Month: April 2010

Taum Sauk Mountain – Missouri’s High Point

/ Ted C. MacRae / 10 Comments

Although spring is now well underway in the middlin’ latitudes of Missouri, it was only a few short weeks ago that winter was still with us.  For my last winter hike of the season, I returned to perhaps my favorite stretch of my favorite trail in all of Missouri – the Mina Sauk portion of the Taum Sauk Trail on Taum Sauk Mountain.  Located in the rugged St. Francois Mountains (the “epicenter” of the Ozark Highlands), Taum Sauk Mountain is Missouri’s highest peak.  I say “peak” with a bit of reservation – at 1,772 feet it hardly compares with the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains or even the much mellower Appalachians (and certainly not with those of my beloved Sierra Nevada).  Nevertheless, unlike the remainder of the Ozark Highlands, the St. Francois Mountains are true mountains initially formed through a series of volcanic events occurring well over a billion years ago.  They, and the rest of the Ozark Highlands, have been shaped to their current form by repeated cycles of uplift and subsequent erosion.  

During their Precambrian prime, the St. Francois Mountains reached heights of 15,000 feet (the “ancient” Appalachians, in the meantime, were still just a twinkle in Mother Earth’s eye).  Rain and wind and the vastness of time have reduced them to nubs, leaving only the most ancient of volcanic rocks as testament to their former glory.  Although most of what is now the Ozark Highlands was inundated repeatedly later in the Palaeozoic (laying down the sediments that were then uplifted and “carved” to their current shape), the highest peaks of the St. Francois Mountains may be among the few areas in the United States never to have been completely submerged under those ancient seas.  Standing atop Taum Sauk Mountain, it is tempting to visualize today’s craggy terrain as a fossil of that ancient landscape – the peaks representing the former islands of rhyolite, their slopes barren and lifeless in stark contrast with the exploding diversity of bizarre life forms appearing in the tropical waters that surrounded them.

The sterile, volcanic rocks of the St. Francois Mountains support an abundance of open, rocky glades – especially on their peaks and southern and western slopes – that are home to a number of plants and animals more typically found in the tallgrass prairies further west.  Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) and little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) thrive in clumps between the large, pink boulders that are strewn across the landscape and which provide shelter and sunning spots for animals ranging from the charismatic eastern collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris) to the smaller but no less beautiful splendid tiger beetle (Cicindela splendida).  The surrounding forest is historically an open woodland with a rich, herbaceous understory and widely-spaced, drought-tolerant trees such as shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), post oak (Quercus stellata), and blackjack oak (Quercus marilandica).  These woodlands and glades are a fire-mediated landscape dependent upon periodic burns to maintain their vegetative character.

A trail begins at “High Point”, marking the summit of Taum Sauk Mountain and the highest point in Missouri.  A granite slab next to the summit rock documents the elevation at 1,772.68 feet MSL (Mean Sea Level).  The Mina Sauk Falls Trail, a rugged three-mile loop that joins the Taum Sauk Section of the Ozark Trail, leads to the tallest wet-weather waterfall in Missouri, Mina Sauk Falls.  During periods of high water flow, water gushes over the edge and drops 132 feet over a series of rocky ledges.  Water was flowing lightly during my late winter visit; nevertheless, looking out from above the falls (see photo above) offers one of the most spectacular vistas available in Missouri.  A rather difficult hike down the side of the mountain to the bottom of the falls is also well worth the effort, although clear views of the entire falls are difficult to find in the dense, moist forest below (it was here that I photographed the spectacular Ozark Witch Hazel).

A second unique geological feature lies about a mile farther down the Ozark Trail – Devil’s Toll Gate.  The rocks stand 30 feet high on either side of this eight-foot-wide, 50-foot-long fissure.  The gap probably began as a vertical fracture in the rock that has been enlarged by subsequent weathering. Over time the fissure will continue to widen, as the rocks on either side lose height.

Returning to High Point at the end of the hike, I noticed that the summit was a little higher than when I started my hike – whether this was through additional uplift of the underlying mountain or a depositional event I cannot say.  Nevertheless, I estimated Missouri’s new highest elevation to be approximately 1,773.01 feet MSL!

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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Two ladies from Ontario

/ Ted C. MacRae / 6 Comments

What do bugs and snakes/lizards/frogs/turtles have in common? Yes, they’re both ectothermic, but that is the scientist’s answer. Most folks would say they’re just creepy – girls especially! Well, two ladies from Ontario are proving the latter notion wrong by hosting three blog carnivals that cater to these cold-blooded critters: House of Herps, An Inordinate Fondness, and The Moth and Me.

