Rambling about Brambles

It looked like it would be another good year for blackberries. My wild canes were full of blooms this spring.

Fruit set looked pretty good, and then some questionable visitors showed up.

 

These are rednecked cane borers, Agrilus ruficollis, on the wineberries. The females lay eggs in the canes and the larvae produce gall-like swellings that predispose the canes to breakage. However, they're the least of my worries when it comes to harvesting blackberries.

This is the brown marmorated stinkbug, Halyomorpha halys. It's feeding on the developing drupes of the blackberry fruit. Keep this picture in mind....it'll be more relevant in a few minutes.

Some of the plants are looking pretty good. These are mostly canes growing in part shade.

Some plants growing in sunnier areas are marginally okay. The fruit is ripening but the berries are small or only have a few drupes.

And this is what many of my blackberries look like right now. The excessive heat and lack of rainfall is killing the canes, often right before the fruit ripen fully.

And remember the stinkbug? This is what stinkbug damage on blackberries looks like. Many of the drupes are brown and look somewhat mummified. I've heard that stinkbug feeding with make the fruit distasteful, but honestly....bad blackberries are hard, seedy, and sour so I don't think the fruit could taste any worse.

Combine heavy stinkbug feeding with excessive heat and you get this: brown berries with no juice! Ugh!

We have black raspberries, blackberries, and wineberries on our property. There are only a handful of black raspberry plants and they did fairly well, escaping much of the damage I've shown here, but I probably only get a cup or two of fruit from them. The wineberries are just starting to ripen now, and they also seem to have escaped much of the damage as well even though they grow side by side with the blackberries. I think this has to do with how the plant blooms and sets fruit.

For a couple of years I've wondered why I never saw the wineberries in bloom. They have fruit, but I never saw any flowers. As it turns out, their flowers are small and immediately forgetful.

Wineberry flowers are no where near as showy as blackberry blooms. And after flowering, the calyx encloses the developing fruit, which might protected it from marauding stinkbugs.

As the fruit nears ripening, the calyx splits apart. By this time the blackberries are also ripening and maybe the stinkbugs find those berries far more attractive in size, number, and availability than the wineberries.

Wineberries will slowly turn from a bright orange color to a deep wine color. They seem to be sweet as soon as they begin to color up, although the flavor continues to develop until they are wine colored.

Wineberries are a type of raspberry from Asia. The fruit is composed of drupes around a pity core that remains on the cane after the fruit has been picked. Wineberries are considered a naturalized plant at best and can be downright invasive in certain areas. I don't mind having them on my property and I'm wishing I had more of them given the blackberry crop this year.

My Name is Tree, and I Approve of This Message.

Yesterday in the Insect ID Lab we opened a box of promotional materials sent to us by the Don't Move Firewood campaign run by The Nature Conservancy's Forest Health Protection Program. Many invasive pest species can be transported around the country on the firewood that people bring with them on vacation. Emerald ash borer, Asian longhorn borer, and Walnut twig beetle are just a few of the insects of concern. There's also a dozen or so pathogens that can be transported on firewood, including oak dieback, butternut canker, and thousand canker disease. Want more information about firewood and the danger it presents to our forest and urban trees? Please check out the campaign's website at http://dontmovefirewood.org/

The promotional materials included the usual swag....informational cards, wrist bands, even some really cool temporary tattoos featuring emerald ash borer. But what really caught our eyes were the forest green water bottles that feature the Don't Move Firewood.org logo.



Who couldn't use another water bottle? But it's the slogan on the other side that was really interesting.



Yep, that does indeed read, "Be a good neighbor. Leave your firewood at home. That's What Tree Said."



Huh? This boggles my mind on several levels. I don't remember personally approving this message although I certainly support it, but mainly I just didn't know that my opinion carried so much weight.

Black Widows and Not So Black Widows

A couple of weekends ago I was cleaning out a storage locker that we use to store the covers for our patio furniture on our back deck. I was concerned about a couple of paper wasps that had taken up residence in the locker and didn't see this spider until after the wasp nests had been dispatched. (Yes, there was more than one paper wasp nest. I'm surprised they tolerated each other in such close quarters.)

This is, I believe, a Northern black widow (Lactrodectus variolus). I say "I believe" because 1) I'm not a specialist of spider taxonomy and 2) I'm identifying this spider from my photos and not the actual specimen. Mature female Southern black widows, Lactrodectus mactans (the spider we think of as the "classic" black widow), are usually a shiny jet black with just the infamous red hourglass mark on their abdomens, but males and immature female L. mactans do have markings similar to these pictured here.

