Foxes Lair
  • Home
  • About
    • About Foxes Lair
    • History
    • Landscape and Soils
  • Things To Do
    • Scavenger hunt
    • Picnic Spots
    • Walking Tracks
    • Visit the Arboretum
    • Geocaching and Orienteering
    • Ride Your Bicycle
  • Things To See
    • Birds
    • Wildflowers
    • Trees in the Narrogin district
    • Narrogin spiders scorpions ticks
    • Vertebrates
    • Fungi and lichens
  • Other Places to Visit
    • FAMILY bush attractions
    • WILDLIFE bush attractions
    • WILDFLOWER bush attractions
    • all reserves
  • 1Foxypress
    • Foxypress
    • Vanishing Farms
  • Foxes Lair seasonal guide
  • Contact

Mysteries of Flies Eyes

29/3/2021

 

Greetings fellow Foxies,
It is amazing how a single question can open up a new world of knowledge.

When I photographed a couple of fly species pollinating sandalwood flowers, I noticed that the surface of their eyes had facets like gemstones, unlike the round shape of most insects.  I caught house and March flies (an easy task this time of the year) and found the same. Why is this so?.
Picture
Type of blowfly
Picture
Tachinid fly pollinating Frasers dryandra
Picture
Domestic house fly
Picture
March or stable fly. Note spear like cutters around the proboscis
Picture
Rhinidae fly
​I Googled insect vision and was blown away by a wealth of fascinating information that explains so much about insects and how they behave.
PictureLacewing reflected light hexagon from camera flash

​​​Our own eyes provide us with very clear coloured images with good depth perception and can detect fairly rapid changes of movement. We have two large movable eyes with lenses that can change shape and regulate light intake, and a sensitive retina that is backed up by large computing power.
Insects have compound eyes consisting of hundreds of single focus lenses that each have relatively few receptors (ommatidia). Most don't see very clearly but they are good at detecting movement. Ommatidia are packed together in a hexagonal, pentagonal or occasionally square array.

PictureUpward facing pigmented eyes
​Most insects have a less comprehensive colour range than us and don't differentiate orange and red. However they can see ultraviolet colours that we can't. Many flowers have ultraviolet pigments that we can't see, but make patterns specifically designed to attract pollinators. Similarly insect eye colours act a sunglasses that filter out some colours and make their targets and predators more visible.
​
There are many tweaks that different insect have to adapt their vision to their lifestyle.
To get a full understanding please have a look at these fascinating blogs? 
  • Through the compound eye.
  • Insect vision.

​None of this explains why many flies have gemstone facet eyes. A possible link is that they are all fast flying insects that often interact with animals The facets enable more individual ommatidia to provide better focus in fewer directions that would enable them to react faster to say a swatting hand or tail. The slower flying insects below all have more rounded eyes.
Picture
Bee flies
Picture
Stiletto fly
Picture
Soldier fly camouflaged eyes
Picture
Native bee
Picture
Wasp
Picture
Rhinotia suturalis weevils
Picture



Dragonflies are an fast-flying exception but the following features greatly enhance their vision.
  • Enormous eyes with more sensors per ommatidia. 
  • A huge range of colour receptors, and have the fastest movement detecting ability (flicker fusion frequency).
They can detect 300 images per second compared to our 15 to 20.

Have you ever caught a flying dragonfly? 

Narrogin Weevils

10/3/2021

 
Hello fellow Foxies,
I can still remember my delight as a child when I found a catasarcus weevil, put it on a finger, and felt it hanging on for dear life as I tried to remove it. Weevils are harmless, galumph along and look cute. This link provides an excellent introduction.
Picture
Weevil snout
Picture
Galumphing Oxops weevil
PictureHaplonyx species
Weevils are a type of beetle; there are lots of them (over 6000 Australian species) and they are all vegans. The distinctive long snout (rostrum) is not used for sucking, as it has chewing mouthparts at the end. Many weevils are very selective about which plant (and often which part of the plant) they eat and often chew deep into the plant part to lay their eggs
a very general rule of thumb is the longer the snout the deeper the eggs are laid.
The Haplonyx species (pear-shaped weevil) was about to drill into a Drummonds mallee bud. 
​The file below describes the life cycle of another Haplonyx species

Tuart bud weevil and gregarious gall weevil
File Size: 1019 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

​In Foxes Lair I often see weevils on flowering Jacksonia plants. Here are some examples. I found the rare and beautiful Ctenaphides maculatus only once despite intensive searches.
Picture
PictureCtenaphides maculatus




