Tiny Mushroom

Someone asked me if I hunt and I answered "no", then stopped to think about it.  I do hunt but it is for interesting plants and insects.  Birders "hunt" birds and many mycologists hunt mushrooms, neither group intending to eat their prey.  Here is Mark Bower's description of a September "hunt."

"I had been walking in the woods for 2 1/2 hours looking for mushrooms to photograph. The woods were dry, and I had only taken one picture all morning. As I was leaving the woods, I noticed two small mushrooms growing together on a moss-covered log. I assumed that they were just the usual boring brown-capped Pluteus species which are very common, and not worth stopping for. On closer inspection, however, I noticed the scaly appearance of the cap, which would be very unusual for Pluteus.

Spore print

This prompted me to get on my knees and closely inspect it. To my surprise, the stem appeared to be streaked with purple. Multiple photographs were taken and a spore print revealed pinkish spores. With this information, and after reviewing my books, using keys, etc., I had no clue. I then put the info on the MOMS Facebook page. The genus Entoloma was suggested as a possibility.

The color of the spores is one of the distinguishing traits used to identify mushrooms. There are a lot of ways to make a spore print but the basic method is placing the underside of the cap on a surface and keeping it moist to encourage the spores to drop.  It helps to have a dark and light surface to contrast against the spores which may vary between white or pink to dark brown.  

I then posted it on Mushroom Observer, which is a website which is reviewed by mycologists, like Bugguide for Fun-guys and gals.  My boring little mushrooms were identified as Entoloma tjallingiorum, and even though I can’t pronounce the name, I’m very happy to have found it.  Half the fun is in the hunt while identifying them is like cleaning the game.  And stop asking "are they edible?"

Fuzz on the Kale

Braconid pupae from kale - REK

My editor (wife Barb) keeps me constantly entertained with her discoveries in the garden.  This time it was clusters of tiny fuzzy spots stuck on the underside of lots of our kale leaves.  The whole cluster measured only an eighth of an inch, a jumble of oblong fuzz balls.  We put the leaf fragment in a plastic box and left it on the dining table for a few days.*  

Braconid Wasps - REK

When we next checked it there were tiny 2mm black specks on the lid.  When I opened it, they immediately flew out.  The next day there were more and this time the box went in to the freezer for a few hours before opening it. These turned out to be tiny wasps.

I sent the pictures to Bugguide.net and got a rapid response from Ken Wolgemuth.  He identified them as braconid wasps (Braconidae) in the subfamily Microgastrinae.  He explained that these are "individual cocoons that were spun by the wasp larvae that were consuming the host (e.g. caterpillar) that was feeding on your kale. They then emerged from these cocoons as the adult wasps you are seeing now."

Braconid wasp - 2mm   REK

The Braconidae family of wasps numbers over 17,000 species and counting.  They are parasitic like their larger Ichneumonoidea wasp cousins, using the larvae of beetles, flies, butterflies and even aphids to feed their young.  Once they crawl out, they spin their cocoons for protection until they emerge as adult wasps.

We think of having a virus as a disease but for Braconid wasps polydnaviruses are their nannies.  The wasps carry polydnaviruses which they have coevolved with over thousands of years.  These are injected into a host caterpillar along with their eggs.  The viruses are harmless to the wasp but immediately start to disable the host's immune defenses against the foreign eggs.  The wasp eggs hatch, develop into larvae and feed inside the host until they emerge and form the pupae we found above.  The wasps soon emerge and begin the cycle again with their friendly virus still on board.**

Cabbage white - Bob Moul

These clusters were really good news.  We have lots of cabbage white butterflies (CWB),  Pieris rapae, constantly hovering around the kale.  They are the most common butterfly in North America, an unwelcome European import which arrived around 1860 and is now on every continent on the globe except Antarctica.  They are a hearty breed, the first to emerge in the spring, flying from March through November.  In addition, their reproductive success comes from the fact that they may have 7-8 hatches a year and the wide range of host plants they can raise their young on.

