… I missed at first, when outside friday morning shooting passionflowers.

It really irked me to not have my own photo of a Gulf Fritillary to post yesterday, so once the sun was higher, I went out to fetch one, if possible (a photo, that is, not a flutterby). I ended up encountering not only the butterfly, but three other notable things. Here they are, in the order they appeared (be sure to click to enlarge, except the kestrel, which is too blurry to bother, and actually will just get smaller anyway; all photos A.Shock):

A. The Gulf Fritillary, which started it all. The insect is sort of hidden in the negative space between stems and leaves (almost a “Spot the Bird“).  This was the best photo I was able to nab — the name flitirraries would suit them even better, because they never seem to rest. They are Passiflora specialists, and are clearly thrilled that we have four vines in the yard. (Well, six vines actually — this morning I found two small seedlings, thriving about 4 feet away from where their parent plant refused to take.) >>

B. The Echinopsis in bloom (or “Easter Lily cactus”). This one is a cultivar, I don’t know which, since these shade-growing cactus have been living in this yard longer than we have. In my experience, it’s unusual to find its crepuscular flowers still open at noon. <<

C. The Fearsome Predator. >> The neighborhood male American Kestrel, about the size of a Mourning dove, checking out the Dee-licious Finch Bar (the birdfeeders) for lunch. I looked up when I heard a house sparrow give a rough alarm call; the little falcon was just 20 feet away from me, perched on a low wire with a good view of the menu. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a shot of him until he’d swooped up to the top of the corner phone pole because my trigger finger was distracted by D:

D. The Ants that were biting me painfully on the feet. Due to hastily brushing them off and sweeping them out from under my sandal straps in a undignified quick-time version of the Myrmex Dance I did not immortalize their image, although they were just doing their job, Protecting The Nest, which I’d accidentally trodden upon trying to photograph the Echinopsis. Perhaps the Gilded Flicker family who lives here (and who, I think surprisingly late, just fledged a young’un) will be making a visit to the Dee-licious Ant Bar.

Do you suppose the Ant Bar has a Formica countertop?

Bonus etymology: Formica, etc.

According to the archives of “Word of the Day” — …Greek murmex [is] “an ant,” which also gives us myrmecology “the study of ants” and myrmecophagous “ant-eating.” In Latin the related word for ant was “formica,” from which we have the former Word of the Day “formication,” the sensation of ants crawling under the skin. The proprietary name “Formica” applies to a plastic laminate ultimately derived from formic acid (which comes from ants), but it is also a pun—it was originally developed as an electrical insulator that could be substituted “for mica.”

For the detail-oriented, let me add that Latin formīca is the ancestor of the French and Spanish words for ant, fourmi and hormiga, respectively. The Latin and Greek words formīca and myrmex (μύρμηξ) at first glance may not seem similar to each other, but as neatly summarized by Wikipedia, both are generally accepted to be derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *morwi- along with a pile of words for ant in other languages: Latin formīca, Iranian /moirbant, Avar maoiri, Sanskrit वम्र (vamra), Greek μύρμηξ (murmēks)/μυρμήγκι (mirmigi), Old Norse maurr, Crimean Gothic miera, Armenian մրջիւն (mrǰiwn), Polish mrówka, Albanian morr, Persian /murče, Old Church Slavonic mravie, Russian муравей (muravej), Tocharian /warme, Kurdish Mérú, Breton merien.

Earlier in the week we had a storm — technically outside the officially designated monsoon season — and it was a colorful one.  Our microcosm of Phoenix received about a half inch of technicolor rain in a very short time, without the wind and hail that the same towering clouds dropped on neighbors less than three miles to the east.  The storm brought amazing sunset skies, migrants, optimistic amphibians, and flowers to our yard.  (All photos E.Shock.)

Shortly after these clouds moved over the metro area, the dark skies split, pumping rain and lightning into the creosote-scented night air.

