A Change in Plans

©2018 Karen Richards

©2018 Karen Richards

Last week I went back to a high-desert camp I’d been to about a year ago. I was excited to look for a couple of interesting beetles I’d found there last summer, and get better pictures of them if possible. 

As it turned out, I didn’t see either insect this year. So the photos above remain the best images I have of a tiger beetle and a ten-lined June beetle. 

However, because of the “failure,” the trip yielded a few thoughts.

I recently visited Christopher Marshall, the curator of Oregon State University’s arthropod collection. He said,

“Surveys and people looking for new material have a way of self- reinforcing their own biases so once you know a certain taxon lives somewhere and you can see that in a collection or a publication, you’re likely to go there again to see it or collect more of it.”

He said OSU recently helped the University of Michigan with a study on a rare butterfly. Marshall said people who came from outside Michigan found the butterfly in areas the locals hadn’t found it—because the locals always went to places they’d seen it before.  

So here I was, going back to a place and expecting to see the same species I’d found there before. Silly human. The good thing was, by not seeing those two beetles, I focused on some other insects that were new to me. One was a spotted pine sawyer beetle.

©2019 Karen Richards

This guy (pretty sure it’s a guy because the female’s antennae are shorter), isn’t destructive: They lay eggs only in dead or dying pines. It’s an impressive insect, about 1.5 inches long in the body with antennae that more than match it. Up close, the white spots sparkle with colorful iridescence. 

©2019 Karen Richards

I also got some decent shots of this creature. It flew like a dragonfly, and I couldn’t figure out what it was at the time. Turns out, it’s a robber fly. They are fierce predators and eat everything from grasshoppers to stinging wasps. The fuzz around the face is called a ‘mystax,’ from the Greek word for moustache, and it may help protect them from thrashing prey.

So the trip was productive, insect-wise, but not in ways I’d anticipated. I guess that’s the definition of being in the moment: Your goals need to be firm enough that you’re pointed in a specific direction, but not so rigid that you miss out on the unexpected, or can’t tolerate changes in circumstance.

Action: ADAPT. When things don’t go as planned, find ways to remain true to your goal. Note: “adapt” also applies to biodiversity. Insects will relocate and change their seasonal schedules to parallel changes made by the weather, the timing of blooming plants, and / or their prey.

You Have to Choose

©2019 Karen Richards

After failing to find any pictures on Google images that look like a beetle I found the other day (pictured), I checked out a bunch of books from the library. One, Insects of the Pacific Northwest, I thought would be helpful not just for this species, but to learn about many of the insects I’ve seen so far. 

I flipped through it with anticipation. There are more than 12 pages of longhorn beetles, several of which I’ve seen and many that I’d love to see. But none of them look like this beetle, which I’m pretty darn sure is a longhorn beetle. 

I re-read the introduction. Turns out, it’s not a guide to all the insects in the Pacific Northwest. The authors chose 452 species of the more than 28,000 species in the region. Duh. For all my wonder at the diversity of insects, I should have known that!

The guidebook incident brings up some things I never thought about. When someone writes a guide to the natural world, they curate what to include. Maybe it’s obvious, but I guess I’d thought that, like a dictionary, you’d write something about everything that was known. The problem is, especially with insects, but I’m sure it’s also true for birds or flowers, there are so many thousands of varieties that you can’t provide pictures or words about all of them. You have to choose. 

And that’s powerful and intriguing. Say you get to write a guidebook for people about your city. Of course, you’d pick the experiences and restaurants that you enjoy and recommend those things for your readers. Your guidebook would be completely different from your neighbor’s or your co-worker’s. 

It’s the same with a guide to plants or animals. The authors have the privilege and responsibility to choose how to narrow the enormous list of possible entries. Somehow I “get” that idea for a guide to a place. But it never occurred to me that a guide to living things would have a bias, a slant toward the preferences of the author(s).

In the case of Insects of the Pacific Northwest, the author discloses in the introduction that he chose insects that people most often asked to be identified, in his experience at an Agricultural Commission office. He further limited the list to larger, more common and more easily identified creatures. He chose to exclude mosquitoes, mayflies and ants. He adds seven pages of insect galls, which are the growths on plants that are a result of insect larvae deposits. An odd choice, but one he saw was missing from other guidebooks and that, I’m sure, is a personal interest. 

Action: CHALLENGE yourself to find an insect that’s not in a guidebook. You’ll have to have an insect identification book first. They’re easy to find in libraries or used book stores. Then, take pictures and keep notes about creatures and look them up. See how many you can find that aren’t in the book. 

Treasure Hunting

©2019 Karen Richards

I’m sure many people wouldn’t feel this way, but I’m equally enthralled with being out in a field staring at flowers and photographing crazy-looking bugs as I am coming home, downloading my photos, and trying to figure out what those creatures could be.

I found this insect on potentilla about a week ago. I assumed it was some kind of fly, because it looks like it has one set of wings. I started a Google image search by typing “Black yellow fly,” and “Fly that looks like wasp.” The search yielded some interesting creatures, but none quite like this one. I checked the fly sections of a couple of guidebooks, the beetle sections just to be sure, and the wasp sections, getting desperate. No luck. Then somehow, I think it was deep in the online image pages, I came across a “clearwing moth.” It wasn’t quite this one, but it was closer than anything else I’d seen.

Could it be a moth?? 

It could. Of course, now that I look at its antennae, it makes a bit more sense. Also the feathery flourish on its tail. I’ve since learned that one way to tell a moth from a butterfly is that their wings are spread out when they’re at rest; butterflies fold theirs up, generally speaking. The other cool difference is that butterflies have “knobs” on the end of their antennae. There’s a scientific term for them, I’m sure. 

Action: QUESTION. See something you don’t understand? Ask. As I’ve been proving lately, there are no dumb questions. I’ve also found that learning something usually leads to more questions, and that means more potential treasures to unearth.