Nature's Viet Cong

In Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, author David Quammen writes about one of the world's most despised insects:

"...the mosquito is taking a bad rap. It has been victimized, I submit to you, by a strong case of anthropocentric bias. In fact, the little sucker can be viewed, with only a small bit of squinting, as one of the great ecological heroes of planet Earth. If you consider rainforest preservation. The chief point of blame, with mosquitoes, happens also to be the chief point of merit: They make tropical rainforests, for humans, virtually uninhabitable

So as Europe was being stripped of its virgin woods, and India and China, and the North American heartland, the tropical rainforests largely escaped, lasting into the late twentieth century—with some chance, at least, that they may endure a bit longer. Thanks to what? To a concatenation of accidental and deterministic factors, no doubt, among which should be included this: 10 million generations of jungle-loving, disease-bearing, bloodsucking mosquitoes—the Culicidae, nature’s Vietcong.

.

Mosquitos? Kill Them All!

Eradicating any organism from this earth would have seriously bad consequences for entire ecosystems, right?

Well maybe not says Janet Fang, if the organism is the mosquito.  Writing in Nature magazine,

Malaria infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes cause a huge further medical and financial burden by spreading yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus and West Nile virus. Then there's the pest factor: they form swarms thick enough to asphyxiate caribou in Alaska and now, as their numbers reach a seasonal peak, their proboscises are plunged into human flesh across the Northern Hemisphere.

So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers....

...Most mosquito-eating birds would probably switch to other insects that, post-mosquitoes, might emerge in large numbers to take their place. Other insectivores might not miss them at all: bats feed mostly on moths, and less than 2% of their gut content is mosquitoes. "If you're expending energy," says medical entomologist Janet McAllister of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colorado, "are you going to eat the 22-ounce filet-mignon moth or the 6-ounce hamburger mosquito?"

With many options on the menu, it seems that most insect-eaters would not go hungry in a mosquito-free world. There is not enough evidence of ecosystem disruption here to give the eradicators pause for thought...

...Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.

.

Insects That Raise Meat for Market

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them. ~Samuel Butler, Note-Books

Samuel Butler, of course, was simply wrong.

Colonies of aphids are milked by ants and some wasps for their "honeydew", to say nothing of the Melissotarsus ants that raise insect herds for meat.

Lots of insects predate on animals by sucking their blood or eating small bits of flesh: fleas, mosquitoes, bedbugs, biting flies, and a whole host of mites, many of which are unnoticed and unseen by their hosts.

And on the "less friendly" side of the equation, there are various wasps that sting and paralyze living spiders and caterpillars which continue to live on, serving as living meals for the larvae of the wasp.

On Sunday, while digging on the dogs, Dick and I came across one such wasp that had captured a spider and paralyzed it as a precursor to laying its eggs inside.  The wasp was very blue -- this blurry camera shot does not capture it.  Apologies for the photo quality, but we were digging on the dogs and this fellow was just a side show.

.

Zebra Swallowtail

Just a common butterfly, but I like butterflies as they are a sign you are on an organic farm or in an area without too much spraying.

The Zebra Swallowtail, Eurytides marcellus, was first named in 1777 when the country was only one year old, and it's pretty common east of the Mississippi.  It is in a different genus from the other swallowtails, which are Papilio.

Zebra Swallowtail caterpillars live off off the the leaves of bushes in the pawpaw family of plants, while the adult butterflies feed off of milkweed, blackberry, lilac, mutliflora rose, redbud, verbena, and dogbane -- all plants you are likely to find along forested river and creek bottoms of the kind I was hunting Sunday.
.

The Billions of Bugs Above

.

• Related Posts:
  ** Tracking How the Dragons Fly
  ** Monarchs & Mexico.

Old Habits Are Hard to Break

This is Darwin's beetle. Watch it to the end.

For the record, I still have the beetle collection I started at age eight, 42 years ago. Old habits are indeed hard to break!
.

Goliath Bird-eating Spider

Watch this one to the end!

Just what it says. A species of Tarantula (Theraphosa blondi) native to the rainforest of northern South America.

And yes, they can eat birds as large as a robin, though their normal food is frogs, mice, and very large insects.
.

Hunting the Huntsman

Australia's Huntsman Spider is indeed a big boy.
.

A World Connected and Boiling With Life

Loggerhead turtle migration in the Atlantic.


The entire world is a seething mass of migration.

Sharks, tuna, whales, and turtles migrate, as do eels, salmon, perch and cod, to name a few.

Birds migrate from North to South and from West to East.

Even penguins migrate.

Elephants migrate, along with wildebeest, zebra, caribou, gazelles, pronghorn and buffalo.

Some insects migrate -- ladybugs, dragonflies, butterflies and locusts, for example.

The entire world is connected and boils with life.

• Related Links from this blog
  ** The missing birds of Rock Creek Park
  ** A single transmitter made a world of difference
  ** Dragonfly migrations
  ** Before bird-banding, there were arrows in the neck
  ** This bird does 40,000 migration miles a year
  ** Why bird flu might show up in Alaska first
  ** Why a lot of birds may not be coming back in the Spring

Click to enlarge.
.

Ticks Cure Cancer

Photo from Treehugger

Don't believe it?

Me either, but here's the source article to make of it as you will.

.

Praying Mantis Vs. Hummingbird

Wow. Did the mantis do this by itself? The fact that it is hanging from a hummingbird feeder suggests it. Amazing if true. Picture from Blame It On the Voices.
.

Strange Wildlife

This little stinker was walking down the fence line while we were digging, and I took this picture with my crappy old point-and-shoot no-telephoto lens digital (the only thing that can survive a dig), which means I was pretty close to her.

The notable thing about this skunk is that she had so much white -- almost entirely white along the top. She hardly cared about me; she knew she had the ultimate defense, and unless I had a gun, she was going to be all right.

More about yesterday's digging later, but suffice it to say we also saw her mate -- a bit larger and with a normal skunk pattern.





The other odd creature we found yesterday was this very large orange ant-looking thing. It's the size of a bullet ant, with a pumpkin-orange and black-banded body, and a slightly fuzzy skin tone as I recall. It was completely solitary, which made me think it might be a wingless-wasp ant mimic, but whatever it is, I have never seen one before.