The meadow spittlebug

Left:  Meadow spittlebug nymph encased in spittle.   Right:  Grassy area with spittlebugs

When camping, I enjoy going for a walk in any available natural areas close to me.  It usually means grabbing a camera and lens combination and heading out to explore what flora and fauna await discovery.  Yesterday I took an APS-C DSLR camera equipped with a 105 mm macro lens.  It was also equipped with a macro flash unit.  This combination has always served me well for my macro stuff.

I came to an abandoned field, once a golf course, and came upon a remarkable sight.  Spittlebugs.  OK, so maybe they are not so amazing in themselves, but this was different because there were thousands upon thousands of them.  The grass was teeming with them.  Some areas of grass were unaffected, but here and there were countless numbers.  You can see in the right photo above a small sample of this; multiply it by a couple of thousand and you have an idea of the scope.  Did I mention it was remarkable?

I pulled one stem of grass up and blew away some of the bubbles.  Under its frothy canopy was the meadow spittlebug; the insect which created the bubbly mass.  It is only the nymph (juvenile form of an insect with incomplete metamorphosis) which lives in the spittle.  It secretes mucus which it mixes with waste products and whips the concoction up into the resulting froth.  It provides protection against desiccation and keeps it from being detected by predators.

Adult spittlebugs are sometimes called froghoppers.  One species in this family has the record for jumping distance as it can cover 40x its own length.  If a six foot human had this same ability, they would be able to cover a distance of 240 feet; only 20 yards shy of the length of a football field.  Mind you, the person may have to spend their childhood and adolescence in a frothy encasement made of their own physical wastes and mucus secretions.  I don’t think the ability would be worth the sacrifice.  Just saying.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The maze of life.

Image
The skeletonizing of a leaf by a leaf miner. Born to tunnel; a simple egg laid on a leaf produces a tiny caterpillar.  It immediately becomes an industrial machine, boring into the leaf and consuming the matter between layers.  Barely visible to the human eye, it proceeds in a relatively straight line until it finds an obstacle.  Undeterred, it changes direction and continues its momentum; becoming larger with each centimeter consumed.  The tunnels become larger and its progress faster.  Soon it has consumed almost half an entire leaf.  Thwarted by the main vein running through the middle, it is now large enough to chew through the tougher structure.  Continuing the destruction, the caterpillar finds an outside edge.  It is time to rest.  Spinning silken web, it makes a bed out of the very vegetation it has been consuming.  When it wakes, it will no longer be a caterpillar, but a newly emerged moth bent on laying its own eggs to star...
Read more

Western thrashing ant attacking insect larva.

Image
Western thrashing ant attacking insect larva. We arrived at an area of southwest Washington called Long Beach yesterday.   This morning I was out for a quiet walk with my camera; it was equipped with a macro lens and macro lighting system.   It is always fun to explore new places to see what kinds of finds can be discovered.   I had quite a bit of luck as I ended up with half a dozen pictures which I am excited about.   The one above is an example. Thrashing ants feed on a wide variety of foods.   They will take seeds, honeydew from aphids, and small prey items such as this insect larva.   Ants have very strong jaws.   They are capable of subduing smaller insects with relative ease and, when working together, can overpower significantly larger creatures.   They will bring their find back to the nest where it will be fed to larvae, the queen, and shared amongst the adults.   When in “bug mode,” I am scanning the environment for a...
Read more

How to get rid of a wasp's nest.

Image
The yellow jacket wasp. Yesterday I was busily working on some yard work when I looked up and saw a most uncomfortable sight.  Wasps had moved in.  A small nook in my deck cover was now the home to a yellow jacket wasp colony.  If I have learned anything about wasps during my time on Mother Earth, it is that wasp nests only get bigger over time.  It is better to deal with them now rather than later.  It is one of those problems you simply cannot ignore and hope it goes away.  If you have ever played one of those computer games where you obtain resources and build an empire, the development of a wasp nest is something like that.  A single wasp, a queen, slowly constructs a tiny enclave in some hopefully safe spot.  Foraging for food, she builds a nest, lays her eggs, and tends the young until they mature.  These underlings then go on to forage, build, and tend in a slowly exponential manner.  Soon, small becomes big, then big beco...
Read more