The next morning, we found an excellent red dragonfly drying its wings on barbed wire, “our” spadefoot wound up in the pool again along with the rest of the storm debris, awaiting rescue, and the Herrerrae barrel cactus’s crown of fragrant yellow and red blooms were saturated with color.  The architecturally precise buds tautly await their turn in the vortex of the flower crown — the easier-going little lemony pine-apples slouching around the edge are last year’s fruits, waiting to split open and disgorge their seeds, or be plucked and carried off by an herbivore, and left elsewhere to start a new barrel.

With luck, cactus and wildflower seeds all over the desert will be soaking up the fall moisture, preparing themselves for next spring’s blooming.

(Don’t forget to click to enlarge)

…but it’s not from the bottom of the sea.  If you had a hard time with the centipede or the solpugid, you may wish to look away.  Or not…

This is one of my favorite desert arthropods ever, in kind of an oscillating horrified/fascinated can’t look away from photos of the train wreck kind of way.

It’s a Tailless Whip Scorpion, or an Amblypygid.  Let me just say at the outset that it is completely harmless to humans, and has neither stinger nor venom nor powerful jaws like its “cousins” scorpions, spiders, or solpugids.  Like them, it’s an arachnid, but it has its own Order, Amblypygi.  It’s got narrow pincer-like pedipalps to capture and hold its small pray items which it detects with the long sensory appendages. The other six legs (as an arachnid, it’s got 8 altogether) are used for scuttling about.

>>A live “Rock lobster” on our front cinderblock wall; note that I do not have my hand nearby for scale. Also note that the entire creature is not in the photo: at least another two-inches of “feeler-leg” is out of frame in the upper right.  (Photo E. Shock)

But, it’s really big.  A few years back, I found one in the garage, all folded up with its legs held close to its flat, broad, segmented body.  Hoping to liberate it back to whence it came (the wash in our yard), I approached it with a glass jar and a postcard.  It saw me and moved a few feet away, very quickly and sideways like a crab.  Then it extended its long front pair of legs and suddenly my Bonne Maman jam jar seemed totally inadequate.  I had to get a plastic Trader Joe’s ginger cookie container and a 9×12″ manila envelope to cap it off with, so as not to crush the lil dude’s end leg segments.  Capturing the fast-moving skitterer involved two of us, a fair amount of herding and chasing, and some undignified screeching as feelers encountered fingers.  An odd sensory relic of this capture is that, having just bought new tires for the Honda, the whole garage smelled strongly of new rubber: the whipscorpion’s shiny black exoskeleton looked like a plausible rubbery source of this odor, and every time I’ve seen one since, my mind’s nose smells new tires.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen the “Rock Lobster” — we’re due for a sighting, and this is the perfect time of year to find them abroad on warm Monsoon nights.

Here’s a pleasant fact about tailless whip scorpions, courtesy Wikipedia:

Amblypygids, particularly the species Phrynus marginemaculatus and Damon diadema, are thought to be one of the few species of arachnids that show signs of social behavior. Research conducted at Cornell University by entomologists suggests that mother amblypygids communicate with their young by caressing the offspring with her anteniform front legs. Further, in an experiment where two or more siblings were placed in an unfamiliar environment, such as a cage, they would seek each other out and gather back in a group.

Is that not adorable?

A centipede, a solifuge, now a dinosaur: all have recently made an appearance on our back porch.

Just now, I was sitting in the den with the sliding door open, when suddenly a winged dinosaur landed on the bricks right outside and ran up to the screen-door, its tail held high behind it like a velociraptor.

Greater roadrunner (Photo A.Shock)>>

Although my camera was inches from my feet, I couldn’t move without spooking the creature, so I sat still and watched it forage for a few minutes, searching around the furniture, planters, and nooks just outside the door for goodies. Goodies like centipedes and solifuges, I suppose, and geckos, all of whom might be hiding in their concealed day roosts.

When the bird moved away, I grabbed the camera and followed, only able to get a blurry shot as it looked down at me from the palo verde tree by the wash. Greater roadrunners (Geococcyx californianus) are fairly common in the Phoenix area, but we see them in our yard only occasionally — not every week or even every month. It’s always a surprise and a thrill when one swings by.

