What’s Afoot in the AB Winter: 8-legged Moose Nightmare

Male Winter Tick

As a general rule, I don’t like ticks. Actually, that is an understatement: I loathe ticks! But it is winter and, even during this unusually mild version, there are few arthropods around to enliven the out-of-doors. Here’s an exception that showed up with the New Year, a bit earlier than expected, but a real live winter arthropod and not unattractive at that. My appreciation of this rather large (6.6. mm long) blood-sucking 8-legged fiend is influenced by the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t bite me: it is a male Winter Tick, Dermacentor albipictus (Packard, 1869).

Winter Tick-infested Moose - 3:12 AM
trail camera shot

 Winter Ticks appear to prefer to suck the blood of moose and their relatives (Cervidae – moose, elk, deer, caribou). Moose can be very heavily infested - the average load in late winter is 30,000 ticks (see Samuel* 2004 p. 31). Heavily infested moose spend more time rubbing up against trees and the like trying to remove the itchy ticks than feeding. The result is a Ghost Moose – skinny, with ragged coats, open sores, and a grey-white colour. Many such moose will die overwinter, but if they can last until May, most of the ticks will have dropped off and they have a chance to recover.

Ghost Moose at Dawn

 Winter Ticks are the only ticks you are likely to find in Alberta in the winter, so identification is not too challenging. The adults are ornate ticks, i.e. the dorsal plate (covering the whole body in the male, but only the part just behind the ‘head’ in females) is patterned and they have 11 posterior festoons (the tooth-like grin at the rear). A pair of small eyes on the margins of the plate and a spiracular plate with large ‘goblet cells’ (unless you know what small goblet cells look like, this isn’t a great character) completes the identification. Males also have a distinctively formed spur on the base of the first pair of legs. Adult males are not above wandering around looking for females, so you or your dog may pick-up one of these ticks while on a winter hike on a mild day. Usually, they would keep wandering until they found a moose with female ticks, but if they are more hungry than horny, the males may bite (or at least I was brought a Winter Tick male that someone claimed bit them near their eye).

Winter Ticks have eyes too (arrow)

 Most hard ticks (Ixodidae - the family that includes the Winter Tick) have three different hosts during their life cycle – one of the reasons they are so likely to pick-up and transmit a disease causing pathogen. Each life stage - larva, nymph, and adult – attaches to and feeds on the blood of a host until full and then drops off. Winter Ticks, however, usually spend most of their lives on the same host. The best place to learn about the fascinating story of the Winter Tick is Bill Samuel’s book (see below*), and SRD kindly provides a good factsheet, but I’ll give a quick overview of the highlights.

Mouthparts (upper) and coxal spur (lower)

 From late winter until early spring, you can find female Winter Ticks as blood-filled blobs (to ~1.5 cm diameter) attached to moose and other members of the Cervidae (deer, elk, moose, caribou), and rarely on other large herbivores (bison, cattle, horses) or smaller mammals (coyotes). Males feed a bit, but do not bloat, and wander the moose looking for females to mate. Once the females have dropped off to lay their eggs (about 5000 each), you might come across them on the ground or in the litter around moose wallows and the like. Some of these female ticks may have been buried in the litter by magpies – which will also eat the ticks directly off the moose. 

Magpies - boreal tick birds

Tick eggs lie dormant until late summer to early fall when they hatch into tiny (<1mm) seed ticks (larvae – with only 3 pairs of legs). Seed ticks hunt moose, usually by hanging on to low vegetation and grabbing a moose when it walks by. Sometimes larvae get on people by mistake, as we, much to our horror, found out one September, but they don't attach. The larva wanders the moose until it finds a good site to bite through the skin, suck blood, and then shed its skin to become a nymph. Nymphs hang out and wait for things to get cold before sucking enough blood to moult into adults.

Moose Fly - the business end

 You’d think that Winter Tick would be all the parasite nastiness that any animal should have to endure, but Mother Nature has a summer surprise for moose too - Haematobosca alcis (Snow, 1891), the Moose Fly. Just as the moose is beginning to recover its condition in early summer, these housefly-sized pests start to appear. The flies hang out on the back legs of moose, pierce the skin with their long proboscis, and cause large, open sores from which they feed.

Sores from Moose Fly bites

 If you notice a cloud of flies around the rear of a moose in summer, especially if there are sores on the hind legs, you are likely seeing Moose Flies. The flies lay their eggs in moose dropping, the larval food, so moose give these pests pretty much everything they need. The sores don't heal until frost kills off the adult flies but tend not to fester either. So, it seems likely that the flies introduce a substance that protects the sores from bacteria. You can read all the gory details at  another SRD factsheet and see better pictures of the sores than we have here. Next time I’m feeling persecuted by the mozzies, I think I’ll reflect on the life of the moose, and not complain so much.

