Orange Pore Fungus—a storybook mushroom

April 27, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

As my husband and I were hiking on Sunday, we came across a beautiful little fungus along the trail. Pebbly orange caps with a honeycomb underside. I was enchanted—they were storybook mushrooms that would have nestled neatly into any fairy tale.

But when my husband posted the sighting to NatureWatch NZ, the dirty truth came out.

These storybook fungi are Favolaschia calocera, the orange pore fungus, an invasive weed, and our sighting was the first in Hinewai Reserve.

The orange pore fungus is a curious organism. It appears to be native to Madagascar, though there is some speculation that it might also be native in parts of Asia.

It was first recorded in New Zealand in 1969, and has since spread throughout the North Island and much of the South Island. It has also recently been found in Australia, Thailand, China, Kenya, Reunion Island, and Norfolk Island. Its success probably shouldn’t be surprising—it’s a generalist, invading just about any dead wood available, unlike many other species that have specific tastes. It is also able to produce spores without mating, so it’s very quick to reproduce. It is so successful in New Zealand that mycologists are concerned that it could be displacing native fungi.

But it hasn’t stopped in New Zealand. In 1999, the orange pore fungus was first noted in Italy near the busy port of Genoa. Genetic studies of the Italian fungus indicate that it probably came from New Zealand on imported timber.

This storybook fungus is straight out of a fairy tale, all right—but the tale was written by the brothers Grimm.

The Aphipocalypse

April 9, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It has been years since I’ve seen an aphid infestation quite this bad, and rarely at this time of year.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I usually have aphids in early spring, and then the predators and parasitoids knock them back to almost nothing through the summer.

But somehow, the predators and I all missed the aphids on the pumpkins. I expect the warm dry summer was perfect for their growth. I rarely take note of the pumpkins from December to April—they need little weeding, and are generally pest free.

So when I went to harvest, it was a bit of a surprise to find millions of aphids on the underside of nearly every leaf in a back corner of the pumpkin patch.

All summer, the aphids have been cloning themselves, producing dozens of replicas every week—an army of little green girls. Only girls. It wouldn’t have taken them long to build up the population level out there right now. Some of the generations of aphids had wings (you can see some on the left side of the leaf in the photo), and dispersed to other plants, but most stayed put, slowly spreading across one leaf after another.

But, as big as the population is today, they will all die over winter. About this time of year, the females will start producing a few males—also genetically identical to themselves, with the exception of a missing sex chromosome. Only in the fall will females mate and produce eggs. The eggs will overwinter, hatching out in spring (all female) to start the cycle over again.

I think I won’t wait for these girls to lay eggs. I’m afraid that, now that the pumpkins are gone, the infested vines will be dunked in a bucket of soapy water and buried deep in the compost pile. No sense in letting them get a head start on next spring!

Dobsonflies

April 4, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Photo: Geoff Gallice

One of the insects I wish we had in our pond is dobsonflies. When I first learned the insect orders, the dobsonflies were lumped with the lacewings. Now they’ve got their very own order–Megaloptera. So, of course, since they have their own order, they need their own poem!

Megaloptera, helgrammite!
Known as toebiters.
When larvae bite

Adults are gentler,
Though they still look fierce
Their scimitar jaws
Are too weak to pierce.

Massive jaws
And flashing wing
Woo the ladies
But don’t catch a thing.

Puddles of Crickets

April 1, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

A female small field cricket–the long ovipositor (egg laying tube) at the rear tells you she’s a girl.

It was like walking through puddles, my daughter said.

There had been no rain.

But the grass was so alive with crickets, they rippled away from every step like splashes of water.

By the time I got there, she had splashed all the crickets away, but I could still hear them. Their little bell-like songs have been a constant background noise all summer, and are particularly loud now, in autumn, when most are adults.

It’s only the males who sing, and they do it by rubbing their short, leathery wings together. The song is fiendishly difficult to locate—it sounds like it’s coming from a dozen places at once, and finding a calling male is all but impossible for a predator. The other crickets are able to do it, though. Males’ calls stake out their territories and attract females.