Cabbage white caterpillar - Wikipedia- CC

On close inspections any of you gardeners may find one of these innocent looking caterpillars.  CWB lay one egg on each available leaf of their host plant. They eat predominately plants in the mustard family, (Brassicaceae) including cabbage, broccoli, and our kale as well as dandelion, red clover, asters, and mints.  They seem especially addicted to our leafy garden plants, chewing holes in the kale leaves until they look like  sieves. 

Cabbage white pupa - Bob Moul

The pupae of the cabbage whites are green or brown with points on the ends, resembling a dried up leaf. The last batch of caterpillars hibernate over the winter as chrysalids and hatch into adult butterflies in the spring ready to start the cycle again.  We have learned to embrace these little fuzzy spots on the kale leaves, wishing them great reproductive success as they munch away on the innards of the invasive caterpillars.

We can almost forgive them for occasionally attacking caterpillars we raise at the Butterfly House.  For a graphic example of Brachnoidae larvae emerging from horn worms, check this Youtube video.

*  Note: I am blessed with a wife that will tolerate road kill snakes and a found blue heron skulls in her freezer.  Since she accepts them, what problem is a little plastic Gerber baby food box containing insects sitting beside the salad bowl?
**  Braconid wasps and Polydnavirus

Ghost of Bull Mills

Shed hunting is a popular non-violent winter sport in the Ozarks.  After the fall rut, a buck's need for a bragging rack is gone for the year.  Decreasing testosterone levels lead to reabsorption of the bone at the antler base and eventual shedding, leaving the antlers on the forest floor.  Soon squirrels and wood rats find them and use them for sharpening and shortening their constantly growing incisors and obtaining calcium...unless Barb finds them first.  Barb is the family shed hunter and she found this beautiful pair on January 2008.


This pair ended up on our stone fireplace, tied with leather thongs as the center of the display.  They remained there until the Spirit of the Great Buck returned 10 years later.  Last Tuesday I came into the creek house and found them on the floor with the leather thong neatly sliced in the middle.  Wood rats, aka pack rats, Neotoma floridana, are frequent guests and we hear the click of a trap several times a year so I wasn't concerned and tied them back on the wall.

Here is where it gets a little weird.  Three days later we were eating dinner at 8PM right beside the wall when they came clattering down to the floor.  We hadn't seen or heard any varmit activity and the thong appeared to be cleanly cut.  Spooky!  The next morning I rubbed Siracha jalapeno sauce on the thongs, tied the cut ends together and hung them back up.  I hoped the lip burn of capsicum would dissuade a rat.

The following night at the same time we were eating when they came crashing down again!  Again the cut thong looked clean and no scurrying mammals were in sight.  I went to bed with the image of the Spirit of the Great Buck attacking me at night with an antler.

Gnawed, scissor and knife cut.

The next morning in the cold light of day the fear passed.  Under magnification I compared the cut end of the thong with scissor and knife cuts.  The end was ragged compared to the others, obviously gnawed cleanly in half without the assistance of a ghost.  At least that is what we were telling ourselves.

I hung them again, this time with the thongs tied to copper wire which was looped over the nail.  We returned 18 hours later to find one antler back down on the floor with a chewed thong.  I tied it up again and after sitting on the porch working for an hour I returned to the house and found it cut back down again!  (You can't make stuff like this up!)

This time I put up a game camera on the post opposite the antlers, hoping to catch the culprit digitally.  The next morning the antlers were safe and there was a rat in a trap.  The rat had committed suicide in our rat trap rather than be filmed doing its dastardly deed again.  The antlers have now remained in place after three weeks.

Case closed (we think), but if we don't make the next meeting, who ya gonna call?  Ghost Busters!
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And for a pleasant bedtime read to take your mind off that scary tale I would highly recommend this entertaining description of the interaction of termites farming fungus, or is it the fungus that farms the termites?

Red-shouldered Bugs

Our Springfield neighbor Cyrus asked me to identify these bugs that were covering his privacy fence.  These are nymphs of the red-shouldered bug (RSB) or jadera bug, Jadera haematoloma.  The interesting question is what are they doing here in our neighborhood?