So why do I think this is L. variolus and not an immature or male L. mactans? The body of this spider was about a half inch in size, suggesting that it was a mature Lactrodectus female. Mature males are only about half that size. Again, the white bands on the dorsal side suggest L. variolus, but there's a better way to distinguish between the two species.

The red hourglass marking on the ventral side of the abdomen is incomplete in the Northern black widow. In contrast, the hourglass is complete with both triangles touching in the Southern black widow. My spider doesn't have a complete hourglass with both triangles touching, so I think this a Northern black widow, L. variolus.

Initially it may sound funny that the Northern black widow can be found in southwestern Virginia, but there's a good deal of overlap between the ranges of the Northern and Southern black widows. In fact, the Northern black widow can be found as far south as Florida and as far west as Texas, while the Southern black widow can be found as far north as parts of Canada. We have both species on our property, with a healthy population of Southern black widows in the stone block wall edging our driveway.

For more information about Lactrodectus spiders, Bugguide has great information on the genus Lactrodectus on their website and you can also find some terrific pictures there, too. And if you have any burning questions regarding these spiders or if you think you have one in your house, please contact your local extension agent for more information. Don't think you have a local extension agent? Don't be silly, they're in all 50 states of the USA and you can find yours here at the USDA website. 

Wordless Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011

Nearly Wordless Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2011

Dreaming of summer...Monarch butterfly on butterfly bush.

Mr. Stinkbug's Winter Vacation

On Tuesday morning Ally was sitting at the dining room table eating breakfast when she pointed out a dead bug on the floor beside the door leading to our back deck. It was a brown marmorated stink bug, a newly arrived pest species in Virginia. Over the past couple of years populations of these stink bugs have built up to where they spend all summer feasting on your tomatoes and other garden produce before coming inside your house to stay all winter with you. They're a lot like Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation in this respect. This particular specimen was on its back in the classic folded leg yoga posture that announces, "I'm a dead bug." However, when I picked the stink bug up I noticed that one of its legs and antenna were still twitching. Figuring that the little bugger was on its way out, I decided to toss it in the compost container so it could at least fertilize the tomatoes this summer after sucking out the juice of my tomatoes all last summer.

I'm a dedicated composter. I don't maintain my compost pile in the most efficient manner, but I do put every possible scrap of organic material in it that I can. Fruit peels and cores, egg shells, coffee grinds and their filters, old dry bread, vegetable peelings, even the paper mache cartons for my eggs get torn up and tossed into the compost, along with any grass clippings or mulched leaves from the yard. I don't add any dairy or meat products as I don't want to attract any more varmints out of the woods than we already get, but I've been known to toss shrimp tails and the occasional fish skeleton in there, too. I'm always amazed at how much biodegradable material we, a family of three plus a small dog, can generate in a week. I like the idea of all this stuff going into my compost pile where it will eventually break down and nurture my garden instead of merely filling up another spot in a landfill for all of eternity.

The only problem is that after making dinner in the winter, I'm not motivated to run out in the cold and dark to dump that day's offering on the compost heap over by the woods. So I keep my compost fodder in an old red plastic Folger's coffee container. I'm sure the blue plastic Maxwell House containers work just as well, but ours is from Folger's because that's the kind of coffee we prefer. I just keep it on the kitchen counter and add scraps to it throughout the day. I've used this type of container as a temporary compost holder for years and I have never had a problem with any type of smell coming from the container as long as the lid is on securely. Sure, they get a little worn looking after a while and someone unfamiliar with my composting habits might get a nasty shock if he's looking for ground coffee for the coffee maker, but they work great, they're easy to clean, and better yet, they're free after you use up all the coffee. When they get too worn looking you can just rinse them out and put them in the recycling bin. Not a bad deal, especially compared to buying a specialty "composting pail" that can easily cost $30.00 from a gardening supply catalog.

But because I add so much material to the old coffee container each day, it fills up after a couple of days and I still don't want to run out to the compost pile to empty it due to the winter weather. So I put the full container to the side and start up another one using an empty container. Usually it's another coffee container, but this week I had a plastic container that had previously held spring lettuce mix. It's a nice size, but I don't typically use a container like this as it's clear plastic and not everyone enjoys seeing compost material in a pre-rotting (or worse) stage. But that's what I was using when I tossed Mr. Moribund Stinkbug in there.