When I ran the Bugmobile, I used to take crickets to schools, and I always wanted to have a couple of males so the kids could hear them singing. Catching males was a challenge. Not only are they difficult to locate by sound, but if you do stumble across one, it will drop immediately to the ground and scurry underneath the leaf litter like a cockroach. Females, on the other hand, take great bounding leaps to get away, making them easy to catch in a sweep net. I could collect a dozen females in one sweep of the net, but it might take me half an hour to search out as many males.

It was the same story when I went to photograph them for today’s blog post. Males singing all around me, and not one available for the camera. The girls were more obliging. It wasn’t quite like walking in puddles, but there were an awful lot of them hopping around in the grass.

Fungal Forest

March 29, 2016March 30, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Entoloma hoschstetteri–the only fungus that appears on a nation’s currency.

Over the weekend, we went on a lovely hike from Okarito, through the bush up the hill behind the town, over to the next lagoon, and back via the beach.

The beach part was, naturally, lovely, with huge waves, trickling waterfalls down the cliffs, and a lazy seal who watched us pass.

Hygrocybe spp.--known as waxcaps--the Crayola of the fungi

Hygrocybe sp.–known as waxcaps–the Crayola of the fungi

But the real beauty lay on the forest floor. The track was like a Disney storybook forest, with colourful mushrooms everywhere. It just needed a few gnomes or fairies to be complete.

This unknown mushroom had a lovely lace petticoat.

Lycoperdon spp--a puffball. The genus name means "wolf fart"

Lycoperdon sp.–a puffball. The genus name means “wolf fart”

Another member of the genus Hygrocybe

Otira Valley

March 27, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We spent the past three days on the West Coast. On the way over the mountains, we stopped for a hike up the Otira Valley.

The track goes through stunning, diverse alpine vegetation, much of which was in seed at this time of year—lots of weird and wonderful berries to be seen! Though we were lucky to avoid being rained on ourselves, there had been recent rain, so the track was wet, and every little rivulet was running. The Otira River roared below us.

The day was moody, and low clouds shrouded the mountain tops around us.

I love the alpine environment. One of the most wonderful things about it is that its beauty lies both in the minute plant life clinging to the rocks, and in the grand vistas—one must view the landscape at both scales to fully appreciate it. We spent our time divided between marvelling over some tiny plant, and admiring the peaks and waterfalls around us.

Ant Swarm

March 18, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I walked out the brick path to my office after lunch today, my mind focused on how I was going to write my main character out of the mess I’d written her into in the morning.

Then something in my peripheral vision made me leap over a few bricks. I turned to inspect what I’d thought I’d seen.

Sure enough, there were three growing ant swarms on the path. And as I expected, when I looked more closely at them, I found winged ants among them.

Among the eusocial ants, only the reproductive individuals have wings. Throughout most of the year, the colony produces wingless worker ants—females who don’t ever reproduce, but instead care for their younger sisters, and feed and defend the colony. In late summer, in response to some environmental signal (often rain), all the colonies in an area simultaneously produce winged ants—both males and females.

Entomology textbooks dryly say the winged ants fly off in search of mates, but from my perspective, having watched winged ants emerge for over 45 years now, the colony throws a huge party for the winged ants before they go.

On “Emergence Day”, an ant nest swarms with activity—not just inside, where it’s always busy—but also out on the surface. Winged and wingless ants pour out of the nest and mingle in the sunshine, sometimes for hours before the winged ants finally take flight. I like to think they’re having a little bachelor/bachelorette party for the potential brides and grooms.

When the winged ants take off, the wingless ones retreat to the nest. Their brothers and sisters will never return. If they are lucky, they’ll find a mate. The males, once they’ve mated, won’t live long. Their job is done, and they are easy prey for birds, spiders, and other predators.

The mated females, if they escape predators themselves, will fly to a favourable nest spot, break off their own wings (they’re not needed anymore), and begin to dig. The small nest each excavates will be home to her first offspring, who will enlarge the nest and care for the next batch of eggs the new queen lays.

A queen ant will mate only once. From this mating, she will parcel out sperm for her entire life (up to 30 years for some species!) to fertilize the eggs she lays.

