Friday Bug: Monster on the Monstera

Brown Soft Scale on Monstera

As the sun slowly inches higher and higher above the horizon and the snow shrinks towards the shadows, some six-legged life is again stirring in the Home Bug Garden. A few flies and spiders seem to be willing to share in the delusion that spring is just around the corner. A small fly with long wings in the genus Sapromyza is the most common, sunning itself on fence, trellis, and garage. With their wings folded, these flies are maybe 5-6 mm long, but half is wings. Their family, Lauxaniidae, seems to be too obscure to have garnered a common name. That may be a good thing, since Sapro + myza seems to be from the Greek for putrid + suck. Somewhat larger (~10 mm) and more elegant is what looks like a small cranefly. I think is a Winter Cranefly (Trichoceridae) [but I was wrong, it was a female Meniscus Midge, Dixidae, Dixella sp.] .

Soft Scale, honeydew, and bay leaf

No true bugs seem to be active outside in the dim late winter sun, but we have our own indoor colony of Brown Soft Scale Coccus hesperidum (Linnaeus). This is a pernicious pest, more for the sticky honeydew is squirts on windows, floors, and leaves, than for the minor damage it otherwise does to the plants. We've completely failed to eliminate the pest in spite of years of squirting insecticidal soaps and horticultural oils. We put the plants outside in the summer, and predators and parasitoids reduce the numbers seemingly to zero. Yet every winter they reoccur in their sticky invincibility.

Tetragnatha on Pitcher Plant 2005

Oh well, the one lone spider, a Longjawed Orbweaver Tetragnatha sp., observed this afternoon is also a survivor. The picture above was taken during the second Home Bug Garden Summer and its relations still inhabit the Garden. That is comforting. The Pitcher Plant, alas, failed to survive its first winter.