Herps and Invert tracking weekend

We had a good tracking weekend with guest Charley Eiseman who is the author of the new book Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates. He gave us a great slide show the first morning with pictures and stories of some of the fascinating creatures he learned about as he wrote his book. Here are a few of the more interesting things that I learned this weekend:

Texas leaf cutter ants use bits of leaves as a medium for a fungal growth that sustains them. There are several different duties that the ants take responsibility for. Some ants cut the leaves, others protect the plant, and other ants act as "quality control" and send back leaves that aren't best suited for fungal growth. There will be piles of these rejected leaves a hundred feet from the ant mound. And the mounds can be 40 feet wide with the fungal gardens 20 feet under ground.

Leaf miners genetically engineer leaves to create a growth that encapsulates their larvae by inserting their DNA into the leaf. This also happens in many other galls. There is a theory that the origin of fleshy fruit is from wasp DNA interacting with a plant to create a gall, which eventually proved beneficial to the plant and turned into its fruit.

Slugs poop out of the side of their heads.

17 year cicadas suck on roots under ground for 17 years and then pop out to reproduce. Millions of individuals are perfectly synchronized to do this in 17 year intervals. Different species do this too, almost always in intervals of a prime number so that their pop out doesn't coincide with another species.

We saw some ants that were farming aphids. Aphids eat more sugar than they can digest so the ants protect them and eat the excess. They shelter the aphids in poor weather and take them out to graze in good weather.

There are 1600 species of caddis fly, each with their own specific casing. Some create casing out of pebbles with two bigger pebbles on either side for better balance in swift streams. Some are perfect rectangles, other are a mess of debris.

How all of these tiny creatures "know" to do these things is beyond me. Here are some pictures from the weekend:

Resin midge larvae (the red spot) and faint beetle tracks.

This is a "Bee fly". It looks like a bee but its harmless.

This is the web of the "bowl and doiley" spider.

Eggs.

Wood turtle and tracks from the Center for Wildlife. This one was hit by a car (note the pins holding its shell together).

Caddis fly with casing.