Most people approach their first blog carnival hosting gig with some trepidation, but the Geek in Question at Fall to Climb has embraced the challenge by volunteering to host two blog carnivals simultaneously.  What chutzpah!  Clearly, she was up to the task – for issue #3 of An Inordinate Fondness, she introduces us to technical terms such as OMGSHINY and Coleappetite™ in Discovery Zone, with thirteen stories of beetley discovery. She then shows off her “slammer” talent in House of Herps #5: Slime Poetry – deftly pairing poems with prose.  I would love to see her do this live!

Seabrooke Leckie’s passion for moths is obvious – she is the founder of The Moth and Me and co-author of the soon-to-be-published Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America. Issue #10 of TMaM, Down to the letter, comes home to mama at the Marvelous in Nature – its 24 contributions almost enough to complete the alphabet! Recite your ABCs in lepidopterous fashion with this fine array of contributions.

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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Josef Knull was wrong!

/ Ted C. MacRae / 11 Comments

A few weeks ago I received an email from Kyle Schnepp, an entomology student at Purdue University.  Kyle has taken on the rather ambitious project of developing an illustrated key to the Buprestidae of eastern North America, for which he has been spending the past year acquiring material for photographs.

During his examination of specimens in the Field Museum of Natural History, Kyle came across two examples of an extraordinarily rare species of Buprestidae, Agrilus audax Horn.  Although described more than 100 years ago from specimens collected in Texas (Horn 1891), few records have been published in the years since.  Chamberlin (1926) reported the species also from Arizona and Illinois but without further details, causing Fisher (1928), in his revision of the genus (woefully out-of-date now, but still the only comprehensive resource for identifying the North American species), to regard at least the Illinois record as probably erroneous (common for many of Chamberlin’s records).  The first undisputed report of this species from outside of Texas was by Josef Knull (1934), who reported the species emerging from living, wind-thrown branches of slippery elm (Ulmus rubra) collected in western Missouri.  More than half a century would pass before the species would turn up again – first in Oklahoma (Nelson and MacRae 1990) and twice again in Missouri through the efforts of Gayle Nelson and myself (MacRae 1991, MacRae and Nelson 2003). All but one of these specimens were beaten from bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa).

Agrilus audax Horn, 1891 – male (L) and female (R)

While the rarity of this species makes Kyle’s find significant enough, there is an even more significant – and interesting – aspect to his discovery.  Both of the specimens, one male and one female, were collected in Ohio, which is a rather extraordinary geographical range extension. Additionally, the specimens were collected by none other than Josef Knull.  To students of North American Buprestidae, the name Josef Knull is as familiar as Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, or Thomas Say. A Professor of Entomology at The Ohio State University from 1934-1962, Knull published nearly 200 papers on the taxonomy, biology, and distribution of these and other families of beetles (Davidson and Bellamy 2002).  Although he lacked a Ph.D., he was an indefatigable collector and describer of beetles – to his fellow colleagues and students, he was known as “Professor” or “Doctor” as a show of respect.  He spent many of his summers traveling through the southwestern U.S. with his wife Dorothy Knull (herself an entomologist specializing in leafhoppers), and by the time he died in 1975 he had described 233 species and subspecies of beetles (as well as one species of Fulgoridae).  He was, and is, an icon among North American beetle collectors.

Curiously, Knull did not recognize these specimens for what they were, instead identifying them as the similar and much more widespread species, Agrilus vittaticollis.  Curious, because Knull collected these specimens in 1949 and 1953 – after first reporting the species in Missouri.  Agrilus audax belongs to a small group of species that look very similar to each other by way of their large size and striking coloration – black elytra and a red pronotum with a densely pubescent median channel.  Agrilus vittaticollis is the most common of these (though still not as commonly encountered as many other species in the genus), and the much less common A. benjamini also belongs to this group.  Kyle had sent me the above photo in an attempt to confirm their identity, but true confirmation would require examination of characters of the face and ventral surface.  Kyle quickly took additional photographs of these characters and sent them to me – they are shown below and leave no doubt as to the identity of these specimens.

Agrilus vittaticollis prosternum – note sides bent downward to sharp points.

Agrilus audax prosternum – sides normal, not bent downward to sharp points.


Agrilus audax frons is moderately depressed and uniformly pubescent (deeply depressed & pubescent only on lower half in A. benjamini).

Agrilus audax male sternite – the deep, smooth, elongate depression is diagnostic (A. benjamini males have only an obsolete depression).


