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ESC Blog, Natural History, Non classifié(e)

Western Specialties

Living in Western Canada is pretty sweet. Especially here on the coast, we have a plethora of awesome insects that only occur in this region. I am trying to savour these insects while I can, as this fall I am moving to Toronto.

The snakeflies (Raphidioptera) are awesome animals, with a delightfully elongate prothorax and long bladelike ovipositors. These insects are fairly common in the early spring in a Garry Oak meadow not far from my mother’s house, so whenever I am in the vicinity at the right time I keep an eye out for them.

The most common snakeflies in BC are members of the genus Agulla.

What I had not noticed about these insects is how the pronotum wraps around ventrally, like a shield. Also look at the awesome ornamentation on the thorax!

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The larvae of snakeflies are difficult to find, but if you flip over enough rocks or logs, you may just find one!

In fact, flipping over logs is exactly how I found this next western treasure…A tiger beetle that may just shatter your image of tiger beetles forever.

This is Omus dejeani, often referred to by its awesome common name, the greater night-stalking tiger beetle. This is a tiger that could easily be mistaken at a glance for a carabine, if not for the shape of the thorax. This is not a slender, bright, iridescent speedster, but rather a hulking, powerful night terror.

Yes, make no mistake, this is a tiger through and through. The mandibles tell the tale. Bugguide has this to say about the origin of the generic name Omus: Probably from Greek omos (ωμος)- « raw, crude » or « savage, fierce, cruel »

Regardless of the name, this beetle is a truly impressive beast, though I rarely encounter it. I wonder if it could be because of the introduction of the two similarly-sized invasive carabines Carabus granulatus and Carabus nemoralis.

Anyhow, regardless of where you live, get out and enjoy what your region has to offer. Insect season is in full swing, and life is short. This summer I will keep flipping logs to savour the western specialties!

Log flipping also brought me an encounter with another western treasure: the rough skinned newt (Taricha granulosa). Who doesn’t love a newt!

mai 24, 2015/par Sean McCann

Canadian Entomology, ESC Blog, Natural History, Non classifié(e)

Finding a rare robber fly in the Okanagan

Vaseux Lake, a gorgeous body of water in a dry landscape.

Catherine Scott and I recently indulged in an almost unheard-of pleasure…A week long car camping trip to the Okanagan Valley! For those of you who don’t know, this is the area where the vast majority of BC wines originate (and tree fruit crops as well!). The South Okanagan and the Lower Similkameen Valleys, biologically speaking, are very similar to a desert, with many of the flora shared with northern parts of the Great Basin Desert.

The purpose of the trip was to have fun and seek out whatever cool life-forms we could, basically doing undirected fieldwork. With Catherine along, it meant that we sought out a LOT of spiders, but the Okanagan has some spectacular ones, so I was not complaining.

Catherine under the rocky slopes off McIntyre Rd.

While soliciting info about good spots to check out, one of our Twitter contacts told us to be on the lookout for Efferia okanagana, a robber fly (Asilidae), recently described by Rob Cannings in The Canadian Entomologist.

The bluffs are spectacular, with abundant scree slopes, which can produce something terrifyingly called a « debris torrent » at times.

On the 5th day of our trip, we were examining the awesome bluffs above the eastern shore of Vaseux Lake (thanks Nature Trust!), when we spotted our first robber. I managed to get a dorsal shot of this female, followed by a couple lateral shots.

We took these to a local restaurant with Wi-Fi, and compared them to the pictures of E. okanagana in the paper. They looked mighty similar! We went on Twitter to ask Dr. Cannings if these were indeed the Efferia we were looking for. They were!

This robber is at significant risk of extinction due to its small range in Canada (to date it has not been collected in Washington State). The South Okanagan grassland habitats where this and other iconic wildlife make their living are at risk due to widespread development and increased agricultural land use. It is one of the earliest-flying robbers in the area, and photographs have documented it feeding on a wide variety of insect taxa. Like other large Efferia, they are not super difficult to approach, flying in bursts when disturbed and often coming to rest only metres away.

The very next day, coincidentally World Robber Fly Day (thanks to Erica McAlister of the Natural History Museum), we set out for the bluffs once more (they are an awesome habitat). We managed to find E. okanagana several more times, including a female feeding and a pair in copula!

A female Efferia okanagana chows down on what looks like an ichneumonid.

Eating requires a leg bath afterward.

A pair of Efferia okanagana copulating! The male seems to partially cover the female’s eyes with his tarsi.

Look at the odd position of the male’s abdomen!

A male, note the bulbous rear end.

