Field notebook
Opening the requested public page…
Field notebook
Opening the requested public page…
Taxonomic class
This practical browse label comes from the published animal profiles. Taxonomy changes as evidence improves; individual source records remain the authority.
Their sting is reduced to a useless stub, so defence falls to mandibles, resin and sheer numbers. Some species bite hard enough to draw blood, and a few smear caustic plant secretions into the wound.
The flat faces of the wedge point east and west, so the broad sides catch weak morning and evening sun while the narrow edge meets the fierce midday sun overhead. The alignment is remarkably consistent across a plain.
Almost all pollination is accidental, a by-product of insects seeking food. The female yucca moth gathers pollen with specialised mouthparts, lays eggs in the flower's ovary, then climbs the style and packs the pollen in deliberately.
A fossil insect from the Messel pit in Germany, Eophyllium messelensis, shows the leaf-like body outline and leg lobes of modern Phyllium. It puts the strategy at least 47 million years old and reveals it evolved among quite different plants.
Bogong moths fly up to a thousand kilometres to alpine caves they have never visited. Flight simulator experiments showed they combine a magnetic sense with visual landmarks, and that scrambling either one leaves them unable to hold a course.
The red admiral was long treated as an annual immigrant to Britain that could not survive the cold season. Records of adults active in midwinter and of overwintering success have accumulated as winters have warmed, changing how the species is classified.
No individual green darner completes the annual round trip. Isotope work on museum and field specimens showed a migratory generation flying north, its offspring flying south, and a third, non-migratory generation overwintering in the south before the cycle restarts.
Along the Mediterranean coast, workers taken from Portugal and from Italy do not fight when introduced to each other. Genetic and behavioural work indicates a single cooperative network running roughly 6,000 kilometres.
After rats wiped out the Lord Howe Island stick insect early in the twentieth century, the species was written off. In 2001 a surviving population of a few dozen individuals was confirmed on Ball's Pyramid, clustered around a single melaleuca shrub.
Anoplophora glabripennis larvae tunnel deep in living hardwood, out of reach of surface treatment. The only reliable response found so far is to cut and chip every infested tree, along with apparently healthy hosts nearby.