Dear Kitty. Some blog

This is a National Geographic video about butterflies.

At the urban birds conference, there was also a lecture about insects.

It was by Kars Veling, about Butterflies and dragonflies in cities: more than food for birds.

There are quite some butterfly species in Dutch cities and towns. For one category of butterflies, that is not surprising. These are the species who are not so selective about environments. Caterpillars of species like red admiral, peacock, and small tortoiseshell are dependent on stinging nettles, plants which grow even in city centres.

With some luck, one may also see more selective butterfly species in urban environments, like the comma, and meadow brown.

There are also some really specialized species in Dutch cities. As far as we know, the white-letter hairstreak in the Netherlands lives only in Heerlen city. The brown hairstreak numbers are going down in the countryside, but are stable in cities like Wageningen and Zwolle.

Kars Veling once saw 700 common blue butterflies in the ancient town Naarden. He had never seen so many together. Their caterpillars eat bird’s-foot trefoil, abundant in Naarden.

Essex skipper butterflies may also flourish in urban environments. Provided that lawns are not mown, destroying the eggs.

Brown argus butterflies also thrive in cities sometimes, especially on temporarily fallow land.

In an oak tree, there may be 50-70 butterfly or moth caterpillar species.

Plants which attract butterflies: here.

Dragonflies and damselflies in cities, like elsewhere, are dependent on clear water. In muddy water, their larvae will not be able to see far enough, and will die. If you want willow emerald damselflies in your city, you need trees as well as clear water: because the adults deposit their eggs in autumn in trees standing close to water. If the larvae hatch in spring, they drop straight into the water. So, don’t cut down all trees near the water. But also don’t let big trees grow all along the water, for then the water becomes too shady. Try to find a balance.

What’s a city-dweller to do — you want to help fight climate change, but does planting trees in the city really make a difference? Can urban forests help sequester carbon and offset emissions? Here.

This video is called A Panorpa scorpionfly from Frohnleiten, Austria.

From Science News:

Pollination in the pre-flower-power era

Scorpionflies may have aided plant reproduction long before blossoms evolved

By Sid Perkins

An obscure group of scorpionflies with specialized mouthparts may have pollinated ancient plants millions of years before flowers evolved, a new study suggests.

Fossils indicate that before flowers evolved about 130 million years ago, most plants with seeds were wind-pollinated. Yet the pollen grains of some plants that lived in the prefloral era were too big to be wind-dispersed, say Conrad Labandeira, a paleoentomologist at Smithsonian Institution’s

National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Also, he notes, pollen receptors were hidden deep within some of those plants and wouldn’t have been readily exposed to windborne pollen.

Now, in the Nov. 6 Science, Labandeira and his colleagues propose that an ancient group of scorpionflies might be counted among the missing pollinators of such plants.

The researchers analyzed 21 specimens of scorpionflies representing 11 long-extinct species, with body lengths ranging from 3 to 28 millimeters. Most of these insects were preserved in rocks laid down as fine-grained sediments, but one had been preserved in amber, says Labandeira. The fossil record suggests that these creatures were rare but present in Eurasia throughout a 62-million-year interval that began around 164 million years ago, well before flowers evolved, and stretched into the early evolution of blooms.

All of these scorpionfly specimens have long, siphon-like mouthparts capable of sucking liquids — in one case, the proboscis is about one-third the length of the insect’s body. Because pollen grains could be too large to fit through the slim siphons, the researchers suggest that the pollen stuck to ridges or hairlike structures on the creatures’ mouthparts or face as they fed on nutrient-rich fluids produced by the plants. Then, the insects carried the pollen from plant to plant as they foraged, just as modern-day pollinators do.

Labandeira and his colleagues didn’t find any pollen on or around the fossil insects they analyzed. “That was really disappointing,” Labandeira notes. But, he adds, the pollen may have decomposed or otherwise not been preserved in the sediments for any number of reasons. On the other hand, the amber that entombed one well-preserved scorpionfly didn’t contain any pollen, either — which probably reflects a true absence of pollen in that case, possibly due to entrapment of the insect at a pollen-poor time of year.

Grains of pollen preserved with such specimens would be the missing piece of evidence to definitively link these scorpionflies to the pollination of ancient plants, says Jeff Ollerton, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Northampton in England. But he’s not surprised that pollen hasn’t been found. “Evidence for species interactions rarely fossilizes,” he notes.

This video from New Zealand says about itself:

Carinate Rattail - (Macrourus carinatus)

This weird (ugly) fish is from 1061m deep. From off north-east Chatham Rise, east of New Zealand.