RSB distribution - soapberrybug.org

RSB are members of the soapberry bug subfamily, Serinethinae.  There are 65 hemiptera species in the family and interest in their their evolution and adaptation to human associated changes on the planet has earned them their own webpage, Soapberry Bugs of the World.   

The sudden spread of these new species is due to adaptive radiation, "the diversification of a group of organisms into forms filling different ecological niches."  Darwin's finches evolving different beaks to adapt to varied food sources are a prime example of adaptive radiation.  For the soapberry bug family, their success is based on their evolving ability to tolerate the cyanide defenses of the soapberry plant.
 
Bugguide says RSB occur year-round in CA, TX, and FL, with peak numbers in May in central Florida but they are also found in southern Missouri and Kansas. Their native host plants are Sapindaceae family plants and the western soapberry, Sapindus drummondii, is a native species found in a few southern Missouri counties. 

Adults mating - Rebekah D. Wallace

The red-shouldered bug moniker is obvious when you see the adult.  It averages 1/2 inch long.  Most pictures of adults show them mating, either because that is what they do most of the time or that is how to find them holding still for a photograph.  They can be a nuisance like box elder bugs when they invade your home and can also stain children's clothes red when they play in an infested yard.


I think the key to why Cyrus found his fences covered with RSB nymphs lies across the street in a neighbor's goldenrain tree.  This is Koelreuteria paniculata, a native of China and Korea imported to the USA in 1763 and now a popular landscape tree worldwide.  (Editor's confession: we had one once in our back yard.)  In some areas the RSB are observed feeding so often on goldenrain tree seeds, Koelreuteria spp. (Sapindaceae), that they are referred to as goldenrain tree bugs.

Mosquito Bite Update

After posting this blog with photographs of a mosquito biting my arm in the middle of the afternoon, I had it identified on Bugguide as the eastern tree hole mosquito (ETM), Ochlerotatus triseriatus.  This turns out to be an unusual insect.

Although it does breed in moist holes in trees, it really specializes in tires, tires stored or trashed on the ground.  If you have ever tried to get all the water out of a tire on a creek cleanup, you know that it is a definition of forever.  This has become an important urban mosquito because of tire dumps and scrap yards around cities where there can be 60,000 mosquitoes per acre in the summer.

Eastern tree hole mosquito - Ilona

Asian tiger mosquito

At first glance to my untrained eye ETM looks a lot like the Asian tiger mosquito.  The differences are more obvious to an entomologist but include the abdomen which is mainly dark scaled with only the margins of the last four segments with pale patches, and legs that lack the white spots of the Asian tiger mosquito.

"Few mosquito species feed rodents. These mammals are just too jittery and quick to sit still for that. But Ochlerotatus triseriatus, even though it bites a wide variety of mammals, including humans and sometimes birds, particularly likes chipmunks and squirrels. These woodland rodents are active during the day when Ochlerotatus triseriatus is seeking hosts in the woods."  Bugguide

We are unlikely to see these during the evening when mosquitoes are abundant.  They tend to occur during the day, as mine was, when their mammal hosts are active.  The ETM transmits La Crosse encephalitis virus, an uncommon but significant disease.  While 70% of females hatching from infected eggs inherit the virus, the good news is that it isn't that common in most of its range.  There are around 72 cases per year in the US and it usually affects children.  If it only would transmit the disease to the wood rats in our house!

Tracking Pollution

Ozarks Water Watch

David Casaletto published this article on the Ozarks Water Watch newsletter and let me share it on the blog. 
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Bacterial Source Tracking Needed to Determine Pollution Contributors
David Casaletto, Executive Director, Ozarks Water Watch.

I was attending a conference this summer and a presentation on Bacterial Source Tracking (BST) really got my attention.  In more laymen terms, a laboratory identifies the source of the E.coli and other bacteria that are polluting our streams and water bodies.  What really made me sit up and listen was, according to this study in Texas, 62% of the bacteria came from wildlife, while 10% was human and 13% cattle.  These were not the percentages I expected!


