An Imposter in the Garden

The Memsahib and I have been delighted with the backyard paradise installed by Cutters Lawn and Landscape.  I've written about Leon, the Test Fish and my deep ambivalence over some pioneering water striders.

Today, the Mem and I were out back doing a fish count.  All were accounted for except Halloween, a tiny deep red fish with black fins.  (Dear, I've seen her since.)   We were remarking over our pleasure that our garden had become a favored destination of hoards of bumblebees.  We noted the handwringing that goes on over bees' lost of habitat in recent decades, and speculations over whether cell-phone towers and other wavy transmitters were disorienting those salutary insects.  We were pleased, as only homeowners who install fake habitats can be, that we have been able, in our modest way, to tip the balance back their way just a little.

I was watching the bumblebees clouding around our blue salvia, when I noticed one that looked a little different.  At first, I thought it was just a large bumblebee, but upon closer inspection I saw that if it was, it wasn't like any of the others.  It was identically black and yellow-gold, and its wings were completely invisible as it flew, but it had -- well, it had a hairy ass.

I realized after watching it for a few minutes that it wasn't a bee at all.  It had the coiled proboscis of a butterfly or moth.  Because it hovered and floated expertly, at first I thought it was a moth of the sphinx variety, but it had the stick-like club-end antennae of a butterfly. 

Of course, I had to know what it was.

I'd like to pause here to say a few words in praise of Google.  There has recently been some speculation that Google, and the Internet in general, is making us dumber, robbing us of the ability to engage in leisurely reading and thinking necessary for learning.  (See this recent article in The Atlantic.)  Maybe so.  I judge that it's making me smarter.  I know my insect and especially my butterfly-and-moth books inside and out and I've never seen anything like this.  Since I had no idea what I was looking for, I despaired of  devising search terms that would yield useful hits.  "moth black yellow" seemed pretty useless to me, and then I hit on it:  "bumblebee mimic moth." 

I had the answer in seconds:  It is a snowberry clearwing moth

Looking like this on our salvia:

It is indeed a variety of sphinx moth, perhaps better known as hummingbird moths, closely related to the moths (underwings and hawkmoths) that one sees only at night, looking like ghostly hummingbirds (and about the same size), especially favoring petunias and the like. 

I regret to report that their larva can be hell on tomatoes. 

Anyway, we welcome this fake bumblebee to our fake paradise, close on the banks of our fake pond.

Now, if I only knew what a snowberry is.

I'm Very Conflicted About My Gerridae

The Memsahib and I are obsessed with our new fake pond in the backyard.  We have 13 koi and two catfish, all with names:  Leon (the test fish you read about here), Electra, Jane, Barry, Flame, Sparky, 101, No-Name, SmartyPants, Lily, A-U, FancyPants, Dick, Otis, and Marion.  And yes, each of those names is meaningful to the person who named it.  We're hoping that we have not imposed too much gender confusion on our little school.

I was out gazing at the herd one afternoon when I saw something that absolutely astounded me:

A water strider.  An insect, Family Gerridae.  And another, and then one more. 

Also called pond skaters, skimmers, and water scooters, four of the water strider's six legs are constructed in such a way that the tiny beast is able to skate across calm waters supported only by the surface tension of the water.  They use the other two to propel them at amazing speeds across the surface.  They eat microscopic subsurface crud.

They are not rare.  But neither are they spontaneously generated out of fake pond chemicals.  They had to have gotten there somehow.  There are no waters within, oh, a mile or so where one might have expected a water strider to have come from.  In any event, of the thousands of water striders I've seen in waters all over the country, I have never seen one fly.  They do not appear on casual examination to have wings.  It seemed unlikely that they would have walked, or strode.  And we have an eight-foot fence around the joint, although I would not have thought it would be a particular hindrance to a determined water strider.

Irrespective of their mode of arrival, I got to thinking:  Why would these few water striders show up in my pond anyway? 

When a few young male seals move on to colonize a new location, it's because the dominant males where they had been living have shamed them out of the herd, beating them up or honking at them or slapping them with their flippers or whatever bully seals do to keep them away from the hot young babe seals (standards of female seal beauty being notoriously low).  They swim off to less threatening harbors where they laze about and stink and attract hoards of human admirers and EPA bureaucrats who tell you you have to move your yacht so these weenie geek seals can work on their tans.  

Adolescent lions who can't cut it with the pride similarly start their own families if they can find some homely chick lion to leave with them and get away from those irritable man lions with the fluffy necks and sharp claws.  

Similar behavior has been observed in post-adolescent human males, especially recent college and professional school graduates, who go on business trips and gather in the bar areas of steakhouses, some of which have pianos.  Don't ask me how I know this.

Drawing on this extensive knowledge of the characteristics of isolated male populations, I realized exactly what kind of water striders these were:

Losers.

I pictured them timidly approaching some comely lady striders, and promptly being aggressively skated off into the nether parts of the pond by studlier Gerridae.  Moping at the pond's margin in a batch of duckweed, they decided to strike out on their own and ended up in my fake pond, where they can rule the roost and offer to buy some cute stridette a mosquito-egg cosmopolitan.

Then I decided to do a spot of research, and I discovered this on Wikipedia:

"Similar to other bug groups (such as Pyrrhocoridae), the development of wings can vary significantly within the same population. The population consists mostly of specimens with undeveloped or poorly developed wings. However, a small number of individuals have fully developed wings which they use for colonizing new habitats and forming new populations."

Whoa.  I began to view our visitors in a new light.  Perhaps they weren't the strikeout kings of nearby waters, but were instead -- pioneers, brave explorers, the vanguard of the species, the lone hope for the colonization of new ecosystems.  They were the heroes of their kind.  And totally hitting the stridettes they'd lured there far from home.  "Forming new populations" indeed!  Hey, longlegs, hows about you and I skate on over to that lily pad and form a new population?  No, really, the Beemer's paid for.  No wonder the koi left them alone.  These bugs were major dudes.

Filled with a new admiration for these selfless pioneers and sexual adventurers, I returned to the pond with a new appreciation for their courage and (dare I say American?) spirit.

They were gone.

What -- my fake pond scum wasn't slimy enough for them?  Our subsurface microorganisms weren't tasty enough?  Was the surface tension of our fake pond not tense enough for their liking?  Not enough silicone in the stridettes' thoraxes to hold their interest?  No  piano? 

Huh.

Losers.