References:

*Bill Samuel. 2004. "White as a Ghost: Winter Ticks & Moose" Federation of Alberta Naturalists.

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. 2004. Winter Tick - Fact Sheet #21. http://srd.alberta.ca/fishwildlife/WildlifeDiseases/documents/Winter_ticks.pdf

Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. 2010. Moose Flies - Fact Sheet #30. 

http://www.srd.alberta.ca/fishwildlife/WildlifeDiseases/documents/MooseFliesFactSheet-Aug2010.pdf

The Clivia Food Web: Part I

Natal Lily (Clivia hybrid) in flower 

Bulbs are one of the Home Bug Gardener's obsessions. Not that most bulbs are especially useful plants for promoting insect conservation in the Aspen Parkland of Alberta, but anticipation of the blooming of the 2000 or so spring bulbs that inhabit my yard does help fight off the winter gloom. The most spectacular of my bulbs, however, blooms in the Fall - a Clivia hybrid given to us by a friend. Or rather I should say bloomed in the Fall, which it did in 2010. Last Autumn, though, they could barely muster a few yellowed and sickly leaves. Still I brought the pot inside when the frosts came (Natal Lily hails from Southern Africa) and hoped for the best.

Rove Beetle from Clivia pot - Anotylus insecatus

When a plant starts looking sickly there is often an arthropod or a microbe to blame (or an incompetent gardener) and when one finds an insect associated with a sick plant it is easy to assume the worst. The small (4.5 mm long) rove beetle above, Anotylus insecatus (Gravenhorst, 1806), is both an invasive alien insect and associated with rotting bulbs - so finding it in my Clivia pot was not encouraging. However, the beetle is probably a predator of bulb maggots and other pests (see Campbell & Tomlin 1983) and not a pest itself. Still, as Fall became Winter and no new growth or flower stalks appeared, something would seem to be rotten.

Clivia pot worms, insects, springtails, and mites

A few weeks ago I repotted the Clivia - and yes, half the bulbs were rotting - and sent the soil and slimy bulbs off to the University for extraction. All you need to extract arthropods from soil is an incandescent light bulb, a funnel, a screen, and a small container that fits the stem of the funnel. From these simple ingredients you can assemble a Berlese Funnel (aka Tullgren Funnel) and start learning about the animals that live in soil. As the light bulb dries out the soil, the animals follow the moisture gradient down, pass through the screen, and tumble into the collecting container. Berlese funnels work best for arthropods, but some worms and snails will come through too. The Clivia pot turned out to have a lot of inhabitants (see above): an earthworm (large worm at left above); another kind of rove beetle (black and about 4 mm long), as yet unidentified; several pot worms (Enchytraeidae - the small white worms mid-picture); and a host of springtails and mites. The good news: lots of harmless soil animals and no bulb maggots; the bad news: lots of bulb mites.

Unfortunately, most of the mites from the extraction were the notorious Bulb Mite Rhizoglyphus robini Claparède, 1869. Bulb mites do best in cold, wet weather - like last summer - and once a bulb is colonized, they are difficult to eliminate. But - the second most abundant mite in this extraction was a predatory mite in the genus Gaeolaelaps (also called Hypoaspis). Izabela Lesna and her colleagues in the Netherlands have shown that Gaeolaelaps aculeifer (Canestrini, 1884) can be an effective biological control agent of bulb mites. If only I had been a bit lazier and waited to repot the bulbs until later in the New Year, the problem may have solved itself. Still, I now have the makings of a map of the feeding relationships inside my former pot of Clivia - a food web. That sounds like a good project for the New Year and a chance to contribute to the Wildlife in Our Homes Project.

Mystery Rove Beetle from Clivia pot soil

References:

Campbell JM, Tomlin AD. 1983. The First Record of the Palearctic Species Anotylus insecatus (Gravenhorst) (Coleoptera:Staphylinidae) from North America.The Coleopterists Bulletin 37(4): 309-313. http://www.jstor.org/pss/4008251

Lesna I, Sabelis M, Conijn C. 1996. Biological Control of the Bulb Mite, Rhizoglyphus robini, by the Predatory Mite, Hypoaspis aculeifer, on Lilies: Predator-Prey Interactions at Various Spatial Scales. Journal of Applied Ecology 33(2 ): 369-376 http://www.jstor.org/pss/2404758

What's afoot in the Winter in the Home Bug Garden?