Finding a new state record buprestid in Ohio – the land of Knull – based on specimens collected by Knull himself is nothing short of remarkable (almost like proving E. O. Wilson wrong¹). The occurrence of A. audax in Ohio also lends some credibility to Chamberlin’s record of the species in Illinois. Kyle is graciously allowing me to include these new records in a forthcoming publication; my thanks to him for this and also for allowing me to use his fine photographs in this post.  Kyle did also mention that these were the only misidentified specimens he saw in the Knull collection at the Field Museum of Natural History. For those interested in acquiring reprints of Knull’s papers, pdfs of the 50 papers he published in the Ohio Journal of Science may be found at this link.

¹ The title of this post is a play on the title of a recent post by Alex Wild at Myrmecos. No true disrespect is intended to Josef Knull, who’s legacy (with the possible exception of his frustratingly vague label data) is rightfully held in high regard by all who knew him or know of his work.

REFERENCES:

Chamberlin, W. J. 1926. The Buprestidae of North America, exclusive of Mexico, a catalogue including synonymy, bibliography, distribution, type locality and hosts of each species. W. J. Chamberlin, Corvallis.

Davidson, J. M., and C. L. Bellamy.  2002. The entomological contributions of Josef Nissley Knull (1891-1975).  Zootaxa 37:1-24.

Horn, G. H. 1891. The species of Agrilus of Boreal America. Transactions of the American Entomological Society 18:277-366.

Knull, J. N. 1934. Notes on Coleoptera, No. 4. Entomological News 45(10):207-212.

MacRae, T. C. 1991. The Buprestidae (Coleoptera) of Missouri. Insecta Mundi 5(2):101–126.

MacRae, T. C., and G. H. Nelson. 2003. Distributional and biological notes on Buprestidae (Coleoptera) in North and Central America and the West Indies, with validation of one species. The Coleopterists Bulletin 57(1):57–70.

Nelson, G. H., and T. C. MacRae. 1990. Additional notes on the biology and distribution of Buprestidae (Coleoptera) in North America, III. The Coleopterists Bulletin 44(3):349–354.

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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Mylabris oculatus in South Africa

/ Ted C. MacRae / 16 Comments

Mylabris oculata, the CMR bean beetle, is a large, conspicuously-colored beetle in the family Meloidae (blister beetles) that I saw quite commonly during my stay in South Africa.  “CMR” refers to the Cape Mounted Rifle Corps, a police force in the old Cape Colony whose uniforms sported black and yellow bands that resemble the colors of this beetle.

Blister beetles as a whole are, of course, well known for their chemical defenses, primarily cantharidin (the active ingredient in ‘Spanish Fly’, an extract of a European species of blister beetle).  This terpenoid compound is a painful irritant, especially when coming into contact with mucous-lined membranes such as those of the gatrointestinal and urinary tracts.  Blister beetles emit body fluids containing cantharidin from joints on the legs when disturbed, giving any would-be predators a foul-tasting appetizer. As we have so often seen, insects containing such effective defenses are often aposematically colored to advertise the fact, allowing them to brazenly lumber about fully exposed during the day with little to fear.  If there ever was an insect that screamed aposematic, it is M. oculatus with its boldy contrasting black and yellow elytra and hot-orange antennae.

These beetles, however, are more than just a frustration for hungry birds, but also a serious pest of numerous ornamental, fruit and vegetable crops (Picker et al. 2002).  Large numbers of adults congregate on plants and preferentially feed on the flowers.  In the more natural settings where I was encountering these beetles, they were most often seen on flowers of Acacia spp. or (as in the above photo) Dichrostachys cinerea in the family Fabaceae.  To be honest, they became quite a source of frustration for me as well – not because of their distastefulness or pestiferous habits, but because of their role as the model in a mimicry complex.  It was the mimic that I was after, and since mimics tend to be much less common than their models, I had to look at a lot of M. oculatus to find the few specimens of the species I was after. 

Pop quiz: Can anybody name the mimic?

