Why Insects Matter

 

Insects are terrific pollinators!

As the growing human population transforms our planet, the global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of 2% a year. The world has lost 5% to 10% of all insect species just in the last 150 years, so in 40 more years we could lose one third of all insect species. In a study just published in the journal Science, a working group called the ‘Status of Butterflies in the U.S.’ found that the total abundance of butterflies in the U.S. declined by 22% from 2000 to 2020.  Said another way, one in five butterflies have vanished.

Many butterfly species, including the Monarch, are declining in abundance.

What is driving this precipitous drop in insect populations and why does it matter? Insect populations are struggling due to several factors, including deforestation/habitat loss (due to development), non-native invasive species, pesticide use, artificial light pollution, and climate change.  As a result, the populations of other animals, crops, and flowers that rely on insects to survive also struggle.

Non-native, invasive plants, like Ligustrum species, often overtake native habitats.

Scientists say that it is impossible to have an insect-free life on this planet. They perform many essential services that are vital for humans’ quality of life. Pollinators such as bees, butterflies, moths, and many other types of insects are necessary to produce diversity and abundance in our food supply, including crops such as coffee, chocolate, blueberries, apples, almonds, avocados, and pumpkins, just to name a few. In fact, pollinators help ensure that about 75% of the world’s flowering plants and 35% of the world’s food crops are produced.  Other scientists estimate that one out of every three bites of human food are directly related to the work of pollinators such as bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, and other insects.

Moths and beetles are pollinators, too!

Plant and animal waste would pile up if it weren’t for the services of dung beetles and other insect recyclers. Insects like dragonflies, ladybugs, green lacewings, ground beetles, and parasitic wasps keep what we call the ‘pest’ species at bay – the mosquitos, ticks, fleas, lice, and flies that can carry disease as well as crop pests such as armyworms, cutworms, and wireworms.  

Dung Beetles hard at work.

Roseate Skimmer dragonfly eating a mosquito.

Most humans like birds, but most are also unaware of the fact that 96% of birds would not be here without insects. It takes 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars and other insects to feed a clutch of four to six Carolina Chickadee offspring. Multiply that by the fact that most all avian nestlings and fledglings eat some form of insects, and you very quickly realize how important they are to the food web. Insects are also the main food for all of the fish, so they are the glue that binds together every terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem on the planet.

Many bird species, like the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler,
feed insects to their young.

What can be done to reduce this downward trend?  The good news is that the things we do in our own backyards can actually make a difference when it comes to insect conservation. First and foremost, reduce or (better yet) replace your non-native lawn with native plants.  Lawns make up about 50% of Austin’s green space, so turning them back into native plantings would provide significant benefit to insects. 

Replace your lawn with native plants -
extra bonus for providing water!

Eliminate all pesticide use, including mosquito spraying. The spray contains pyrethroids which are advertised as “safe as chrysanthemum flowers”, but they are a much stronger synthetic version that is chemically designed to be more toxic with longer breakdown times.  This increased potency compromises the human body’s ability to detoxify the pesticide in addition to killing all insects, not just mosquitos.

Mosquito spraying kills all insects,
not just mosquitos.

Light pollution contributes to insect decline.

And last, but not least, turn your exterior lights off at night so as not to affect the behavior of night-flying insects (this also benefits birds during spring and fall migration). Artificial lighting can disorient moths and confuse their sense of direction, causing one third of those that swirl around a light at night to die from exhaustion or predation. Excess light also disrupts the mating flashes of fireflies and confuses insects like mayflies by bouncing light off of asphalt and causing them to lay their eggs in the street instead of in a lake or stream.

Ruby and Gold

Kinglets are often found actively searching for food in winter. 

Take a walk in the bare winter woods and you’ll undoubtedly notice kinglets – tiny, highly active songbirds feeding high in the trees.  They are in the Regulidae family, which comes from the Greek meaning ‘petty king or prince’, and refers to their regal, brightly colored crowns.  Legend has it that these little kings derived their names from a fable about the election of the king of birds, defined as the bird that could fly the longest distance.  While the eagle was able to outfly all other birds, he was beaten by a tiny bird that had secretly hidden itself in his feathers.   

This male Ruby-crowned Kinglet is showing his namesake ruby crown.

Here in Central Texas, you can find both Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets most reliably from November through March.  The Ruby-crowned kinglet (Regulus calendula) is about 4 inches long, an olive-gray color overall with darker wings and white wing bars.  The males have ruby crowns that are barely visible and often covered by other head feathers, until responding to aggressive encounters by other males or even curious humans.  They sometimes forage in mixed flocks of chickadees and titmice, and may also show their crowns when in close proximity to other birds.  

Female Ruby-crowned Kinglets lack the namesake ruby crown.