Imagine my surprise Tuesday afternoon when I opened the container to add an apple core and found Mr. Stinkbug alive and well, walking over Monday's coffee grinds. Apparently the extra humidity and warmth of the compost container was just what he needed to perk himself up. I left him there figuring it was just a minor reprieve from the inevitable. When I opened the container on Wednesday to add more coffee grinds, Mr. Stinkbug was jauntily sitting on the apple core, sucking out some juice and clearly having a good time. He had found himself the stinkbug equivalent of a mid-winter paradise, much in the same way I long to drop everything right now and spend the weekend on St. John's in the Caribbean with a cool fruity drink in my hand and my toes in the warm white sands. And I've left him there to enjoy it as long as he can. Eventually the wind will stop howling and the snow flurries will cease and I'll take all the full containers out to the compost pile. It's possible that Mr. Stinkbug can bury himself down in the leave mulch to ride out the rest of the winter despite the freezing temperatures. Even though he's nothing but a pest and they reproduce by the gazillions in the warm months, I can't bring myself to dispatch another fellow soul hunkering down to make it through another round of bitter temperatures and freezing wind this January.

However, I won't hesitate to smush him or any of his kin this summer when I find them on my tomatoes. Winter compassion officially ends as soon as the temperatures rise above freezing.

My Brief Career as a Sex Researcher

Once upon a time I lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was a graduate student in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee between 1992 and 1994. I was working on my MS degree, specializing in medical/veterinary entomology. In particular, I was examining the impact of a topically applied anti-parasitic compound on the invertebrates found in the emphemeral resource of bovine dung.

In other words, I spent a lot of time looking at bugs in cow poop.

Knoxville was a rather fun place to be in the early 1990s. Lots of tanned, blonde women with bows in their hair and good ol' boys in Duck Head shirts dying for the next football game. The internet did not really exist then and no one had uttered the words "dotcom" yet. Since there was no Facebook back then, we had to fill up our free time with other activities, such as watching "Friends", gawking at the current fad of country line dancing, and waiting for the next football game. Mostly I dove into my graduate studies and my research.

(You're probably wondering where the sex research bit comes in here.)

Generally I would try to come up for air from my research and go home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's about a 9 hour drive from Knoxville to Poquoson, Virginia, a long, long stretch of I-81 with a dogleg turn at Stanton, Virginia, onto I-64. I didn't mind the drive too much as it was 9 hours I wasn't sorting insect specimens in the lab, but traveling took two days out of my all too brief holiday time at home. By my second year in Knoxville, my mom insisted that I fly from Knoxville into Newport News, which condensed my travel time into a mere fraction of what the drive required.

Both the McGee Tyson Airport in Knoxville and the Newport News International Airport in Newport News are not very big. Certainly their names were bigger than their physical size back in the early 1990s. Little commuter prop planes, really just puddle jumpers, flew between the two airports. This meant my flights always left from a dinky little commuter gate, where I would walk out a glass door to the plane right there on the tarmac. The commuter terminal was very loud, with the noise from the planes taxing up to the gates and continual announcements on the intercom for flights arriving and departing.

One Thanksgiving a man and his wife struck up a conversation with me as we waited for our plans to begin loading. They, too, were traveling someplace for the holiday. We did the usual small talk and inevitably they asked me what I did. I paused, as I generally tried to gauge how much someone might want to know about beef cattle, ivermectin, and bugs before I gave them a verbal overload about my research, and simply told them I was a grad student at UT.

The University of Tennessee is revered in eastern Tennessee. It is the Holy Mecca of Football each fall. I have never seen such diehard football fans as these people in my entire life. They live, breathe, eat, and sleep orange and white. There is an entire flotilla of fans that arrive at the stadium by boat. If you want to get an automatic approval of most people in eastern Tennessee, you just tell them you're a student at UT. Go Vols!

The couple beamed and congratulated me on being a student at VT. I held my breath, expecting their next question to be something about how well the football team had done that season. Here I must admit that I hadn't ever attended one UT football game, rarely caught any of it on TV, and generally know diddly squat about football in general. I have a fear of crowds and Neyland Stadium seated over 90,000 fans back then. There was no way I was getting anywhere close to the stadium on game day. I steeled myself for the usual disappointment people showed when they learned that I didn't follow the UT football team.

Instead, the couple began asking about my research. Ah-ha! Now here was an interesting subject I could talk about with some authority. Indeed, I may have been the only authority on aphodiine dung beetles in the tri-state area at that time. But still, I disliked being seen as a biology geek so I just told them that I studied insects.

"REALLY?" they laughed. The intercom blared another announcement. "So what exactly do you do?" they continued when the noise subsided.