Scientists discover new deep sea life off NZ coast

Wed, 4 Nov 2009

A deep-sea marine biodiversity survey of seamounts on the Chatham Rise has produced a bounty of new species.

The finds were made by National Institute of Water Atmospheric Research (Niwa) research vessel Tangaroa, on 18-day voyage in July along the Chatham Rise.

The rise stretches for 1000km from near the South Island eastward.

The finds include a coral genus Narella and nicknamed “Rasta” because of its long white dreadlock-like branches; a tiny squat lobster measuring 1cm across; and some specimens of sea urchin which are commonly known as Tam O’Shanters due to their similarity to the Scottish hat.

“There are three new corals that we are confident are new species from the area,” said scientist Di Tracey. …

Three surveys of the Graveyard region since 2001 have revealed high levels of biodiversity, and many undescribed species.

They include benthic macroinvertebrates — animals without backbones that are larger than millimetre long — such as corals, sponges, seastars, snails, lobsters, clams, and marine worms.

The first survey alone showed 15 percent of the species collected were unknown in the New Zealand region, plus 14 species new to science. Six new species of lace coral were discovered in the second survey in 2006.

Seamounts can be ecologically valuable as hotspots of biodiversity and economically valuable and they are often the target of commercial fishing.

But the Chatham Rise — where the fishing industry wiped out the commercial viability of the orange roughy through overfishing — is also being targeted by miners eyeing its multi-billion dollar phosphate resources.

Widespread Energy and its parent company Widespread Portfolios applied in August 2007 for a prospecting licence over a 3048 square kilometre area of the rise.

It hoped that 100 million tonnes of phosphorite (rock phosphate) valued at more than $50 billion can be scraped off the seabed.

And an Auckland company Chatham Phosphate Ltd has applied for another 71,750sq km around the Widespread prospect.

Spider Research Offers Fossil Insight

This video says about itself:

A team of British researchers have been rebuilding fossils of 300-million year old spiders using computer 3-D technology- they say they are providing a clearer picture of how some extinct species once lived on early Earth.

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Spider web confirmed as ‘oldest’

Spider webs encased in amber which were discovered on an East Sussex beach have been confirmed by scientists as being the world’s oldest on record.

The amber, which was found in Bexhill by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks and his brother Jonathan, dates back 140 million years to the Cretaceous period.

Professor Martin Brasier said they were the earliest webs to be incorporated into the fossil record.

He has published his findings in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Professor Brasier, who is a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford, said: “This amber is very rare. It comes from the very base of the Cretaceous, which makes it one of the oldest ambers anywhere to have inclusions in it.”

‘Sticky droplets’

He added: “These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the spider web threads to trap prey.

“We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber. These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge.”

His studies revealed that the spider that spun the web is related to the modern day orb-web or garden spider.

Scientists think the web became trapped in conifer resin after a forest fire and then became fossilised inside the resulting amber.

Mr Hiscocks and his brother also found the fossilised remains of an Iguanodon jaw bone on the coastline.

This video says about itself:

Pond skater. Gerris sp. feeding on ants that have fallen from bushes and are trapped in the surface tension. Also close up view of adult and nymph.

Just outside the garden, a group of long-tailed tits.

From the Natural History Museum in London, England:

A new species of parasitoid wasp that feeds on the common whitefly pest has been discovered in the UK by a Natural History Museum scientist.

Museum wasp expert Dr Andrew Polaszek found the tiny 1-mm-long insect, Encarsia aleurochitonis, near his home in Kent and spotted it after it hatched from its host, an adult whitefly.

Although known in mainland Europe, this is the first time the wasp has been recorded in the UK. However, it is probably native to the UK and has just been missed due to its tiny size.

This is a Dutch TV video about the Naardermeer.

Today, Naardermeer nature reserve. A peacock butterfly flying across the bicycle track.

A great egret standing on the bank of a ditch.

Three buzzards flying.

Near the first hide: a kestrel. Shoveler ducks, shelducks. A great cormorant drying its wings. Six snipe on a tiny island in the shallow lake.

A Canada goose swims past.

On our way to the second hide, two juvenile and two adult fly agaric mushrooms.

As we walk back, a kestrel again, hovering beautifully.

A fox running in a meadow. Then, it stops, runs back, and disappears in the reedbed to the left of the meadow.

Over a hundred lapwings flying west of the Naardermeer.

From Forest & Bird in New Zealand:

Popular songbird nests on Chatham Islands mainland

New Zealand’s fifth most popular bird, the tui, has started breeding on the Chatham Islands’ main island after a successful transfer of 14 Chatham Islands tui to the main island earlier this year.

