Here are some boffo blue beetles.

I don’t know anything about them. We found them last year just below a cloud forest in southern Veracruz, Mexico, on the side of a road that crossed a re-grown lava flow. There were hundreds of them, congregating for reasons possible to guess at, but known only to themselves, in an astounding density. Each is just over 1/2 inch long, and the color is true.

Anyone know who they are?

Here is an bonus unidentified beetle, big and green, seen at the same location.  It was almost 2 inches long.  The irregular dark shape that looks like backwards Texas in the highlight of its carapace is the reflection of my hand holding the camera.  That’s how reflective its shell was.  Click to enlarge, and look at all its little pores!

(All photos A.Shock)

Update: After looking around the internet, I believe the green beetle on the left is a Fig beetle, Cotinus sp.

I’m also working on the theory that the blue beetles may be cobalt milkweed beetles, Chrysochus cobaltinus, but further investigation is needed.

If these IDs are correct, both beetles are quite common, and also occur in the southern US.  The fig beetle is a favorite prey item of Mississippi kites, and no wonder — it looks like it might have some meat under its hood.

Scorpions are not a thing at our house.  We don’t see them frequently, and as previously posted, they’re more likely to be encountered outside as victims of the swimming pool than inside the house.  But last night E liberated one from the front bathroom, and temporarily incarcerated it in a pint glass.

In the morning, I wanted to watch it glow.  Here’s a picture of it viewed under a UV light, with the glass’s Duralex logo for scale.  It’s another “striper”: Vaejovis spinigera, a stripe-tailed scorpion, our most common species.

There are places in the Greater Phoenix famous for their scorpionicity.  So much so, that you can find maps of the frequency of scorpion stings on the internet, for the benefit of people new to the area who might want the info while searching for a house to buy. (We looked at a map of Superfund sites, but everyone has to prioritize their own worries).  Such a map is to the right: the darkest areas show the areas with the most stings reported, so it’s more likely to reflect factors such as human population density or likeliness of going to the hospital than actual scorpion presence.  Also, the map doesn’t indicate actual numbers or a unit of time, so there’s no knowing if the darkest red are so many stings a year, or so many stings a minute.  But, it provides a rough idea of who should invest in a hand-held black-light, and who’s most likely to subscribe to weekly pest control.

Oddly, the scorpion-rich areas are not all desert neighborhoods as you might expect: there’s a hot spot in Tempe with lawns and sprinklers and rose-bushes, and another in the central corridor of older Phoenix.  We’ve got friends who live there, and they see scorps way more often than we do, and have been stung.  As a kid in Phoenix, I remember being afraid of scorpions after hearing stories of people leaving wet washcloths on the bathroom floor, and finding several of them clinging to the underside of it when it was picked up next morning.  (Scorpions love getting under things and hanging there upside down.  Biologists call this “reverse geotaxis”: the habit of aligning yourself in reverse to the surface of the earth.)  Fortunately, in our area, for most people the sting of most scorpions is a painful inconvenience, and nothing more.  There are places in the world where there are much more potent scorps, and their sting is a medical matter and is even occasionally fatal.

After its photo-session, I released this striper in the back yard, under a Cenizo bush, where it clung to some foliage.  By the time the sun strikes the plant, it’ll be back in a hidey-hole until night falls again.

(Photo A.Shock; scorpion wrangling E.Shock)

This was weird, and sad for sure.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned the unfortunate similarity of our swimming pool to the LaBrea Tarpits.  Especially in the summer months when there are lots of inexperienced young animals out and about, we often have to carry out water rescues.  Since my studio is at home and looks onto the pool, this is often in the nick of time: desert cottontails, house sparrow fledglings, tiger whiptails, european honeybees, beetles, moths, sunspiders, and even the occasional “cowkiller” (AKA velvet ant) have all been successfully fished out to live another day.

Unfortunately, not everything that takes the inadvertent plunge is so lucky, and daytime critters often fare better than nocturnal ones, because I see them, and can help.  So, often, the first thing I do in the morning is check the pool for watery unfortunates: the closer to the surface, the better: the bottom, not so good.  Most days, there’s nothing.  But one morning, I was surprised to see this Striped-tailed scorpion (Vaejovis spinigerus) standing on the side of the pool about 18 inches below the surface (the infrequent drowned scorpion we encounter is generally on the bottom, belly up).  The poor thing must have fallen in and, unable to get out, found itself a place to stand ready for anything, with its tail fully armed,  and stuck there until it expired.  I fished it out, and took some pix for reference, and left the soft, waterlogged body for something to make a meal of.  I never saw what scored it — probably cactus wren or thrasher — but it didn’t take long; less than an hour later the little body was gone.