“I assure you,” the solpugid says, “it’s good you are bigger than me.  Otherwise… well, I couldn’t account for my actions.”

(Photos A.Shock)

Here’s the whole creature, my hand for scale:

Last big monsoon event brought rain and a spadefoot to our Phoenix area yard. Tuesday night’s big monsoon event brought even more rain and a centipede.

This guy is a Scolopendra polymorphus, a Sonoran centipede, sometimes called a tiger centipede. This one is about 4 inches long (they can grow up to about 7 inches), and has crawled up the outside of our back door screen, possibly in search of prey, or maybe to escape flooding in the nearby soil, where it very likely dens up.

It’s a beautiful animal, although I have to admit I’m not partial to centi- or milli-pedes (it may be all the pointy little appendages) but as this one’s a neighbor, I’m trying to be inclusive. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has a hard time liking them. Our cat, Hector Halfsquid, spent the evening on the inside of the wet screendoor alternately approaching hesitantly and hurriedly backing away from the centipede, giving the impression of being simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by it.

(Photos A.Shock)

In fact, even today he’s still giving occasional neurotic “creepy hops” where from deep sleep he suddenly jumps out of his skin, apparently having received Gary-Larson-esque “cumulative willies” from the many-legged visitor. Hector’s wariness is probably justified, as these guys can deliver a powerful and venomous bite; not dangerous in most cases, but certainly painful.

Recent posts have been about lady bugs, and prickly pears.  Here’s one about both: a lady bug on an Opuntia blossom in the Mojave desert.  (Both photos A.Shock)

You can’t tell, but this particular prickly pear lives in a little piece of Nevada jammed between Arizona and California.  Its chief attraction is that it’s also stuffed with Joshua trees, which we’re finding there are more of in the world than we ever thought:

…our aphid-infested herb garden.

Last week, we found a lady bug (AKA lady beetle, lady bird beetle) wandering around on the ground; we scooped her up and put her on a cilantro plant badly infested with aphids.  A few days later, the flower stalks of the plant were alive with the black-and-orange alligator-like larvae of the ladybug.  There were so many aphids on these stems, the larvae stuck around, pupated, and hatched into mint new beetles.  Here’s the process in photos (A & E Shock).

We didn’t think to look for eggs, so the first thing we saw was about two dozen larvae slurping up aphids on the cilantro plant.  In the picture on the right >>, the final instar of a larva (lower) is attaching itself to the stem in preparation of pupating.  The critter above it, which looks like a wrinkly beetle, is what it becomes: a pupa, waiting for the beetle inside to reach adulthood.

<< The next photo shows a newly-emerged adult beetle clinging to its empty pupal husk.  The unripe tomato color of its wings deepens as it dries, possibly in response to UV exposure.  Also, ghostly gray dots appear and darken along with the elytra.  The wings, pale yellow and transluscent, retract fully under the elytra, and the beetle is ready to trundle — or fly — off.

The photo below shows two empty pupal cases, the sun shining through them and split open like… well, like invertebrate pupal cases, abandoned where their larvae attached to the stem.

Finally, the familiar mature, deep red-orange, sun-spotted lady bugs spread out, looking for food and mates to start the cycle all over again (below).

Hard not to appreciate the aphids giving up their sticky little plant-sucking lives for such a delightful result.  And, thanks, ladybugs, for clearing out the thuggish aphids.  Not to anthropomorphize or anything…

A praying mantis egg-case is not something you can easily find if you’re looking for one.  So, imagine our surprise — again! — when E looked up at a random, leafy, and low branch of the big backyard mesquite, and said, “Hey, look!”  There was a tiny brown-loaf-looking mantid egg case, stuck to a thin twig towards the whippy tip of a branch.

This was our second mantis-related sighting of the week — the other is described here, in the latest post on this blog.

So, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one, to see if it hatches, now that warmer weather is here.  And, who knows how many more are out there?  With luck, the yard will be mantis-rich before long.

Praying mantis egg-case on mesquite twig, finger for scale (Photo A.Shock) >>

And stay tuned to read about what I encountered under the mesquite just now, while checking on the mantis-egg case…