Hosts & Beetles: Another Duh? Moment in the Home Bug Garden

Ted MacRae of Beetles in the Bush was kind enough to accept my challenge and supported my tentative guess about the Bronze Aspen Borer (Dicerca callosa) – the attractive jewel beetle (sounds nicer than flat-headed borer) whose genus I misspelled in the 1st edition of What if and What is it? Mystery Beetles of the Moose Pasture posting for the 2nd edition of An Inordinate Fondness that Amber and AJ did such an excellent job of hosting (if you haven’t visited yet, you should for both the beetles and the music). Meanwhile, I’ve found some additional images that may help confirm the identification (from a different time, but looks like the same beetle), and certainly help show why they are called jewel beetles. Ted also complimented me on my use of host information to narrow the field. That’s nice, but now I feel somewhat dumb, since I failed to use such logic elsewhere.

Ted also took a stab at the other mystery beetles, including the difficult (over 40 thousand species are known) members of the leaf beetle family Chrysomelidae. Of particular insight was his suggestion that my ‘another orange & black chrysomelid’ might belong to the genus Phyllobrotica. After much Googling and Bugnetting, I have come to the conclusion that Ted is right and in fact, this particular orange & black chrysomelid is the famous Phyllobrotica decorata - the North American Elegant Four-Spotted Black-bellied Marsh Skullcap Leaf, Flower & Root Eating Beetle (if I may be so descriptive and prolix as to try and outdo the Australian Ant-naming Alan Anderson).

Now that name may incur infamy, but usually such just desserts devolve because ‘leaf beetles’ eat our crops (e.g. asparagus, cucumber, and potato beetles), ornamentals (e.g. the Old World Viburnum Leaf Beetle), and street trees (e.g. the elm leaf beetle). But famous and infamous carry different implications: Phyllobrotica decorata’s fame rests on its diet, but only indirectly through the justly famous paper by Brian Farrell & Charles Mitter published in the journal Evolution (44:1389-1403) in 1990: Phylogenesis of insect/plant interactions: Have Phyllobrotica leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae) and Lamiales radiated in parallel? Not only have I read this paper, but I also assigned it as reading in a class; and yet, I didn’t recognize the beetle. Duh!

Although Phyllobrotica decorata appears to derive its species name from the Latin for ‘elegant’, it can be just as destructive as its pesky relatives – its larvae eat the roots and the adults feed on the leaves and on the sexual organs (aka flowers) of its host. But the host is the Marsh Skullcap (Scutellaria galericulata) – a widely distributed wildflower in the mint family that does very well along the margin of the lake at the Moose Pasture (in fact, if one looks at our pictures of the beetles, one sees that they are eating skullcap leaves!). A closely related 4-spotted species of Phyllobrotica feeds on the same skullcap in Europe and Asia.

According to Farrell & Mitter’s elegant and life-history-filled study, the Phyllobroticae (which more or less means ‘leaves for dinner’) tend to be ‘strictly monophagous’, meaning they tend to feed on only one kind of host plant. Since they feed on members of the mint family, this implies a specialized constitution. If you will recall an earlier posting on herbs, those essential oils we find so refreshing can be toxic and if your entire dinner is laced with them you will soon be a minty corpse. If you can feed on mints without ill-effect, however, not only will you have fresh breath, but at least two other avenues to a better life are open. First, you can eat all you can stomach with little competition from other mint-challenged herbivores. Second, if you can sequester some of those toxic chemicals, then you can make yourself distasteful to those predators that are considering you for dinner. That is the probable reason for the striking orange & black colouration – a warning to predators that you taste bad. Also, according to Farrell & Mitter, these host specialist beetles appear to be somewhat trapped by their specialization. As new species of skullcap evolved, so did new species of Phyllobrotica, but for the most part (one species has switched to mints in the genus Phyllostegia) the Phyllobroticae seem to have been unable to take advantage of other potential hosts with which they moved through evolutionary time.

And now for the double-duh development: the other mystery orange & black chrysomelid was labeled ‘Zygogramma sp.? feeding on willow’. Well, these are some Zygogramma that look a bit like this picture, e.g. the ragweed leaf beetle Z. suturalis, but except for being a little oranger than normal, this beetle is a dead ringer for a member of the Home Bug Garden fauna that I have posted on before, the Striped Willow Leaf Beetle Calligrapha californica. Not only that, but at the Moose Pasture this beetle was all over a composite last Fall – the Nodding Beggartick, Bidens cernua – a known host of the beetle, or at least for the subspecies Calligrapha californica corepsivora Brown which feeds on Coreopsis, Bidens (beggarticks), and Ambrosia (ragweed). Well, eating ragweed is good, but I have several species of Coreopsis in the Home Bug Garden and I’m not too keen on a generalist leaf beetle munching on them. Unlike the simple story the Phyllobroticae tell; however, the Calligraphae are complicated. Calligrapha californica may be a complex of cryptic species or populations with different host specializations. This could be just as interesting a story as with the Phyllobroticae, although much more difficult to work out, but I just hope none of the HBG visitors have a taste for coreopsis.

