowling about on a leaf of Climbing Hydrangea, Decumaria barbara, about 5 feet off the ground.


The expanded, leaf-like tibae of the hind leg pair immediately suggest Leaf-footed Bug, the Family Coreidae. However more than just the hind pair of legs seem to exhibit expansion. And the bug as a whole seems slimmer and sleeker than the generally broad bodies of a leaf-footed bug. The antennae with the banding and the red tips should certainly offer some clues, but I don’t see any Bugguide photos in Coreidae that correspond. The colorful red eyes provide designer quality fashion sense.

The other possibility is the Assassin Bug Family, Reduviidae. But although the specimen here matches more the sleek profile and posture, this one lacks the typical assassin bug constriction that makes it look like it has a “neck”. Also, I don’t see any Reduviidids that have leafy expansions of their tibiae.

The other thing, of course, is that this could be a nymph nearing adult shape, but not quite there yet. Here, you can just barely make out the folded proboscis. I’d say this is a predator.

UPDATE: Bev suggests Acanthocephala femorata, Florida (or Giant) Leaf-footted Bug, in comments. And therefore not a predator despite the fierce beak.

There is a little area, quite sunny and dry, above the Bufo Pond, that I’ve given over to whatever wild grasses, and later, asters and goldenrods, might be able to make their living there. I rip out any intruding sweetgum or pine seedlings, and blackberries that like to take over any sunny disturbed area for a time. It seems to be a favorite perching spot for a number of dragonflies and kin. On Sunday, I discovered a Spreadwing.

Admittedly this post is rather heavy on the taxonomy, but as with the flies (Order Diptera) I’m trying to fix Families in my mind with the objective of being able to readily identify to at least that extent.

Dragonflies are generally in the Order Odonata, and there are two Suborders into which North American odonata will fall. Giff Beaton has a nice page that uses easily recognized images to place candidates into the suborder of either Damselflies (Zygoptera) into which Spreadwings fall, or classic Dragonflies (Anisoptera) where you’ll find Darners, Skimmers, Spiketails, and others. (Giff Beaton’s website is especially useful for me, since it targets Georgia and surrounding southeastern US states.)

The suborder of classic Dragonflies contains insects that keep their wings straight out, unfolded, with the two pairs distinctly separate from each other, when at rest. Damsels fold their wings to one extent or another. Spreadwing Damsels are sort of in-between: they don’t fold their wings completely like an Ebony Jewelwing, rather the wings are held at an angle from the body.


Spreadwings are in the Family Lestidae, and while there are only two genera mentioned in Bugguide, it is hard (for me at least) to tell the difference between species. Right now, it’s hard for me to tell the difference between males and females unless there is a color form for each.

I’m only guessing that this critter here is a female Carolina Spreadwing, Lestes vidua, which is distinguised from the Southern Spreadwing, Lestes australis, by a bit of blue or gray in the terminal one or two segments of the abdomen. At any rate, the photos match up fairly well, but it could be something else too.

The thumbnails below lead to larger photos. The middle is a closeup of the tail, but the appendages that distinguish male and female are not presented well enough for my rudimentary abilities yet. However the patterning of colors on the abdominal segments themselves seem to correspond to Carolina Spreadwing.

No comment required here - this is, completely and unexpectedly, a shameless us-us-us post. Just enjoy it, as I did when I discovered it.

Our neighbors Gisela and Tom stuffed a CD of photos from the WVFD Open House into our mailbox, and I found this treasure.

In the last 30 years, Glenn and I have had only one photo taken of the two of us, in Wisconsin, in the mid-1980s (isn’t that right, dear?), and that one is pretty awful. We knew our picture was being taken and it looks like a 19th century discomfort setup, you know the sort.

This seems to be the second one, taken as we were working with the anchoring of the monitor and without our awareness, and it is precious to me. Even without the history, I think it’s something of an iconic photo.



I know I’m looking like I’m about to zap him with 1000 gallons of water per minute, but as you can see, the hose is uncharged. I knew that

May marks the end of spring, and the pressing issue of weather for spring here has been drought, for us. How about you?

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

New England states, and the US midsection especially south received considerably colder weather in May.

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

Most of the country’s interior experienced warmer (2-6 degF) than usual temperatures during May: Great Lakes states, midwest states, and western mountain states. The coastal areas, Florida, Atlantic states, Northwest Pacific, and especially Texas, were either fairly average or 2-4 degF cooler than average for May.