Back to their chemical defenses – I’ve often wondered just how poisonous blister beetles really are, especially to humans.  Here in the U.S., their main importance is as contaminants in alfalfa hay fed to cattle and horses.  Deaths from severely contaminated forage do occur, but this is dependent upon the cantharidin content of the species and their abundance within the hay.  The highest reported cantharidin content for a blister beetle is 5.4% dry weight in Epicauta vittata.  Calculations based on this figure and the lethal dose for a 1000-lb horse indicate that around 100 such beetles would need to be eaten to receive a fatal dose.  This seems to make the claim that a single beetle can kill a human a little far-fetched.  However, M. oculatus are big beetles – more than a full inch in length and bulky.  In this regard, I found an interesting tidbit at the TrekNature website.  Clarke Scholtz is an entomologist at the University of Pretoria, and when asked, “Is it true that their poison can kill a human being?”, he responded:

Yes; they are poisonous enough to kill people – especially a big beetle… The poison is very toxic and actually causes collapsed tissue. It would also depend on the weight of the person, as with any other toxin. The poison of a CMR beetle, that is dried and powdered, is sufficient to kill a 70kg human.

REFERENCE:

Picker, M., C. Griffiths and A. Weaving. 2002. Field Guide to Insects of South Africa. Struik Publishers, Cape Town, 444 pp.

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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Winter Botany Quiz #6 – answers and a checklist

/ Ted C. MacRae / 7 Comments

I thought yesterday’s Winter Botany Quiz #6 would be a fairly difficult, and given the apparent difficulty of my previous quizes (Pismire Puzzle and Tuesday Teaser) I thought I’d give readers a break this week and narrow down the location to the Lake Tahoe area. Despite publishing in the dead of night, it took only 31 minutes for Peter Yeeles to swoop down and correctly name the family, genus, species, and function for the structure pictured. His only lapsus regarded the terminology used for the name of the structure itself, leaving the door open for James Trager to snag some scrap points. The plant is, of course, Cercocarpus ledifolius (curl-leaf mountain mahogany) in the family Rosaceae, and the structures pictured above and in the previous post are the stigmas of the flowers persisting as wind-assisted dispersal structures for the fruit. “Cercocarpus” is, in fact, derived from the Greek words for “tailed” and “fruit”, whose numerous erect hairs give the plant in a silvery sheen late in the growing season.

Why was I interested in this plant? It was one of the few tree species occurring in the Lake Tahoe Basin that I wasn’t able to find for last year’s 3-part series, Trees of Lake Tahoe (including The Pines, The “Other” Conifers, and The Deciduous Trees).  Widespread in the mountainous west (and barely qualifying as a tree), its occurrence in the Tahoe Basin is more sporadic.  Better stands are found outside the basin proper on the dry eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada (Graf 1999), and indeed these plants were photographed at ~6,500 feet on the eastern slopes of Mt. Rose.

My real interest in Cercocarpus, however, is as a favored host plant for species of jewel beetles (family Buprestidae).  About two dozen species of these beetles have been associated with Cercocarpus spp. in North America, nine of which have been confirmed as breeding within dead branches of these plants and five having been associated with no other plant.  I’ve collected a number of these species myself, particularly in the San Gabriel and Santa Rosa Mountains of southern California and the Chisos Moutains of Big Bend National Park in Texas, including Polycesta cazieri, Chrysobothris piuta, and paratype specimens of Acmaeodera rubrocuprea. I thought it might be of interest to any readers who might collect these insects to present a checklist of Buprestidae associated with Cercocarpus in North America (see appendix below).

REFERENCE:

Graf, M. 1999. Plants of the Tahoe Basin. Flowering Plants, Trees, and Ferns. A Photographic Guide. California Native Plant Society Press, Berkeley, 308 pp.

Checklist of North American Buprestidae associated with Cercocarpus

(Bold indicates species that have been reared from Cercocarpus.  An asterisk indicates species that have been associated exclusively with Cercocarpus).
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) angelica Fall
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) connexa LeConte
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) dolorosa dolorosa Fall
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) idahoensis Barr
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) mariposa mariposa Horn
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) mariposa dohrni Horn
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) nelsoni Barr
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) nexa Fall
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) plagiaticauda Horn
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) pubiventris lanata Horn
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) rubrocuprea Westcott & Nelson*
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) vandykei Fall
– Acmaeodera (s. str.) variegata LeConte
– Acmaeodera (Squamodera) vanduzeei (Van Dyke)
– Anthaxia (Haplanthaxia) caseyi sublaevis Van Dyke
– Anthaxia (Melanthaxia) porella Barr*
– Anthaxia (Melanthaxia) simiola Casey*
– Chrysobothris bisinuata Chamberlin*
– Chrysobothris mali Horn
– Chrysobothris piuta Wickham
– Chrysobothris purpureovittata purpureovittata Horn
– Chrysobothris purpureovittata cercocarpi Westcott & Nelson*
– Dicerca (s. str.) hornii hornii Crotch
– Polycesta (Tularensia) californica LeConte
– Polycesta (Tularensia) cazieri Barr

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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Monday Moth: Arniocera erythropyga

/ Ted C. MacRae / 14 Comments

Arniocera erythropyga (Zygaenidae), Geelhoutbosch, South Africa

Last week’s king cricket quiz (Tuesday Teaser) reminded me that I still have quite a few photographs from my trip to South Africa, now 10 years ago, that I still haven’t shared. This pretty little moth is Arniocera erythropyga, which I photographed at Geelhoutbosch farm in South Africa’s Northern (now Limpopo) Province while clambering up the magnificent north-facing escarpment of the Waterberg Mountains. 

