Insect Scavenger Hunt

Temperature: 60°F, sunny weather

Date: May 27, 2015 at 3:00pm

Zoomed out view of main site

For this week's journal entry, our class was assigned to document at least four invertebrates at our site. The first insect I spotted on the ground was a pill beetle crawling around on a dry area of my site. It moved fairly quickly over the small pebbles as it blended fairly well with its grey surroundings. 

Pill beetle

Sketch of pill beetle

The second invertebrate I found was a fly resting on a leaf. It seemed to be sucking on what looked like white pus centered on the leaf, it stayed there for about five minutes before it flew away. It was difficult to follow where the fly actually flew off since it was in the direction of a ton of leaves and branches. 

Fly on leaf

Sketch of fly on leaf

As for my third invertebrate, I found a small ladybug also resting on a leaf. It was crawling pretty quickly on the leaf's surface but did stay in one spot for at least two minutes. Personally, I have always been fascinated by ladybugs and they're probably the only insect I'm not creeped out by.

Sketch of ladybug

The fourth invertebrate I found was a mayfly sitting on a large rock close to the river. It was resting on the rock quite still and made no intentions of going elsewhere. The three antennas at the bottom of its body were quite distinctive and obvious and its wings were fairly see-through.

Sketch of mayfly

As for my fifth invertebrate, below is a haiku describing the behaviors of one insect I learned about in class this week. 

Feeding from within

Spinning webs of foam only 

To protect myself

Above are several pictures of what my poem attempted to describe, the evidence of a spittle bug from within its foamy protection. This is one of my favorite insects I learned in class, mainly because I have always seen these on leaves yet never knew that a bug is actually within it. It was pretty amusing that after I learned about them, I began to spot more of them on both plant stems and leaves. Some fun facts I retained from Tuesday is that spittle bugs do molt several times and are extremely similar to aphids as they are sap feeders.

For my overall site, I did notice small changes within the various plants and flowers. For one, there are more salmonberries ripening, yet I did not find any ripened ones. Despite seeing a ton last week of the red/orange berries, they were all green this time around. I also spotted less of the salmonberry flowers, they were mostly leaves or the berries ripening.  

Salmonberry

Furthermore, there are more signs of the small trees splitting at one point of the trunk/stem. For example, as the image shows below, the bigleaf maple has a drastic split causing the top part to lean towards the ground. There was also another small tree that was entirely uprooted as it leaned all the way to my right side with its roots sticking up in the air.

Bigleaf maple splitting

There were also a lot of signs of the leaves beginning to wilt and turning into different colors. As seen in the picture below, the leaves are clearly wilting and turning into a lighter shade of brown.

Signs of wilting leaves

I also noticed strange spots of white fuzz on the leaves, of which I could not figure out what this phenomenon actually was.

White fuzz on leaves