Picture
Unknown species
Picture
Rhinotia suturalis
Picture
Polyphrades species
Weevils vary greatly in sizes. Tiny Rhinolaccus ant mimic weevils live on acacias. Adults chew the stems and grub type larvae burrow inside the plants. Other small weevils include agricultural pests such as desiantha weevils and closely related vegetable weevils.
Picture
Desiantha weevil/spotted vegetable weevil
Picture
Surprisingly, closely related species may have different types of larvae. For example desiantha weevil larvae are pale grubs that chew grass roots, while vegetable weevils  have greenish above-ground slug-like grubs that chew leaves like the adults.
Large weevils are similar. Catasarcus weevil larvae chew eucalypt roots, and Leptopius species (wattle pigs) chew acacia roots. Both pupate underground. This Foxypress recounts fossilised Leptopius pupal cases (clogs) that I found at Mukinbudin.
Picture
Fossilised pupal case (clog)
Picture
Leptopius (wattle pig) adults
Last spring I was on the hunt for an insect that causes a distinctive leaf damage, they make great photos when the sun is behind the leaf, and finally found the strange slug-like larva of Gonipterus eucalypt weevils. To discourage predators they exude a horrible oily liquid to cover their body and decorate it with their frass (poo). They still get parasitised.
Picture
Picture
Gonipterus sp. weevil. Image Doug McDougie
Picture
Gonipterus larva underside
Picture
Oily gunk it spreads on its back
Picture
Frass covering on top
Oxyops species weevils have similar larva but eat melaleucas.
Picture
An Oxyops species
Picture
another Oxyops species
Picture
Polyphrades eucalyptus weevil

Narrogin Hoppers

6/3/2021

 
​Hello fellow Foxies,
An egg mass on a leaf took me on a journey of learning about the world of hoppers.
Planthoppers, leafhoppers, treehoppers and froghoppers are all small bugs that suck sap from plants.
They belong to the order Hemiptera (sucking insects that are called homopterans)
Suborders include
Heteroptera: (typical bugs like stink bugs that suck plants or animal suckers such as bedbugs, and assassin bugs.
Sternorrhyncha: aphids, whiteflies, and scale insects
Auchenorrhyncha: cicadas, leafhoppers, treehoppers, planthoppers, and spittlebugs (adults called froghoppers)

Hoppers have aerodynamically shaped adult bodies and most have an exceptional hopping ability to escape from predators. The nymphs are generally tiny. There is great confusion around hopper names. For example the commonly named two-lined treehopper below is in the leafhopper genus.
Adult leafhoppers (Family Cicadellidae) have torpedo-shaped bodies and wings that tend to be flat on the body. I have found the three species below. The brown leafhopper lives in an ant nest and is tended by ants.
Picture
Leafhopper;Pogonoscopus Pogonoscopini
Picture
Leafhopper; Subfamily Tartessinae
Picture
Leafhopper; Two-lined gum treehopper Eurymeloides bicincta
I am yet to find a froghopper. They are more often seen as their strange nymphs called spittlebugs
Picture
Spittlebug (nymph) family Aphrophoridae
Picture
Tube spittlebug (nymph) family Machaerotidae
​My interest in hoppers started with attractive white blobs that appeared in January on box poison leaves in Foxes Lair. They were planthopper egg masses with a white waxy cover. Planthoppers have mostly narrow heads with large compound eyes separated by a ridge. I was yet to find an adult planthopper and eagerly monitored the blobs for emerging juveniles. 
Picture
Eurybrachid planthopper nymph head on left
Picture
Egg mass
PictureToo late. Most have hatched leaving empty shells

​Alas I never witnessed the wonderful hatching time. The egg masses were empty, or they had 1mm black spots in the mass that looked like parasite eggs.
​
I put a leaf with spotty egg mass in a glass jar and sure enough tiny 2mm blackish wasps appeared. This species is just one of thousands of stingless parasitoid chalcid wasps that keep insect numbers in control. 

Picture
Hatching planthoppers; image Doug Mcdougie
Picture
Wasp eggs an emerged adult
Amazingly there are even tinier (from 0.1mm; a printed full stop is about 0.3mm!) hyperparasitic wasps that keep chalcid wasp numbers down by laying their eggs on the other wasp’s eggs. I won’t be getting a photo of these anytime soon!

    Author

    Doug Sawkins is a friend of Foxes Lair 

    Categories

    All
    Animals Other
    Birds
    Disorders Plant Animal
    Fungi Lichens
    History
    Insects Bugs Other Arthropods
    Landscapes Soils
    Other Reserves And Places
    Reptiles
    Spiders Other Arachnids
    Tree
    Walks Other Facilities
    Wasp
    Wildflowers Orchids
    Wildflowers Other Summer Autumn
    Wildflowers Other Winter Spring
    Wildflowers Parasitic

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    May 2012
    March 2012
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    April 2011

© 2015 All Rights Reserved. Doug Sawkins, Australia.