“The locals are over the moon because some of them have never seen a tui - soon they might have these songbirds gracing their gardens,” Chatham Islands resident & conservationist Liz Tuanui says.

“The last time tui were seen in any numbers on the Chatham islands’ mainland was 25 years ago, so anyone under that age is unlikely to have seen or heard tui.”

In what has been described as a world first, tui were transferred from offshore nature reserve Rangatira Island to the Chatham Islands mainland after a grant was given to the Chatham Island Taiko Trust by Forest & Bird’s international partner, Birdlife International.

The Chatham Islands archipelago holds almost 20 per cent of New Zealand’s threatened species and 160 endemic species of insects. Most of these species, however, live on three inaccessible predator-free islands.

Research conducted in the late 1990s estimated the adult Chatham Islands tui population to be about 350 birds.

Liz and husband Bruce started planting areas of their farmland 16 years ago, fuelled by a desire to create a refuge for the Chatham Islands’ threatened bird. More recently, they began intensive pest control.

Pest control is also done in the nearby Tuku Nature Reserve by the Department of Conservation.

Their property is now “dripping with flowers and fruit”, which nectar-eating birds like tui need to breed successfully.

The new immigrants were last seen on the mainland 25 years ago, and have been welcomed with open arms by the locals. Many have even started planting their gardens with fruity and flowery delights to help aid the baby-making process.

“It would be wonderful to have them back in the kind of numbers that people like my mother took for granted. Our Moriori karapuna were known to wake early and sing in high piping voices with the dawn chorus of the birds,” Shirley King from the Moriori Trust says.

Translocation Co-ordinator Mike Bell says that community-led projects like this help to empower people to get involved in conservation.

“The problem with conservation in the Chatham islands is that you’re protecting things you can’t see,” Mike Bell says. “Projects like this require locals to come on board to help with planting and pest control. Since the transfer, I’ve had locals come up to me, and ask me: ‘What can I do to attract tui? What can I plant?’ It’s fantastic.”

Birdlife International recently gave the Chatham Island Taiko Trust funding to transfer another feathery immigrant – the Chatham Islands tomtit – to one of Bruce and Liz’s covenants.

And if everything goes to plan and approval is given, 40 of these endangered birds will be heading for the Chatham Islands mainland next February.

“The Taiko Trust has done such a good job of preserving our unique taonga ,” Deborah Goomes, from Ngati Mutunga O Wharekauri Iwi Trust, says.

The Chatham Island Taiko Trust is a community-based conservation group established more than 10 years ago to help protect the endangered taiko (magenta petrel) and other indigenous wildlife on the Chathams. The group aims to help islanders conserve habitats and birdlife on their properties.

Facts

* This transfer was the first time tui have been translocated, in the Chathams or in New Zealand.
* Research by Peter Dilks from the late 1990s estimated the adult tui population on those islands at about 350 birds.
* Chatham Islands tui are one-third bigger than tui found on New Zealand’s mainland.
* Tui were voted the fifth most popular bird in Forest & Bird’s 2009 online poll.
* Breeding of Chatham Islands tui is triggered by flax flowering. In each clutch, 2-4 eggs are laid, and 2-3 broods can be raised in a good year.
* Chatham islands tui were last seen on the mainland in the early 1980s.

Publication Date: October 20, 2009

This video is called Balanus barnacle hunting and gathering on a stone in Puget Sound.

From the BBC:

Barnacles‘ sticky secret revealed

By Jody Bourton
Earth News reporter

Barnacles are able to attach themselves to almost anything.

They are found clinging to the hulls of ships, the sides of rock pools and even to the skin of whales.

Just how they stick so steadfastly whilst underwater has remained a biochemical puzzle for scientists for many years.

Now researchers have solved this mystery, showing that barnacle glue binds together exactly the same way as human blood does when it clots.

Barnacles are crustaceans that live in shallow ocean environments.

As larvae they affix to hard substrates, then remain stationary for the rest of their lives.

To attach themselves to a surface, the barnacles secrete an adhesive substance.

Scientist knew the chemical properties of this glue, but not how these chemicals interact to create a sticky effect.

Now researchers reveal all in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

From the BBC:

A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.

It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous.

Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants.

The research is published in the journal Current Biology.

The herbivorous spider was filmed on high-definition camera.

Researchers from the United States and Slovenia have discovered a new, giant Nephila species (golden orb weaver spider) from Africa and Madagascar and have published their findings in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal PLoS ONE: here. And here.