Golden-crowned kinglets (Regulus satrapa) are similar but slightly smaller than their ruby-crowned cousins.  The males have an orange crown patch bordered in yellow and black, while the females have crowns that are yellow and black.  The males also raise their crowns during aggressive encounters.  Both species of kinglets sing fairly frequently even in the winter, with the male ruby-crowns having a complex, rich warbling song, and the male golden-crowns having a much higher pitched, shorter song.

The female Golden-crowned Kinglet has a gold crown, but it lacks
the orange patch in the middle that only the males have.

Kinglets have a very rapid metabolism and their tiny size means they must constantly forage to keep up with their energy needs.  In fact, they are so small that it would take 3 to 5 birds to total a mere ounce! They are always in motion and continuously flicking their wings.  While seen most often gleaning insects and their over-wintering eggs from tree branches, they can forage anywhere from the ground to the treetops, and often catch active prey while hovering or flycatching.  

This Golden-crowned Kinglet paused briefly from its
nearly constant foraging and feeding.

If prevented from feeding for even twenty minutes, they may lose a third of their body weight and could starve to death within an hour.  Golden-crowns are the smallest birds to routinely survive freezing winter temperatures, and huddle together in protected areas at night.  Their populations decrease during severe winters, particularly when ice storms make foraging much more difficult.    

This season take the time to walk through the winter woods and listen for the gift of song given to us by these littlest of kings.  Take your binoculars, and see if you can spot their crowns of ruby and gold! 

Nature's Nap Time

Cold winter temperatures cause many animals to rely on different forms of hibernation.

As fall turns to winter, many animals begin to alter their patterns as the days become shorter, temperatures turn colder, and food becomes scarce. Depending on the species and their environment, there are several strategies that different animals can use to overwinter. Current thinking is that these strategies are not necessarily distinctly separate, but rather lie along a single spectrum. 

True hibernation or dormancy is a state of nearly complete reduced activity defined by a lower body temperature and metabolic rate. A loud noise or movement won’t wake an animal in this state.  However, not all animals undergo a true hibernation, especially in warmer climates areas like central Texas.  Native bumblebees are an example of true hibernators in our area, as they seek shelter in a hole in the soil, under leaf litter, or in hollow plant stems.

Native bumblebees are true winter hibernators in Central Texas.

Brumation is another hibernation-like state exhibited by several cold-blooded reptiles and amphibians such as snakes, lizards, turtles, and fish.  This state can last for months and is triggered by colder temperatures and shorter days. These animals will den in rock crevices or dirt burrows, sometimes alone, but often in groups as in the case of garter snakes. While their body temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rates are greatly reduced, some animals in this state may awaken periodically to drink water.

In winter, Black-necked Garter Snakes often den in groups.

This Green Anole came out of brumation on a warmer winter day.

Not as deep as hibernation, topor is a state that can last for several days or weeks. This light hibernation lasts for short periods of time, allowing animals to wake up on warmer winter days. Such is the case for ground squirrel species such as the Rock Squirrel. Some bird species, such as hummingbirds, go into torpor nearly every night to conserve energy, and can even enter a torpid state during colder days.

Rock Squirrels enter a state of torpor during the colder winter months.

While there are different types of hibernation strategies, hibernation states can also be categorized by the factors that induce that state.  Facultative hibernation in animals is caused by environmental conditions such as lack of food, short daylight hours, cold temperatures, or a combination of these stressors. This can induce short or longer periods of topor throughout the colder season. Obligate hibernation applies to animals that hibernate spontaneously every year for long or short periods, regardless of temperature or food supply. 

Most animals build up fat reserves in the fall to survive the colder winter periods in which they are dormant or less active. However, climate change may disrupt these patterns, as drier summers, warmer autumns, and long-standing droughts can lead to lower food production.  This may cause animals to enter hibernation states without the stored calories they need, and emerge early from hibernation hungry for food that is not yet available.  These types of timing mismatches will become more prevalent as our planet warms, disrupting the rhythms of nature’s nap time.

Observing Orbweavers

Drops of morning dew sparkle on a spider's web.

The family of spiders known for building flat, spiraled, wheel-shaped webs are called Araneidae, or the orb-weavers.  They are the most common group of spiders often founds in yards, gardens, fields, and forests.  In our area, those include the Black & Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia), Lichenmarked Orbweaver (Araneus bicentenarius), and Spinybacked Orbweaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis).  While all of these spiders produce venom, that venom is harmless to humans but helps them to immobilize their insect prey.

Also called the Yellow Garden Spider, the Black & Yellow Garden Spider is a large spider that has an abdomen with a series of pale, yellow spots on a black background, and legs that are orange at the base, black near the tips, and often held in pairs. Females are much larger than males, with up to an inch in body length. While both appear in late summer, females can be seen through December in our area.