Again from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, below is a plot of mean precipitation anomalies for the US, in May. Despite the warmer temperatures in the midwestern states, it was the center of the country that received above-normal rainfall, up to 75% more than usual, during May. Southern California, and of course the Southeastern states, were anywhere from 50-100% below normal, with cities in Georgia setting historical records for little or no rainfall at all.

In both the southwestern and southeastern US drought regions, the culprit has been masses of high pressure air that have settled for long weeks over the areas, and are resistant to any inflow of moisture. At the end of May, the high pressure air over the Southeast US was beginning to move east into the Atlantic.


Fires in south Georgia and Florida continued throughout May. Technically it occurred in the first couple of days of June, but Tropical Storm Barry did finally bring some measure of relief to Florida and the southern 2/3 of Georgia.

For Athens:

May continued the extremes of dry weather begun in March.

Here is the plot for our monthly accumulation of rain here in Athens for the month of May. The red line is the average over 80 years of Mays, and the river of peach defines the standard deviation range. Blue areas mean above-average; mustard areas are below. Our 1.56 inches of rain in May were more than a lot of Georgia received, with many cities - Rome, Macon - setting historical records for the month. That continues the drought that has been our lot since the beginning of 2006, and the trend in less-than-normal rainfall that we’ve seen here since 1998.


Now’s a good time to review our rain situation since the beginning of the year. For the year so far, we have received only 60% of normal rainfall. That’s on top of 80% normal from all of last year, 2006.


Here is my plot of low temperatures for the month of May in Athens. After breaking high temperature records officially on May 1, with 92 degF, May turned out to be reasonably average. As usual, the green line is for this year, and the red line is for last year, 2006. The blue line declares the historical high temperatures for each day.


In the end we had 9 days during May above the 17-year average for that day. That is nearly twice the average 4.9 days of signficantly hotter weather experienced during Mays since 1990. However there were also 7 nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation below the average low, and that’s compared to the 5.4 low nights in an average May. So except for the extremes, it kind of averaged out to appear to be a normal May, temperature-wise.

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 and remained that way throughout May. Nonetheless indications are for a La Nina to develop in the next 1-3 months, and that will mean higher than normal temperatures and continued lower than normal rainfall.

Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department had our first annual open house on Saturday from 10am to 2pm, and it turned out to be a reasonably good success. Fire Chief Mike brought his grill, and it was put to good use with the fair number of folks in the community who dropped by. All three trucks and gear were out on display.

Some of us slept in until start time, but a few managed to get up and arrive early and begin preparations. We dumped 2000 gallons of water into the drop tank and then refilled the tanker.

That drop tank, filled with a couple of thousand gallons of water and fortified with our two wildland fire backpack sprayers, were the big hit for the kids. It took them no time at all to discover the pleasures of water wars, and by the time they left they were wetter than the rest of us.

The only real fly in the ointment came after 2pm, when we were putting the trucks away. I’ve mentioned that the knocker, our white brush truck, lives in the stripped out side kitchen, and must be squeezed in with about two inches of space on either side. And as fate would have it, it snagged on the door frame as it backed in and ripped away one of the two barn doors and the concrete pillar it was attached to.

Fortunately The Unknown Firefighter, an amiable and ingenious individual, threw himself and his truckload of marvelous tools into solving the problem. With the helpful suggestions of the three of us remaining, we had a temporary, rather elegant fix within a couple of hours using only materials at hand.

The other big event of the day was the weather. I was rather astonished to discover that what had been Friday afternoon only a low pressure area off the west coast of Florida had transformed into Tropical Storm Barry. For Floridians both Pure and Impure, and for south Georgians this has proved to be a boon, a wonderful respite from the desiccation and heat of the last month or more. I’m afraid that MarkP in Rome may not have gotten much, if anything, but the rain for us started about 3pm and went all night, gentle but constant.

From Georgia Forestry Commission’s map/fire danger page, the southern half of Georgia seems to back in the green as of yesterday afternoon:


And there is something about the rain from a tropical disturbance that is different and immediately distinguishable from the rain from a simple afternoon shower. The clouds and the variations in temperatures are different, and the rain presents itself along with the wind in a different way. It might just be my association with tropical storms from living in Florida fooling me, but you can almost taste the difference.

