Tuesday, June 21, 2011
"A little bit of scruffiness goes a long way."
So said Liz Bonnin on Springwatch, referring to the diversity of life at Pitsea Landfill, Essex. Or in our garden, of course.
The variety continues to surprise me, although most of the insects I manage to identify turn out to be common species. This muscular gent is a Thick-legged Flower Beetle, and he's new this year.
The delicate insect below is some sort of ichneumon wasp. It could be Amblyetes armatorius - or it could be something entirely different. There are a couple of thousand of these in the UK, and many of them look so similar that it's impossible to identify them from a photo. And what about that tiddly beetle above-left of the wasp? I can hardly even see it, let alone identify it. 
Another miniscule individual is a Froghopper. I've deduced their presence over the years from the "cuckoo spit" (the froth that protects their larvae) on the stems of various plants, but I finally managed to see one of the adults recently. To make sure it wasn't just a seed or something, I put my fingertip gently under the leaf it was on and was amazed to feel this tiny creature push down as it leapt away.Hoverflies can also be a bother to ID, but several excellent websites confirm that this is a Myathropa florea - the grey bars on the thoracic dorsum (just below the head) and the yellow body hairs being diagnostic.
So that's a definite then, although it doesn't seem to have a common name. I wondered why male entomologists often have beards; they just don't get time to shave. And they seem mostly short-sighted, which is an advantage. It makes you wonder how Noah was supposed to have found all these critturs to put them on his ark, and how he would have recognised the dimorphic ones (distinct forms for male and female) of the same species; or, come to that, how he recognised the male and female when they're alike. Sometimes even experts can't tell until they've put them under a microscope.
And the sheer numbers are enough to defeat anyone. There are at least 700,000 known insect species on the planet so you've got to find room for 1,400,000 of the little blighters, and all of them mating, or fighting, or eating each other all the time; then there are 4,000 mammal species, 9,000 birds.....
As Chief of Police Martin Brody of Amity Island might have said "We're gonna need a bigger boat!"
// posted by Christine @ 11:39 AM 