Young Basement Spider Tegenaria domestica

I've always found the first official day of winter somewhat strange, coming as it does, months after winter actually starts. I guess there must be some rhyme or reason to picking the solstice as the beginning of winter instead of say, Winter Hump Day. In much of the world today would be well on the way to Spring. Not in Edmonton, though, we've still a long way to go if previous years are any indication.

A typical March in the Home Bug Garden

So what is the arthropod addict to do with so many more months of winter in the way? Well, our friend John Acorn has come up with the Arthropod Winter Challenge! How many living arthropods can we find in Alberta in the winter? John thinks we can find more arthropod than bird species. Well, inside our house that certainly is true - first look around found three species of arthropods including the half grown Funnel-web Spider (Agelenidae) at the top. That is not quite fair to the birds - we have none to compete - but outside? Yes, there is a cornucopia of arthropods outside that brave the winter weather - but you need to look very closely for them and for many you need to put your nose to the ground.

Microarthropods from a few handfuls of spruce litter under the deep snows of last winter

All gardeners know that a good blanket of snow protects their plants from winter extremes, but even in very cold climates a good snow cover can also capture enough warmth for the tiny animals (microarthropods, nematodes, tardigrades, etc.) and microbes that live in the soil to go about their business. A few degrees above freezing is all they need; but so far, snow has been relatively scarce in Edmonton this winter and so no layer of relative warmth has been trapped. And, while I've enjoyed the less than usual shovelling, it has put a bit of a damper on my response to John's challenge.

A Fairy Wasp (Mymaridae, Polynema sp.) from under last winter's snow

Well, we Edmontonians know that good weather rarely lasts long and I expect that in the New Year I'll have a chance to see quite a bit more snow. I'll take comfort in knowing that under that snow my plants will be safer and there will be tiny arthropods having a good time, like the Fairy Wasp above. This tiny wasp - 0.6 mm long from head to tip of its ovipositor -  is a parasite of the eggs of leafhoppers. Bad news for baby bugs, but good news for the garden.

A Week for the Bugs: Part I – It’s all in the beak

Very young bugs with thrips, their close relatives

Last week I did something that has become unusual for me: I went to an Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting (its 59th). Yes, I was one of about four thousand bug-obsessed people who descended on Reno, Nevada, for 5 days of presentations on the current state of entomological research in North America (and the World). One bug or another was the buzz for each and every of the 2,200 presentations from entomologists from all over the United States and three dozen other countries. Well, bugs in the common sense, anyway.

A stink bug deploys its all important beak

When I was a child, defining a bug was simple: if it scurried on spiny legs and wasn’t a spider, it was a bug. Such logic sufficed for a child, but as I grew older and began my indoctrination into the entomological mysteries, I learned that there were ‘bugs’ for the common people and ‘true bugs’ for scientists. 

A lightening 'bug' is actually a beetle (Ellychnia corrusca)

 The Heteroptera Latreille, 1810, then an order of about 40,000 species of insects, contains the 'true bugs’. As adults, most heteropterans have ‘different wings’, that is the front pair are hardened and thickened (except towards the tips) and the rear pair are larger and translucent. Heteropterans also have their mouthparts formed into a beak or proboscis for piercing and sucking the juices of insects, plants, or even people.

A seed bug Peritrechus fraternus

The true bugs of my youth included the always creepily interesting assassin bugs and ambush bugs. Then there were the pesky plant bugs, lace bugs, leaf-footed bugs, seed bugs, and the smelly and foul-tasting stink bugs. A trip to a pond or stream revealed armies of water bugs, usually going by other names such as toe-nippers, backswimmers, waterboatmen, and water striders. 

Bug eats bug - note membranous hind wings of victim

 Perhaps the most infamous of true bugs are the bed bugs (family Cimicidae). Along the road to becoming blood-sucking parasites, an ancestor of the bed bugs lost its wings, but otherwise they are typical bugs. Well, so they said, but I never saw one until I was much older. Along the road to becoming a university professor, I lost the Heteroptera as an order, but I gained a world where bed bugs are now common.

Two bed bugs from Queensland with beaks deployed

Heteroptera was good enough to get me through university, and as a suborder sustains me still, but science moves on and today’s true bugs now include the Homoptera (‘same wing’) of my youth. What was once Homoptera have a host of common names. Aphids, plant lice, whiteflies, mealybugs, and scale insects are familiar to anyone who has tried to grow a plant. And then there are the noisy cicadas (aka locusts); bizarre lanternflies; and far too numerous hoppers (plant-, leaf-, tree-, and frog-) and spittlebugs. 