So the ant swarms you see on the sidewalk are serious business. Step carefully, please!

Psocopterans

March 13, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I dedicated my book, A Glint of Exoskeleton to the Psocopterans—the booklice. Cute little creatures. They like books–they eat the moulds that grow on them–but they’re not luddites; there’s a whole crew of them that lives in my keyboard. Here is a silly little verse about them.

Psocoptera

Psocopterans are

Great readers of sorts

But don’t enjoy reading

Physics or sports.

They much prefer Hemmingway,

Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

“The classics,” they say,

“Are just so much tastier!”

German Wasps

March 12, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Canning fruit or tomatoes always brings them around—the German wasps can’t resist the sweet/tart smell of chutney, tomato sauce, or apples. And of course, their numbers are highest in late summer/early autumn when we’re doing lots of canning.

Today, they flitted around the kitchen most of the afternoon, licking up applesauce from the benchtops, and generally being a nuisance.

German wasps are opportunistic feeders—they’ll eat most anything, from fruit, to dead animals, to live insects. In the house, they not only go for whatever’s cooking on the stove, but they catch houseflies in mid-air, chomping them messily on the windowsills and leaving cast off fly legs and wings all over the place.

Though they are a nuisance indoors, and can prove deadly to people like me, with allergies to their stings, they do their worst damage in our native forests where they rampage like a pack of hungry teenage boys.

As flexible scavengers whose numbers can grow to an estimated 10,000 wasps per hectare in beech forest, their impact can be devastating. They compete for food with native birds, lizards, and bats. They also eat native insects and even baby birds.

Almost every year, we have a wasp nest somewhere on the property. I haven’t found this year’s yet, though by the number of wasps enjoying my applesauce today, I know there’s a nest somewhere nearby. When I find it, I’ll destroy it—from an environmental perspective, and from a personal safety perspective it needs to be done.

But I admit I will do so with a twinge of guilt. Troublesome as they are, I have great respect for wasps. These beautiful animals are the ultimate efficient eating machine. They are no-nonsense foragers who go out and get the job done so well that they’ve been able to invade diverse habitats throughout the world. I may not like the consequences of that, but I can admire an animal flexible enough to thrive almost anywhere.

The Midges!

March 9, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

A male midge, with feathery antennae.

It was like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film. The sliding glass doors of my office were swarming with midges, commonly called lakeflies here (because they lay their eggs in nearby Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere, and rise off the lake in huge swarms in summer). By their density (at least 1 per square centimetre), and the size of the doors, I estimated that there were at least 90,000 on the doors alone, not counting the ones swarming around looking for landing space.

I had been working late in the office, with the lights on, and they were attracted to the light. I turned off the light, took a deep breath (breathing in midges is horrible), and bolted out the door, slamming it closed behind me.

A female midge, with thread-like antennae.

There were about a hundred on my ceiling in the morning. I reckon that was pretty good, given how many were knocking on the door.

I actually don’t mind the midges much. They don’t bite, and their appearances are brief, if dramatic.

But the question is, what are they all doing in those great big swarms? Well, the swarms are great big mating displays called leks. Male midges (they are the ones with feathery antennae), fly around in large swarms trying to attract the eye of a female. The females drop by the lek, pick out their favourite male, and mate with him. The resulting eggs are laid in slow-moving bodies of water (or sometimes on wet car parks, where I imagine they don’t live long).

The larvae of our particular midges are called bloodworms. They are one of the few insects that have haemoglobin in their blood. That’s what gives our blood its red colour, and it does the same to the midge larvae. The haemoglobin allows the midge larvae to live in low-oxygen, stagnant water, because it can capture and store oxygen, just as it does in our blood.

Midge larvae are a critical part of the food chain in many terrestrial aquatic ecosystems, feeding fish and other insects. They also must be important food on land, too. The spiders and songbirds certainly enjoy them when they swarm.

Still, in spite of their harmlessness and their ecological importance, I think Hitchcock could have had made a great movie of them.

Robinne Weiss

Fantasy / Sci-fi / Non-fiction

natural history