In Texas, there are 273 bacterially impaired water bodies.  With a nonpoint source grant, they set out to identify and assess the sources of these bacteria - E. coli, Enterococcus, fecal coliforms - in these water bodies to properly determine the risk to water recreation.  Then they would develop effective watershed restoration strategies, such as watershed protection plans (WPPs) and total maximum daily loads (TMDLs).

Bacterial sources are extensive and include all birds, wildlife, livestock, pets and humans.  Source surveys, computer models and bacterial source tracking (BST) are the primary methods for identifying predominant bacterial sources in impaired waters.  BST offers distinct advantages over computer modeling and source surveys.

Source surveys, which estimate the numbers and distributions of animals and humans in a watershed, are not capable of assessing most wildlife species or how bacteria from sources are transported to the impaired waters.  Computer modeling addresses the issues with transport; however, because wildlife populations are rarely known, models are unable to adequately assess contributions from wildlife.  BST is able to evaluate wildlife, along with other major sources, and the impacts of transport because BST uses instream water samples for its assessment.

The premise behind BST is that DNA fingerprinting and other molecular targets can identify bacterial strains specific to each animal species since each species has different diets and digestive system conditions that select for distinct strains of bacteria.  This distinction allows the original source of the fecal contamination to be identified.  But BST methods require the development of a DNA fingerprint library.


The Texas BST Library currently contains more than 1,500 E. coli isolates obtained from more than 1,300 different domestic sewage, wildlife, livestock and pet fecal samples.  These isolates, which represent more than 50 animal subclasses, were selected after screening several thousand isolates from more than a dozen different studies throughout Texas.

BST accuracy is best when identifying broad source categories and decreases as the sources are more specifically identified.  A 7-way (non-avian wildlife, avian wildlife, pets, cattle, other non-avian livestock, avian livestock, human) categorization is shown in chart to the right.



The technologies used for BST are continuously evolving and improving. BST has been tremendously helpful in identifying significant bacterial sources throughout Texas.  The state BST laboratories can provide guidance and assistance with performing BST for watersheds. I think it is time for other states to jump on the BST bandwagon.  Too many times, we "think" we know the source of the pollution is human or CAFO, when it may be wildlife.  More information on BST can be found at: texasbst.tamu.edu.
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Ozarks Water Watch is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining and improving the water quality of the upper White River watershed.
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Wee Tiny Ladybug

 
I picked a little fleck off my pant leg and it crawled up onto my thumb for a picture.  It looked like a lady beetle but it seemed too small.  Through the wonders of INaturalist, it came up as the number one choice, a twenty-spotted lady beetle (TLB) Psyllobora vigintimaculata.  Another common name is "wee tiny ladybug."  At 2-3mm long, I thought they would rarely be "spotted" (sorry!) but I found 9 pages of their photographs on Bugguide.

 
Psyllobora sp. are called fungus-eating lady beetles.  P. vigintimaculata (Latin for twenty spotted) feeds on powdery mildew that occurs on leaves from ground level to tree tops. They scrape up fungal spores with mandibles armed with rake-like rows of small teeth.

"Fungi, we have lift-off!"  Oliver Burris CC

TLB are found in all states including Alaska and the the first specimen to be described was in Missouri!  They come in a variety of colors with a white to tan background.  The color can be variable, based partially on the region they are found in, but they all have in common placement of their spots. Like all "ladybugs" they are beetles in the family Coccinellidae.  The majority of this family feed on plant eating insects that are unpopular with gardeners such as aphids and scale insects.  Although we think of them crawling around they are capable of flight after lifting their heavy wing covers. Ten years ago identifying species like this required an extensive knowledge of entomology and would be left to the species specialists or an extensive search of old reference books.  Now sites with photo recognition such as INaturalist.org allow quick comparisons and expert entomologists share their time identifying photographs on Bugguide.  What a great time to become a nature nerd!