Meet the bugs in spittlebug

 I suppose, 'spittlebug' should now be two words, ‘spittle bug’, at least for those who feel that common names must follow the current scientific wisdom. All bugs with similar piercing-sucking mouthparts, irrespective of their common names, are now subsumed in the older ordinal name Hemiptera (‘half wings’) of Linnaeus, 1758.

A 'throat beak' leafhopper Colladonus belli (Uhler, 1877)

The Homoptera is well and truly gone (see Gullan 1999) and has been replaced by two tongue-twisters. Auchenorrhyncha is, I assume, from the Greek for ‘throat beak’ and referring to an anterior origin of the proboscis. This includes the 42,000 or so species of cicadas, laternflies, and assorted hoppers and spittle bugs.

'Breast-beaked' Giant Lupine Aphids (with thrips)

 The Sternorrhyncha or ‘breast beaks’ have a more posterior proboscis as in the 15,000 or so species of aphids, plant lice, and their scaly, mealy and whitefly relatives. Don’t get too attached to these names, though, because scientific progress may shatter them as well. Some day, a grouchy old throat-beak lover may be bemoaning the Auchenorrhyncha of his youth.

Water strider, currently secure in suborder Heteroptera

 Reference

Gullan, PJ (1999). "Why the taxon Homoptera does not exist". Entomologica 33: 101–104.

How to Know a Fly, Part II: Fruit, Pomace, Names & Patterned Wings

Drosophila 'fruit fly' or 'dew fly'?

Tiny flies with red eyes hover over many a bowl of fruit. I suppose that is why we call them fruit flies, but therein reigns imprecision, confusion, and bad wine. I suppose the most well known fruit fly must be Drosophila melanogaster Meigen, 1830, because it inhabits biology and genetics textbooks the world over. My translations of the genus and species names are ‘dew lover’ and ‘black belly’, neither exactly fruity, but seemingly in agreement with other translations. Carl Fredrik Fallén proposed the name Drosophila in 1823 with Musca funebris Fabricius, 1787, as the type species. Funebris is Latin for funeral or death. That would seem to leave us with the equally fruitless ‘Death’s Dew-Lover’ as the type species of the type genus of the 'fruit fly' family Drosophilidae. No wonder, many entomologists, especially if they work in horticulture or quarantine, use ‘Fruit Fly’ for another family: the Tephritidae.

Adult Apple Maggot - a real Fruit Fly (Tephritidae)

Admittedly, although the Tephritidae does contain many economically important pests of fruit, the name may be derived from the Greek for ashes or ash-coloured. Species of Tephritis Griffith & Pidgeon, 1832, do not occur in the Home Bug Garden, but another tephritid fly in the same tribe and with similar habits and similar looks does: Campiglossa albiceps (Loew, 1873). Like species of Tephritis, the maggots of this fly inhabit the 'flowers' (actually heads of many small florets) of plants in the Asteraceae (asters, daisies, goldenrod etc.) and eat the seeds (achenes), but to a botanist achenes are the fruits, so we have some consistency.

Campiglossa albiceps - a tephritid Fruit Fly of ashy mien?

No joy for the etymologist with Tephritidae, but I’m not the only one to find the conjunction of ‘fruit fly’ and Drosophila objectionable. The eminent geneticist MM Green (2002) has a delightful rant in the journal Genetics on the diversity of habitats infested by drosophilid ‘fruit flies’. Perhaps the only thing that ties together the ecology of most species of Drosophila is a fondness for rotten things. Green points out that ‘Pomace Fly’ was the preferred common name in 20^th Century genetics texts until the Roaring Twenties when ‘Vinegar Fly’ and the infamous ‘Fruit Fly’ started slugging it out.

Scaptomyza sp. a drosophilid 'fruit fly' that breeds in rotting leaves

As anyone who has allowed Drosophila to get into his or her fermenting mash might know, Vinegar Fly is an all too appropriate name: Drosophila carry the microbes that compete with wine yeasts. Pomice, the mush leftover after fruit hs been juiced, also makes a nice base for a common name. For most of the flies in the family Drosophilidae whose larval habits are known, it is the rot in the fruit  that makes their habitat. The maggots tend to feed on the yeasts and bacteria that develop (probably after having been introduced by adult flies) in spoiled or damage leaves, fruit, nuts, cacti, sap fluxes, mushrooms, and similarly liquefying plant substrates. Perhaps Fallén knew what he was writing about.