A Female Black & Yellow Garden Spider.

While not quite as common, the Lichenmarked Orbweaver has an abdomen with a pattern of light green and reddish-brown markings and two small humps on front.  Females can grow to one inch in body length. Its legs have alternating bands of orange and brownish-black, and the coloration on its abdomen acts as a natural camouflage against the lichen-covered branches of trees where it often rests.

Lichenmarked Orbweaver, showing its characteristic green abdomen with two humps.

Often called crab spiders, one of our most distinctive spiders is the Spinybacked Orbweaver, a small, half-inch wide spider with a hard exoskeleton that has six spines around the edge.  There are many color forms, but most are yellow or white with black or dark red spines. Males are tiny and seldom seen, but females can be seen year-round. They build their webs in the morning in shrubs or low tree branches.

Spinybacked Orbweaver, yellow form.

Spinybacked Orbweaver, white form, showing relative size.

Orb-weaving spiders are one of nature’s engineers, and their process to build a web is intriguing.  They start by floating a line of silk on the wind to another surface. Once that line is secured, they drop another line from the center, forming a Y.  The rest of the web is a series of non-sticky spirals ending with a final spiral made of sticky capture silk.  The non-sticky webbing is nearly invisible, but the more visible sticky webbing is what normally traps the spider’s prey.  As such, there is always a tradeoff between the visibility and stickiness of the web.

The webs built by some orb-weavers include a vertical zigzag band of highly visible silk through the center of the web.  This is called the stabilimentum, and is most often found in the web of a Black & Yellow Garden Spider. While scientists are unsure of the exact purpose of this structure, theories include it posing as a lure to bring prey to the web, a warning for birds not to fly through the web, or as a way to camouflage the spider as it sits on the web.

A male Black & Yellow Garden Spider
rests on the web's stabilimentum.

Many orb-weavers build a new web on a daily basis.  They often hide during the day and become more active in the evening, when they consume the old web, rest for a bit, then begin spinning a new web in the same general location. Consider all that hard work the next time you think about destroying a web!

 

Fall Fliers

 

Fall-blooming Blue Mistflower and White Boneset attract late season butterflies.

Butterflies are frequently thought of as insects that fly primarily in the spring and summer seasons.  This is because the emergence of many butterfly species is unimodal, which means that their numbers increase as environmental resources increase.  These resources are defined as their host plants and nectar plants, which also become available during these warmer seasons.  

However, there are some species that have bimodal emergences, or increases in numbers in both the spring/summer and fall seasons.  It is thought that the division of offspring between two different emergence times may have evolved to avoid producing all offspring at one time.  This approach would reduce the risk of species mortality in case of potential fluctuations in habitat quality. 

Whether they be unimodal or bimodal, butterfly species typically exhibit a tightly synchronized adult emergence in order to help them locate mates. Further still, some species are present in low numbers during most of the year, but their numbers increase during the fall.  In central Texas these species include the Tailed Orange (Pyrisitia proterpia), Julia (Dryas iulia), Common Mestra (Mestra amymone), Queen (Danaus gilippus), and White-striped Longtail (Chioides albofasciatus).

In the fall, the Tailed Orange is in its winter form, yellow with brown lines and blotches below and a noticeably pointed hindwing edge.  Its summer form is unmarked yellow below and the hindwing edge is less pointed. It flies late summer through fall, and uses senna species as its host plant.

Tailed Orange, winter form

The fast-flying Julia is mostly orange above and orange to brown below, with the female being a duller orange than the male and having a dark forewing band.  Its longwing shape is quite distinctive and it prefers woodland edges and gardens where it uses passionvine species as its host plant.

Julia, male

A slower, flat-winged flyer, the Common Mestra is pearly white above with a pale orange border on its hindwing, and mostly pale orange below with a thin, white spotband.  It is most often seen from June to November, and it uses noseburn species as its host plant.

Common Mestra

The Queen butterfly is often confused with monarchs, as it also uses milkweed species as its host plant.  Rich dark brown to deep orange above with white spots in the black wing margins, it lacks the strong black veining on the wings like monarchs, and can be found in any open habitat usually visiting flowers.

Queen

Straying into our area from south Texas, the White-striped Longtail is a dark brown butterfly with very long tails, and a prominent white stripe on the underside of its hindwing.  It usually perches with its wings closed, and uses various legume species as host plants.

White-striped Longtail

One way to increase your chances of seeing these fall fliers in your yard is to provide native plant species that bloom in late summer and well into fall. These plants include Frostweed, Gregg’s Mistflower, Blue Mistflower, White Boneset, Lindheimer’s Senna, Plateau Goldeneye, and Texas Lantana.  And remember, fall is the perfect time to plant!

Migration Isn't Just For The Birds

 

Wandering Glider dragonflies do more than wander...