Catherine after an awesome trip to the bluffs above Vaseux Lake.

mai 6, 2015/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Non classifié(e)

Invasive ants march on the West Coast

Invasive ants are generally a phenomenon of warmer climates. Argentine ants, red imported fire ants, and electric ants are all major economic problems in places like Florida, New Caledonia, and Australia. But what is to stop European and Asian ant species from damaging invasions of Canada? It turns out, not much.

Ken Naumann and Rob Higgins, entomologists working on ants in BC, have just published a paper in The Canadian Entomologist on the spread of Myrmica rubra, the so called European fire ant in coastal BC.

In many ways, European fire ants are typical Myrmica, engaged in scavenging, predation and aphid tending. They distinguish themselves in their high colony density and proclivity to sting.

This insect was first detected almost a century ago in Boston, and has since spread to many areas of eastern North America. It has not generally been problematic, but in the past 10-15 years, reports of high colony densities and spread have been increasing. These small red ants are superficially similar to other native Myrmica, but in occupied ground they reach staggeringly high colony densities of up to 4 nests/square metre. They become known to anyone walking on their turf due to their painful stinging attacks in defense of their nests. In areas with large numbers of colonies, activities as innocuous as sitting on the grass can become impossible.

Despite her beautiful wings, this Myrmica rubra queen will not fly, a strange trait that is ubiquitous across the North American range for this species.

One factor limiting the spread of these ants is that the queens do not seem to be able to fly. That trait has been lost in their transition to their new home, although the males still engage in winged dispersal. These ants are instead spreading through nest budding where already established and through movement of infested soil and wood into new areas.

In the paper, Naumann and Higgins report staggeringly high numbers of EFA captures in pitfall trapping in infested areas, compared to moderate numbers of native ants in uninfested habitats. The numbers of Myrmica rubra exceeded the numbers of all native ants by 10 to 1300 times!

In infested areas, Myrmica rubra is the only ant to be found.

More worryingly, Myrmica rubra seems to outcompete and eliminate all other native ants, and in infested areas, very few native ants can be found. In addition, other litter arthropods seem to be reduced in infested areas as well, though the reduction in species richness indices is mostly attributable to the loss of the native ants.

British Columbia, as a biologically diverse and relatively warm province with high levels of oceanic trade, may be the testing ground for biological invasions from ants. A second introduced Myrmica, Myrmica specioides, is also mentioned in the paper. Unlike M. rubra, Myrmica specioides queens retain their flight capabilities, and thus there is no feasible way of stopping their spread.

The ants are marching in BC, and entomologists are well advised to keep up with their movements!

Superficially similar, Myrmica specioides (left) can be distinguished in the field from M. rubra (right) by the sharp bend at the base of the scape. M. rubra has a gently curving scape instead.

Nowhere to go but up: Myrmica specioides queens are quite capable of flight!

décembre 18, 2014/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Non classifié(e)

Tracking the Warren Root Collar Weevil

The following is a guest post from ESC student member Sharleen Balogh. Sharleen is a Masters student at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) working with Dezene Huber and Staffan Lindgren on Warren Root Collar Weevils. She recently took home a President’s Prize for best talk at the ESC/ESS JAM in Saskatoon.

For the past two years, I have been studying the Warren root collar weevil (Hylobius warreni). These weevils are fairly large and long-‐lived (for insects anyways, they are about 12-‐15 mm, and live for up to five years). I think they are big enough to have distinct faces and personalities, although some people have told me that I’m personifying them just a bit too much and I need to take a step back from my work, but that’s another story altogether.

I am studying them because of their effects on coniferous trees, especially young lodgepole pines regenerating after the mountain pine beetle infestation in the interior of British Columbia. The larvae feed on the roots and root collars of trees, causing mortality of young trees and growth reductions in older trees (Cerezke 1994). They are native to the Prince George area (where I am doing my research) and can be found across much of Canada. They are often fairly common within their range. However they really can be described as “everywhere and nowhere”, since you can find them in almost any forested area in the region, just in low numbers and often well-‐hidden.

The Warren root collar weevil. How can you not love that face? Photo: Staffan Lindgren

I have specifically been looking at the mechanisms by which they locate their host trees. The weevils can’t fly, so they walk along the ground in search of hosts. We know that they use vision (Machial et al. 2012a) to locate trees, but not much else about their host location. There are higher rates of attack by larvae on larger trees, but this could just be a result of a larger area of roots available, not an actual preference when finding hosts. So far no one has been able to find any chemical cues that they use, although this is very unusual for an insect. Some evidence suggests that at least in some situations their movements may be predominantly random and non-‐directional (Machial et al. 2012b, Klingenberg et al. 2010).