What if and What is it? Mystery Beetles of the Moose Pasture

Gray and chilly this morning in Edmonton, only a week until the end of calendar winter. Of course, here in central Alberta, the calendar is never more than theory until May, a wistful picture over a grid of snow white blocks. Alberta Bugs has had rumours of insects in flight in Calgary, but not even a Mourning Cloak has shown up here. Still, the snow cover is in retreat, the southern exposures are becoming exposed, and one can always hope that El Niño will grant us an early Spring.

But Spring isn’t here and An Inordinate Fondness is all set for its second issue. Alas, I seem to have plundered most of our digital beetle collection for previous postings, leaving little new to add. But, when the facts are inconvenient, it is time to turn to theory, and the theory of the Home Bug Garden (HBG) is that I can create an oasis of biological diversity in urban Edmonton. As a test of how well I have succeeded to date, lets compare the HBG diversity to – well, the Moose Pasture. This seems appropriate since the Moose Pasture is our theoretical escape in the country, a quarter section of bush land near Elk Island National Park where we take our bugpersons’ holidays, putter around appreciating the biological diversity of central Alberta, and daydream that some day we will do more than putter. Sometimes we can even put a name on a beetle, like this wasp-mimicking long-horned beetle Clytus ruricola (Olivier) that probably uses some of our aspen or birch logs as a larva (thanks to Eric Eaton and Kenn Kaufman in the Kaufman Field Guide for the information that they breed in decaying deciduous trees).

You may recall from the When Alien meets Alien: De gustibus ... posting, the HBG claimed 339 species of animals identified from its environs including 28 beetles. Not bad for a quarter acre urban lot, but not really a strong showing for the beetles. I am happy to say this total has risen in the last month to 362 species of animals – but, alas, the beetles have failed to budge. In fact, almost all the increase has been due to moths, thanks to Feralia – the annual celebration of Lepidoptera identification, music, and the usual shenanigans hosted by John Acorn in February. In comparison, our Moose Pasture ‘boasts’ 492 identified animal species including – what, only 31 beetle species! Well, our Inordinate Fondness obviously needs some work and we don’t have a beetle equivalent to Feralia. But, we do have a beetle carnival to appeal to and perhaps its readers can shed some light on a few Moose Pasture mystery beetles.

Here’s one example (with Ted MacRae in mind), a beetle we have labeled Dicerca possibly tenebrosa (Kirby). However, we note that the Strickland Entomological Museum says “Dicerca tenebrosa is easily confused with other Dicerca species” (e.g. Dicerca crassicollis LeConte (Kirby)) and that one character for this species is “a short second segment on the antennae”. Characters like this always make me ask - How short and in comparison to what? Since both of the bupers above bore in conifers, I wonder if we aren’t on the wrong track? The Moose Pasture is full of aspen but has only a handful of spruce (I think most burned up in the early 1900s when the last large fire swept through the Beaver Hills Region), so I wonder if this may not be the Bronze Aspen Borer Dicerca callosa Casey? In case this flat headed borer is too easy, here is a mystery weevil that has no guess at all.

We would be especially pleased with an id on the weevil, but we know there are lots of them and they tend to look alike. So, how about a few of the more colourful Chrysomelidae. Below are a few guesses and one we just don’t know.

Carrying on with the colourful – a few gay beetles on a gray winter day – here’s one Scarabaeidae we think we know and one we don’t.

Well, the sun seems to be trying to peep through the clouds, the temperature is above zero, and if I don’t get outside, then I won’t have any chance to see my first Mourning Cloak, Ring-billed Gull, or other hopeful sign of Spring. One thing that I have noticed in pouring over our Moose Pasture insects is that from the few we have identified, there isn’t much overlap with the Home Bug Garden fauna, and the two sites are a mere 53 km (33 miles) apart. I think this has implications for what I am trying to achieve, but that is something I will need to think about. In the meantime, it seems most appropriate to end, not with a beetle, but with an eponymous Moose Pasture beastie. When the thaw does come, there will be lots of reminders of this animal dotting the landscape - and ones that some scarabs will no doubt find attractive.