I saw this gorgeous, yellow-marked stonefly last week. I’ve seen a few other stoneflies the past couple years, but never one this big with this coloring. I think it’s a Golden Stonefly, Calineuria californica. It got me thinking about insects that I see all the time and insects that I’ve only ever seen once.
This western white-ribboned carpet moth stayed on the flower just long enough for me to get a few so-so images. There have been lots of small day-flying moths in the woods recently. But while they seem common, it wasn’t until I finally grabbed two images of them that I realized there are at least two different, similarly sized moths flying about. See the enchoria from the last post. Believe it or not, when they’re flying, those two moths look like twins.
My point is: You may think you see lots of one kind of fly or bee buzzing around a certain flower. But if you look closer, you will nearly always find that there are many other, sometimes quite similar looking, insects there.
This red-winged (I think) Plastandrena subgenus bee is an example of why it pays to take a moment to look carefully. There have been many darker andrena mining bees out and about lately. But I’d not seen one like this before, and I would have missed it if I’d not stopped among these daisies for a few minutes.
Yesterday, I saw hundreds of what looked like moths flying in and around some trees and bushes. I don’t have any pictures, because they rarely stopped moving, but I saw enough to identify them as caddisflies. That “hatch,” as fly fishers say, made those insects super common in that place at that moment. They also illustrate this “ism” I’ve heard from entomologists:
The common is rare; the rare is common
–Common entomologist saying, I’ve not yet found the first instance.
It took me a minute to get my head around the saying, but I now see that it’s true. When I look at a flowering plant, alive with insect activity, there is often one species that’s there in great numbers. For example, lately on Oregon grape I’ve seen dozens of bumblebees gearing up to start new colonies. So the Bombus vosnesenskii above was a common species visiting the plant, but there weren’t large numbers of other kinds of insects on the plant. Thus: The (number of) common (species) is (small, or) rare.
I’ve also seen a bunch of insects on Oregon grape only once, including the large midge, above. These flies with forward-facing front legs are usually tiny, but this one was maybe an inch long. I also spotted a bright red bee or fly (too fast for a photo), a red-legged wasp, a beetle with jagged-edged antennae, the first blue damselfly of the season (only one), and a few other creatures that came through individually. Thus: The (number of) rare (species you see only one time) is common.
Another way to say it might be: At any given location and time, there is often a great number of one species of insect, and also a great number of unique species represented by just one individual.
I hope that made at least a little sense.
Cheers!
Ticklehead 