In order to study them, I decided to track the weevils using harmonic radar technology. This is the same technology that is used to locate avalanche victims. It functions by the detector sending out a signal in the microwave range that is passively reflected back by a transponder, attached to whatever you want to find. For use in locating avalanche victims, the transponder is the large Recco® tags you often see in ski jackets. In the case of the weevils, I used a miniaturized transponder– a tiny diode soldered to a 4 cm long piece of copper wire.

When I first decided to use this method, and to construct the transponders myself, I went online to learn how to solder. I was told by several different tutorials that it is “very easy, almost impossible to get wrong”. This may be the case when soldering computer circuit boards, but not so when soldering two tiny pieces of metal together under the microscope. In the end though, I did get it to work, and I tagged 115 weevils over two field seasons. I released them into individual plots in a lodgepole pine stand, within which I had mapped all of the trees, and I relocated them at regular intervals.

Although I’m still analyzing my data, my results suggest that the weevils preferred to go to closer trees, larger trees, and that the preference for larger trees increases when the trees are further away. Otherwise, their movements appear to be primarily random and non-‐directional. So, as strange as it is, maybe they do just use vision and random movements. If this is true, and their host selection process is predominantly random, this may have implications for forest management. It might make finding ways to limit their spread into new stands difficult, and it may make it difficult or impossible to identify potential genetically resistant trees for planting.

Warren root collar weevil tagged with transponder. Photo: Staffan Lindgren

References Cited:

Cerezke, H.F. 1994. Warren rootcollar weevil, Hylobius warreni Wood (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), in Canada: ecology, behavior, damage, relationships, and management. The Canadian Entomologist. 126: 1383-‐1442

Machial, L.A., B.S. Lindgren, and B.H. Aukema. 2012a. The role of vision in the host orientation behaviour of Hylobius warreni. Agricultural and Forest Entomology. 14:

286-‐294

Machial, L.A., B.S. Lindgren, R.W. Steenweg, and B.H. Aukema. 2012b. Dispersal of Warren root collar weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) in three types of habitat. Environmental Entomology. 41: 578-‐586

Klingenberg, M.D., N. Bjorklund, and B.H. Aukema. 2010. Seeing the forest through the trees: differential dispersal of Hylobius warreni within modified forest habitats. Environmental Entomology. 39: 898-‐906

novembre 5, 2014/par Sean McCann

Entomological Society of British Columbia, ESC Blog, Non classifié(e), Research Blogging, Students

Exotic field collecting…in the hallway!

The following post is by Chloe Gerak, a Masters student at UBC who completed an undergraduate project at Simon Fraser University in the Gries lab.This past weekend, she won the top prize for an undergraduate talk at the Annual General Meeting of the Entomological Society of British Columbia with a talk entitled « How the false widow finds true love ». Photos by Sean McCann.

A male Steatoda grossa. These spiders have stereotyped courtship behaviour involving stridulation of an organ located dorsally between the cephalothorax and abdomen.

For approximately eight months, I studied the courtship behaviour and chemical communication between male and female false widow spiders, Steatoda grossa. Prior to studying them in Prof. Gerhard Gries’ lab at Simon Fraser University, I had never even heard of this species!

Female Steatoda grossa on her web.

My mentor Catherine Scott and I had collected juvenile and mature false widow spiders around the basement of the biology wing at SFU… and let’s just say we didn’t have a lack of specimens to collect. Almost every baseboard we turned over or corner we searched, we would find these little guys and collect them individually into petri dishes. These formed the nucleus of our laboratory colony which we reared for behavioural experiments.

A common nickname for Steatoda grossa is the “cupboard spider,” which I find extremely appropriate considering these spiders seem to love dwelling in dark corners. Since they are so abundant around SFU, and I had never even seen one before this, I think people should not be frightened by cohabiting with them… likely, you won’t even know they are there!

octobre 29, 2014/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Natural History, Non classifié(e)

Mating of western yellowjackets

The following post comes to us from our new President, Staffan Lindgren, who in addition to being a great researcher, takes the time to make natural history observations which are crucial for any entomologist.

Male Vespula pensylvanica. This was the male that was mating with the queen.