I waited for a dozen people hauling luggage to pass on their way out of the terminal so the couple could hear me. "I'm conducting a field study on how a specific medication limits the spread of parasites." Now this was a slight fib. Most of the insects living in cow poop are not really parasites of cattle, although face flies and horn flies can annoy the animals enough to cause problems. I just figured this wasn't an appropriate topic for polite society, lest the memory of my description of maggots, grubs, and feces bother them as they settled down to a Thanksgiving dinner the next day.

"Oh my!" gasped the lady. Her spouse chuckled, and to my surprise, another man sitting several seats over joined in on the conversation. "Do you really study this?" he asked.

Another announcement blared on the intercom.

"Yep. I'm working on my master's degree," I answered.

This garnered general laughter from several people sitting around us. Apparently the conversation had captured the attention of more people. This was very unusual, as most people couldn't care less about bugs.

"So how do you study this?" someone asked.

A prop outside the gate began to whine for take off. I waited a minute until it was quieter and then told them how I went to the field and collected samples of the "parasites." Then I looked at them under a microscope to identify the invertebrates and measure the impact of the medication.

More twittering. More travelers passed by with noisy wheeled suitcases.

"And the university lets you do this?" another person ask.

"Oh yes," I nodded. "There's a lot of need for researchers so they do what they can to encourage people to enter the field. I don't pay tuition for my classes and they even give me a stipend to live on."

"Wow. I just can't imagine anyone doing something so, so....daring."

At this point a tiny voice in my head informed me that perhaps the ten or so people enraptured by my description of my research did not entirely understand what I was saying. People often find entomologists to be interesting in that they study bugs for a living, but generally they shake their heads in disbelief and say, "Gee, that is just so weird." My audience in McGhee Tyson reminded me more of the audience on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, hanging on to my every word.

In a flash I knew exactly what had happened. When I told them I studied insects, they misheard me and thought I said "incest." And my attempt to shield them from the uglier particulars of my research by talking about parasites and medication and field studies merely enforced their misunderstanding. I'm sure my face must have flamed scarlet as I stammered, "No wait, you didn't hear me right, I study bugs, I'm an entomologist!"

The whole group broke into laughter for a minute then immediately went back to reading their newspaper or talking about Thanksgiving dinner with their travel companions. Just like that, I'd gone from being a captivating young woman studying a taboo subject to merely a geeky biologist who looked at bugs in cow poop. I was tempted to say something about the mating habits of yellow dung flies and aphodiine dung beetles, but I held back in a rare show of prudence. No one wants to look desperate, not even former sex researchers.

Behold, Nature's Bounty

The first Honeybunch tomatoes are ripening this week, making me a happy camper. What does not make me happy are the hordes of itty-bitty mosquitoes and black flies that swoop in and attack me as I pick tomatoes. These are little mosquitoes, the ones that you don't notice until they're done biting and fly off, leaving you exsanguinated and with a bad case of the itchies. I curse these bad little mothers extensively...they don't seem mind any bug repellent I use unless it's super heavy on the DEET. As an entomologist, I know that only female mosquitoes bite and that these are not the Asian tiger mosquito. As an entomologist on indefinite leave, I don't care enough about them to actually identify them to species, but I'd bet a cookie that these are some kind of treehole mosquito. Plus it's awfully difficult to identify an insect that's smashed on your palm. As for the black flies, I have no patience for any insect that either wants to chew on my ears or dive into my eyes and nose like a little black kamikaze pilot.

I've heard anecdotally that many, many people put in a garden this year to offset the rising cost of food in an economy that still seems to be swirling down the drain. Supposedly many of the seed companies had a hard time meeting all the demand for orders. I wonder how all those new gardeners have fared with their gardens. I know my family would starve if my garden was supposed to provide even one quarter of our weekly food supply. I've gotten several zucchini which are much tastier than the ones I buy at the store but not enough to make a meal of, and there are a number of green tomatoes slowly growing on my vines now. I have a thornless blackberry bush that gives me only a couple of berries each day. I can't seem to catch the burgandy okra before the pods have morphed into an inedible mass of fibers with a surprising amount of mucilage. The basil isn't big enough for pesto, the volunteer tomatillos still have very small fruits, and the kale is battling cabbage worms on a daily basis. I do have a pot of carrots that look like they're doing well, but the roots are twisted into mutant corkscrews when I pull them up. (They're still tasty, though.) I just noticed that my Cylindra beets have heaved their roots up out of the soil, but I haven't pulled any yet to see how warped they've grown. Needless to say, we're not going to cut our produce bill significantly this year by supplementing our diet with food from my garden. In fact, I think we would have starved to death back in June, but at least there would have been plenty of flowers to adorn our graves and enough mint for several pitchers of mojitos to toast us on our journey home.