Florida flyers

©2022 Karen Richards

It’s exciting to go to a new location and see so many different kinds of plants, birds and insects. I was in Florida last week and even in just the hour or two I had to scour the vegetation, I found some really cool stuff. Above is a tortoise beetle, Chelymorpha cribraria. In the U.S., it lives only in south Florida. BugGuide says it showed up after Hurricane Andrew in 1993. How cool is that?

©2022 Karen Richards

Even though it’s December, there were things blooming, and I saw a monarch butterfly on this crown flower tree (the blooms are light purple, very pretty). Looking closer, I also found monarch caterpillars, which I’d never seen in person. Here are two at different stages of development, munching away on the leaves.

©2022 Karen Richards

These delicate white butterflies were all over the ground cover. They’re White Peacocks. One source I found said they’re larger and whiter in the winter months and smaller and darker in the wetter, summer months.

©2022 Karen Richards

This last butterfly is another one that’s common across the southern U.S. It’s a Gulf Fritillary, also known as a Passion Butterfly because it lays eggs on passion flowers. It was tough to get close to one and they rarely landed, so this picture isn’t as close-up and personal as I’d like it to be.

Cheers!

We are here, we are here…

©2022 Karen Richards

Remember the book Horton Hears a Who? This tiny speck reminds me of it. At first I saw a small collection of scraps on a medallion. Then it started to move. Was it alive? Was somebody home? 

©2022 Karen Richards

Yes. From the side, above, you can see the legs and some other feathery strangeness going on above them. This is the larval stage of a lacewing, some of which pile bits of forest floor on top of themselves as camouflage. The Horton book ends with the other animals recognizing there is life on the dust speck, and that a person’s a person, no matter how small. Similarly, this insect’s an insect, no matter how disguised. Not that it needs to hide to survive, as you’ll see in the next picture…

©2022 Karen Richards

Lacewing larvae have oversized mandibles, which they use to catch, pierce and drink up the nutrients from their prey. Aphids are a common food, but they can also go after caterpillars or beetle larvae. The “feathery strangeness” I referred to earlier helps them to attach the collection of debris to themselves.  

I’ve now seen the eggs, larvae and adult lacewings. I’d really like to see a pupa. Some lacewings make solid white silky spheres, and some are less substantial, and look woven. 

Cheers!