It’s going to water the ground just as good though!

The wasps have made their appearance in the last few weeks, first the paper wasps, and then in the last couple of days potter wasps and mud daubers.

Yesterday we watched a Pipe Organ Mud Dauber (or dirt dauber or dobber, whichever you prefer), presumably Trypoxylon politum, building her nest. She was tireless, bringing in balls of clay mud every few minutes all afternoon, and spending about a minute on each trip constructing the nest. There’s a little problem with this nest, but I’ll get to that in a bit. We’ve talked about mud dauber nests before, but only as artifacts. The photo to the left shows her just after she landed with a ball of mud, and the thumbnails below are to photos in a new page that show the stages of her spreading her efforts in this single trip. Apparently she decided this ball should be used for extending the foundation, rather than adding to the arch.

As she did this she emitted a loud whining buzz, but not apparently associated with her wings.

As you probably already know, in the next stage she’ll lay an egg and provision it with some poor paralyzed spider, and the larva will feed on that during its development.


Mud daubers are solitary wasps, with the adults apparently feeding on nectar to support their prodigious progeniferous program. I present that link, not as a sole reference for that little factoid, but because the xenophobia interested me. For a considerably more friendly and informative investigation, go to the always interesting Hilton Pond.

But the males get involved here too, and in the insect world that’s always worth mentioning. A male will hang around a female building a nest, and, presumably hoping for some, will in the meantime protect the nest and chase off rubberneckers.

Two worthwhile words: bivoltine, and diapause.

I ran across the first one musing through this abstract on populations of mud daubers. It essentially means that there are two generations per breeding season.

The word probably derives from “bi”, meaning two, of course, and you can use “uni”, "tri", and “poly” as a prefix, coupled with (probably) “voltus”, meaning appearance. So: two appearances (or one, three, many).

What’s interesting about mud daubers is that they’re bivoltine south of a certain climatological line, and univoltine north of that line, with only one generation. Ours are almost certainly bivoltine. That means that the second generation is going to have do something different from the first generation, in order to get through the winter.

That’s where “diapause” comes in. The etymology here is Greek, not Latin, and the “dia” prefix doesn’t mean “two”, it means “through” or “across”. So it’s a pause through or across. (As opposed to “menopause”, where “meno” refers to “month” or “moon” and the “pause” here derives from a word meaning “to bring to an end”, a gratifying result, at least once it’s over.)

It’s essentially a form of hibernation. In this case it means that the mud dauber larvae will cease development, cued apparently by environment, for the winter period, and will resume development with warming temperatures, increasing photoperiod, or some such.

So the first generation in a breeding season doesn’t do a diapause, at least not in the same way that the second generation does. And north of that line, the mud daubers all do diapause at the end of the much truncated warm season.

This brings up a fascinating concept - reproductive isolation. Conceivably organisms that are bivoltine could become reproductively isolated from each other, which means that for whatever reason, they cease mating between generations in a single season. This can herald the start of speciation, in which the first and the second generations, no longer able to mate, begin to diverge and change.

(In the case of mud daubers, this doesn’t happen - according to that abstract linked to above, mud dauber males do survive across the two generations and so they do not become isolated reproductively. That abstract also summarizes transfer experiments where bivalent populations were carted north, and vice versa, and demonstrated that the eggs in the first generation in the south will undergo diapause when transported to the north. So it’s clearly a set of environmental cues that control diapause and both the north univoltine and the south bivoltine populations are capable of either behavior.)

Both voltine and diapause behavior are very general terms and apply to much more than just insects, extending from much lower animals than insects and into mammals even. Here are some extreme examples among insects, for instance, that might have diapause lasting for many years.

Oh yes, the problem. She’s building her nest in the kitchen. We typically keep our “front door”, the kitchen door, open at all times that the weather is not inclement (and then some, too). Since the screen door went away some time back she apparently felt it an invitation. Which means that she investigated the kitchen, found a place, decided “oh yes, perfect”, and then memorized the location, and how to get in and navigate the kitchen.

We probably wouldn’t be so free if we lived in an urban or suburban area where houseflies, mosquitos, and what not abound, but other than the stray possum seldom get invaded.

It does raise the question of what we’re going to do with this first generation nest, which will probably hatch out in a month or two if we don’t get rid of it. I do hate for her efforts to come to nothing.