On occasion I grab my camera and go out in the garden to see if some photogenic insect or other arthropod is willing to pose for me. On October 18, I went out to see what was happening around the rose bushes between ours and our neighbour’s yard. I was immediately struck by the fairly intense activity of yellowjackets, which peaked my curiosity. After looking around for a while I saw what the commotion was all about; a large queen was being mobbed by a number of males. To my knowledge, I have never seen a male yellowjacket wasp before. A casual observer would just think that they were workers, since they are about the same size and don’t otherwise look obviously different. Looking closer I realized that the queen was in copula with one of the males, so I tried to get some photos. It immediately became clear that I had the wrong lens on; my Canon MP-E 65 macro simply couldn’t capture the entire scene. Therefore the photos I managed to take only show parts of the scene. I didn’t have time to go back and change the lens, unfortunately, but below are a few shots.

Here is another view of the male.

This is the queen. The male she was mating with is in the lower right corner. Note the second male trying to mate with her in the background. Note also that her legs are not in contact with the leaf; she was essentially held by the male.

And here is a view of the act of mating, showing the male in the foreground holding on to the queen. Using these photos and the identification guide to the Vespinae I came to the conclusion that these are Vespula pensylvanica Saussure.

octobre 26, 2014/par Sean McCann

Entomological Society of Saskatchewan, ESC Blog, Meetings, Non classifié(e), Students

What is a President’s Prize worth?

Sabrina Rochefort – winner of the President’s Prize for best poster

At the recent ESC/ESS JAM in Saskatoon, not only were we treated to some great science and camaraderie, but the beloved institution of the President’s Prize sessions for student talks and posters provided some of the most stimulating and exciting times. This was my first year not being in the competition, and I would like to offer my views on the subject.

1) The President’s Prize encourages excellence: Students are definitely motivated to deliver polished and professional presentations in the hopes that their efforts will be recognized publicly. This reaches further than the conference, to encourage students to vet their talks and posters within their laboratories and departments in formal and informal settings in order to make the best presentation possible. This can only be a good thing.

2) The recognition is important: this prize, although modest financially, has amazing value as something to put on one’s CV. This enhances the career prospects of the winners and also the recognition that conference travel for students is worth funding within departments. Again, the value of this prize reaches much further than the conference, as students returning with the tangible benefits of a prize winning talk encourages others to make it a priority to attend and give an excellent talk next year.

The President’s Prize and the more recent innovation of the Graduate Student Showcase are thus valuable to the society as a whole. By encouraging and recognizing the efforts of students who attend our conferences to present well-polished research results, we promote excellence in scientific communication. We can all learn from the skill and innovation of these students!

With all of this in mind, I would like to make some recommendations:

1) For every conference, pre-publish the scoring rubric to be used by the judges. This will ensure that students entering a talk or poster know what points they have to hit to make their talk a candidate for the prize. These rubrics should not penalize creativity on the part of the students or discretion on the part of the judges, but should ensure that there is a baseline for what is expected.

2) At every conference, formally recognize runners-up in every session: It costs nothing but a bit of extra time during award presentation, but the chance to bestow recognition on a few more students should not go to waste. Many sessions have many excellent talks, and to send an excellent presenter home with nothing does no one any good. It has been a bit hit and miss in recent years at ESC meetings with regards to runners-up, and I think it should be the case that every conference includes this important recognition.

3) Send all competitors home with the judging sheets. This is a bit more onerous on the part of the judges, but the judges can definitely jot down some notes on their scoring sheet and show the tally for how well the talk lived up to the rubric. This is important to show that the criteria used to score the talks informed the decision. More importantly, it allows students to see how well their talk met the judges’ expectations, and to improve their presentations for the next year. This has been done at a couple of ESC meetings over the last few years and as far as I know, students found the feedback they got very valuable and were able to use it to improve their science communication skills.

Thanks to Mile Zhang for photos of the poster competitors, and to Catherine Scott for helpful suggestions. Congratulations to all this year’s winners, runners-up, and competitors!

octobre 4, 2014/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Non classifié(e)

ESC/ESS JAM 2014 Day 1 photos

septembre 29, 2014/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Non classifié(e)

Drop in on your friends…Before it’s too late!

Just a reminder…Summer does not last long here in Canada, so if there are any insects you have missed so far this year, now is the time to get out and find them!

août 20, 2014/par Sean McCann

ESC Blog, Non classifié(e)

How to get a spider to drink blood

Spiders may not bite, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get them to drink your blood! All you need is a sunset at the beach, hordes of mosquitoes, a spider, and some frustration to take out.

The other night, I was unwinding with an evening of wasp and bee photography at Iona beach, but the flight conditions were great for mosquitoes. They kept interrupting my shots of this lovely Tetragnatha laboriosa, so I decided to share the wealth.