Leucophenga sp. a drosophilid 'fruit fly' associated with mushrooms

But even if Fallén was trying to make his name reflect the behaviour of his species, why should we care? Common names are not for scientists. Besides, generalizing about the habits of a family of insects, or even a genus, is likely to lead to error. There are drosophilid maggots that eat fresh water algae, hang out in the gills of land crabs, live in flowers, mine leaves or stems, and even one or two species that attack fresh fruit. Evolution tends towards the opportunistic and if the right opportunity presents itself an insect is likely to try and take it on. An example of opportunism is the drosophilid Chymomyza amoena (Loew, 1862) – a gift from North America to Europe. This fly breeds in a variety of fallen fruit, acorns, and nuts in Eastern North America and is now spreading through apple and chestnut orchards in Europe. Apparently, there are no European ‘fruit flies’ that fill this niche, and our native is happy to oblige (see Burla 1997, Band et al. 2005, Matteson et al. 2007 in references below).

Chymomyza ('juice fly') from AB that breeds in wounds on aspen trunks

The only Chymomyza I’ve seen in Alberta lacks the patterned wings (or boldly contrasting legs – see Eberhard 2002 in refs below) that are used for sexual signaling in both drosophilid and tephritid (and many other) flies and prefers oozing sap to fruit. However, we do have our ‘true’ Fruit Fly: the Apple Maggot (aka Railroad Worm – presumably from the winding trail of the maggot in the fruit) Rhagoletis pomonella (Walsh, 1867) to entertain us. This fly appears to have originated in North America as a maggot in the fruit of hawthorns (genus Crataegus). Like apples, to which they are related, hawthorns have attractive white flowers in the spring (the White Hawthorn is the state flower of Missouri) and red fruit that somewhat resemble tiny apples. When apples started to outnumber hawthorns, some hawthorn flies switched hosts to give us our Apple Maggot. Although watching one strut around in one's garden is not a good sign, they are far more interesting than the cabbage maggots that wreck the broccoli, turnips, and radish.

Rhagoletis pomonella - not a welcome guest, but an attractive one

Well, enough is enough. As usual, what I thought would be a simple post on a few interesting ‘fruit flies’ that might take an hour or so has led to a weekend’s worth of ‘free time’ lost to reading about bugs (instead of doing chores). And I haven’t even gotten to the really interesting things like the ability of some Chymomyza species to survive freezing to −100 °C  (see Koštála et al. 2011) or their use in exploring the ‘Timeless’ gene. I guess there are worse ways to waste one’s time, but just now I’m informed it is time for dinner and I’d better get cooking.

Campiglossa albiceps - a true fruit fly that eats flowers

References

Band HT. 1995. A note on the sympatric collection of Chymomyza (Diptera: Drosophilidae) in

Virginia's Allegheny Mountains. Great Lakes Entomologist 28(3-4): 217-220.

Band HT; Bachli G; Band RN. 2005. Behavioral constancy for interspecies dependency enables Nearctic Chymomyza amoena (Loew) (Diptera : Drosophilidae) to spread in orchards and forests in Central and Southern Europe. Biological Invasions 7(3): 509-530 DOI: 10.1007/s10530-004-6352-2

Band HT, Band RN & Bachli G. 2003. Nearctic Chymomyza amoena (Loew) is breeding in parasitized chestnuts and domestic apples in Northern Italy and is widespread in Austria. Mitteilungen der Schweizerischen Entomologischen Gesellschaft 76(3-4):307-318.

Burla, Hans. 1997. Natural breeding sites of Chymomyza species (Diptera, Drosophilidae) in Switzerland. Part II. Mitteilungen der Schweizerischen Entomologischen Gesellschaft 70(1-2): 35-41.

Eberhard William G. 2002. Natural history and behavior of Chymomyza mycopelates and C. exophthalma (Diptera: Drosophilidae), and allometry of structures used as signals, weapons, and spore collectors. Canadian Entomologist 134(5):667-687.

Green MM. 2002. It Really Is Not a Fruit Fly. Genetics 162:1-3.

Grimaldi, DA. 1990. A phylogenetic, revised classification of genera in the Drosophilidae (Diptera). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 197: 1–128.

Vladimír Koštála , Helena Zahradníčkováa,& Petr Šimeka. 2011. Hyperprolinemic larvae of the drosophilid fly, Chymomyza costata, survive cryopreservation in liquid nitrogen. PNAS 108(32): 13041–13046.

William Mattson, Henri Vanhanen, Timo Veteli, Sanna Sivonen & Pekka Niemela. 2007. Few immigrant phytophagous insects on woody plants in Europe: legacy of the European crucible? Biological Invasions 9:957–974 DOI 10.1007/s10530-007-9096-y