Most people who are interested in nature know that each spring many species of birds migrate north, and each fall they migrate south.  But birds aren’t the only animals that participate in this amazing natural phenomenon, as even some insects (other than the well-known Monarch butterfly) participate in long-distance migrations as well.  While insects are the most species-rich and abundant group of macroscopic organisms on the planet, understanding many aspects of their annual cycles and behavior drastically trails behind the ability to identify and classify them. 

Migration is defined as the cyclical travel of an animal as it returns to its place of departure.  It can be accomplished in one or multiple generations.  Some animals don’t migrate at all, and others move only short distances south or north.  While the guiding factors for navigation are still being discovered, migration is typically triggered by local climate, food availability, seasonality, or reproduction.

Adult Common Green Darner

Interestingly, about nine dragonfly species are known to migrate, including the Common Green Darner (Anax junius), Wandering Glider (Pantala flavescens), as well as some species in the Skimmer family such as meadowhawks and saddlebags. These dragonflies are known to travel up to 1500 miles over the full cycle of their migration, taking three generations.

Adult Wandering Glider

The secrets of dragonfly migration were discovered and confirmed by biologists measuring the chemical makeup of their wings.  In their immature or nymph stage, dragonflies grow their wings while still developing in local water.  Because the stable hydrogen isotope concentration varies in concentration by latitude, biologists can estimate the geographic region where adult dragonflies developed as nymphs.  

The female Common Green Darner (bottom) is held by
the male (top) after mating, when ovipositing in water.

From February to August the first generation emerges in the south and migrates north.  From June to October the second generation emerges in the north and migrates south.  Both of these generations have the ability to undergo rapid development from egg to adult.  But from November to March the third generation emerges in the south and is non-migratory, focusing mainly on producing another first generation for the cycle to start again.  It is this generation that employs a different strategy, developing slowly in late fall, entering diapause or actively induced dormancy over the winter, and emerging in early spring.

Dragonfly migration was not well understood until very recently.  Research published in 2018 detailed the journeys of Common Green Darners by analyzing 852 wing samples from eight different countries and utilizing 21 years of citizen scientist observations to link each specimen to its place of origin and establish its migration history. However, it is important to note that the timing of migration and the development of nymphs are both highly temperature dependent, so continued climate change could lead to fundamental changes in the migration cycles for dragonflies and other migrating insect species. So as you can see, migration isn’t just for the birds!

Songs of Stridulation

 

Immature katydids, called nymphs, are initially wingless. 

As the summer temperatures heat up, songs of singing insects fill the air with a variety of sounds.  Members of the order Orthoptera, including katydids, crickets, and grasshoppers, produce a variety of sounds through stridulation, or the rubbing of one body part against another.  

Differential Grasshopper, Melanoplus differentialis

While grasshoppers typically stridulate by rubbing their hind legs against their closed wings, katydids and crickets have modified bases of their wings in order to produce sound.  Specifically, they have a sharp edge or ‘scraper’ on the upper surface of the hindwing which they rub against a row of bumps or ‘file’ on the underside of the forewing. During sound production, katydids and crickets elevate their wings and move them rapidly back and forth, and the wings vibrate as a result of the scraper rubbing against the file.

Central Texas Leaf-Katydid, Paracyrtophyllus robustus

Unlike Orthoptera, male Cicadas in the order Hemiptera produce sounds through a pair of special ribbed organs or ‘tymbals’ located on sides of their abdomens, just behind their wings. When they contract their muscles, it causes the ribs to bend suddenly, producing a sound that resonates within a large air sac in their abdomen. The distinctive sound that is produced is one of the loudest made by any insect.

Resh Cicada, Megatibicen resh

The use of sound is crucial in courtship, with each species having its own distinct song.  Males attract mates through stridulation, producing a vibration frequency that is species-specific.  Songs are distinguished both by their dominant frequency and the details of their timing patterns. Crickets generally produce musical trills of continuous notes often too fast to count, or short bursts of chirps followed by silence.  

Field Cricket, a species in the Gryllinae family

Katydids and grasshoppers have high-pitched songs, composed of atonal shuffles, rattles, scrapes, buzzes, or ticks.  Some sing more or less continuously while other species have long silences in between periods of singing.  Cicada songs are the most penetrating, as rattling buzzes or harsh trills, often with a pulsating or grinding quality.

Fork-tailed Bush Katydid, Scudderia furcata

While most insect songs are the calling songs of males intended to attract females, these songs are thought to have other functions as well.  Some songs are for courtship once a mate is found, and some serve to attract males to a group chorus or to keep males optimally dispersed within a singing colony.  Aggressive songs can also be heard, when two males encounter each other, or even disturbance calls, when an insect is touched or handled.  Whatever the reason, now is the season to hear the songs of stridulation!