Here’s a close-up of it, eye-to-eye, a view we don’t often see of these close to the ground tiny arthropods.  If you’re wondering how this mildly venomous stingy thing differs from the more venomous stingy-thing, the Bark Scorpion (Centuroides spp.), the thicker, bulbous tail with longitudinal stripes on each section is the easiest characteristic to note.  The Bark scorpion has a much thinner, more gracile tail and pincers, and often holds its tail coiled to the side.

(Photos A. Shock.  Apologies; since upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress, the editor doesn’t seem to support the “click to enlarge” feature… Don’t know what’s up with that, but I’ll fix it as soon as I figure out how.)

After our latest monsoon event, the yard was freshly rinsed and all dampy.  Everything was making the most of the moist: the succulents were sucking up water, the trees were drinking and dripping, and the whole world was washed in that most deserty perfume of creosote.

Also, the Cactus Longhorn Beetle came out.  Here is its picture, on a “Bunnyears” prickly pear (Opuntia macrodasys).

From a horticultural point of view, the cactus longhorn beetle (Moneilema gigas) is a serious pest: its eggs hatch into larvae which bore into the tissue of cactus, especially Opuntia, and the adults are happy to munch on tender growing edges of cactus pads.  The boring larvae exude their waste as an unsightly tarry goo on the cactus outside their boreholes, and their tunneling can be fatal to susceptible individual plants; the damage gnawing adults do to pads can alter an even growth pattern in new leaves.  So, many desert gardening sites recommend the barbaric “Insta-stomp” approach to relating to this large beetle. (They’re flightless and are easily captured.)

E took pictures of this adult, possibly just eclosed after the monsoon rain, and we left it to trundle off, having admired its long “horns” with the white “elbows” on them.  Stomping just didn’t seem like a viable alternative — frankly, I don’t know if flip-flops are up to the task of exterminating such a robustly-crusted arthropod (note the mediaeval spines around its thorax). Anyway, there’s plenty of Bunny Ears to go around.

Bonus Monsoon cactus flowers

Most Sonoran desert plants bloom in spring after the winter rainy season, but there are many that take advantage of the Monsoon rains, and bloom in late summer and early fall.  This barrel cactus in our yard, a Ferocactus herrerae, is currently putting on an extravagant floral display.

(Both photos E. Shock)

Early Monday morning I nearly stepped on a raccoon kit.  We both came around a wall at the same time, from opposite directions.  Fortunately, no contact was made: the kits are well-grown now.  Also, the Hairhen is very watchful, so we were all very careful to not create an incident.  She and all four kits were headed back to the Fan Palm where the family holes up invisibly in the spiny fronds during the day, after a night marauding.

It was the second raccoon Close Encounter in as many days — the night before last, the Hairhen spied an ENORMOUS fat Palo Verde Beetle above a window in the studio.  She attempted to climb the aging nylon screen to fetch it down, but the UV-weakened fibers couldn’t support her weight, and she slid back down, shredding the screen on the way.  I was on the other side of the window at the time, just a foot away (the glass was closed) unable to do anything but watch strong-nailed raccoon hands wreak destruction.

I wish she’d managed to snatch the high fiber protein snack — these giant beetles are very destructive, laying their eggs in the roots of Palo Verde trees, where their grubs (which are way too large to be appealing in even the slightest way) eat their way to maturity, doing considerable damage.  (See excellent photos and read more about Palo Verde Borer Beetles here at the fine Myrmecos Blog.)

Above is a photo of our yard Hairhen and two kits in the Palo Verde/Aleppo Pine complex. (Photo A. Shock)

…how the photo E was taking turned out (from this post), here it is.  Now you know what the ventral surface of a NZ walking stick looks like.

Here is E, making a new friend in the Kauri Forest.  It may be big and green, but at least it doesn’t bite, like the Sand flies.

(Photo A. Shock)

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)