I saw this moth as it sat on the foliage of Grewia sp. (family Malvaceae) – fully exposed for all the world to see.  If we’ve learned anything by now, we know that brightly colored insects that expose themselves conspicuously during the day are probably protected by chemical defences (or perhaps mimicking something that is). Such was the case for Bromophila caffra, an equally strikingly-colored fly that I saw on the same hike, and it is also the case for this moth as well. Arniocera erythropgya is a member of the family Zygaenidae, or burnet moths – many members of which are known to release hydrogen cyanide (Scholtz and Holm 1985). This is the same family to which another toxic species I featured last spring belongs (Pyromorpha dimidiata).  A number of moths and butterflies in other families are also known to release HCN (produced by the breakdown of cyanoglucosides sequestered from the plants on which they feed); however, all life stages of zygaenid moths, including the egg, contain these compounds.  This suggests that zygaenid species are capable of synthesizing these compounds themselves rather than needing to sequester them from their host plants (Scoble 1992). While some zygaenid larvae do feed on plants that contain cyanoglucosides, they apparently do so simply because of their tolerance to the compounds but without the need to sequester them from the plant.

Thus, when I saw and approached this little moth, it didn’t flinch or flee.  Protected by toxicity, it continued sitting brazenly atop its exposed perch – welcoming me to see it, daring me to do anything more than take its photo.

My thanks to Roy Goff at African Moths for confirming the identity of the individual in this photograph.

REFERENCES:

Scholtz, C. H. and E. Holm (eds.). 1985. Insects of Southern Africa. Butterworths, Durbin, South Africa, 502 pp.

Scoble, M. J. 1992. The Lepidoptera. Form, Function and Diversity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 404 pp.

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010.

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The “New” Gromphadorina portentosa

/ Ted C. MacRae / 16 Comments

I don’t pretend to be a photography guru – I’m learning, and though I still have much to learn I’m happy with my progress so far.  The photographs I posted earlier this week of Gromphadorina portentosa, the Madagascan hissing cockroach, were the results of my first attempt at photographing insects in a white box, and I was reasonably happy with the results.  However, a commentor suggested the photographs could benefit from increased contrast – and he was right!  I admit that I haven’t focused much on post-processing so far, as I’m still in a rather steep part of the whole insect macrophotography learning curve thing. I have played around with the different enhancement tools in Photoshop Elements, but for some reason I don’t find them all that intuitive, and just playing around with them hasn’t helped me understand how they work or the best way to use them.  The Photoshop online help site wasn’t much help either – in fact, it was all gibberish to me!  I started to wonder if maybe I just lacked some basic talent when it came to understanding post-processing.

Fortunately, the commentor provided a link to an excellent article at EarthBound Light called The 1-2-3 of Photoshop Levels.  That article opened up for me a whole new world of understanding!  It explained that Levels is a better alternative for optimizing photos that Brightness and Contrast, and it did it in plain English!  I actually understood it!  Well, my appetite whetted, I started browsing other articles at the site and found the object of my desire: a clear explanation of the seemingly misnomored “Unsharp Mask” in an article called Behind the Unsharp Mask: The Secret World of Sharpening.  I read it excitedly, just waiting for it to become unintelligibly technical, but it was as clearly written as the previous, and for the first time ever I actually felt like I understood the basics of how to use Unsharp Mask.  Well, I couldn’t wait to take my newfound knowledge and apply it to my photos of the already spectacular Gromphadorina portentosa to see if I could make them really pop. The following comparison shows the original photo of the male (size reduced to 1200×800) and the optimized photo adjusted for levels, color, and sharpness (also slightly cropped). What do you think?

Original photo

Optimized photo

Here are paired comparisons of the other photos I included in the original post with their optimized versions (click to see enlarged versions). I would be most interested in hearing any specific comments you might have about these optimizations.

Original

Optimized

Original

Optimized

Original

Optimized

Original

Optimized

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2010

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