How Well Do You Know Your Local Ecosystem?

Can you name 5 insects that can be found in your neighborhood? If you are interested enough in nature to be reading this blog, you probably can. Do you think you could answer some tougher questions? Because I have found some really tough ones. The hardest (and most fun) part may be finding out if you answered them correctly, since they are about your local ecosystem. I'm still trying to figure out how well I scored!

Before I give you the questions, I should tell you where they came from.

I recently read the book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. Mr. Brand founded the old Whole Earth Catalog. One of the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog was Peter Warshall. Mr. Warshall originally wrote this quiz 30 plus years ago. It has recently been updated by Kevin Kelly who, you guessed it, was another editor at the Whole Earth Catalog.

Without further ado, click here to see how much you know about your own backyard. And by the way, they do not ask about insects. No use in me giving you a head start!

Daddy Long Legs Daddies (aka Harvestman)

More from Life in the Undergrowth Episode 1 - Sir Attenborough stuck his micro camera in a "harvestman" nest, and showed a male guarding a nest filled with about 25 eggs. This creature, which looked like a spider, was constantly cleaning off the eggs. Occasionally a female harvestman would stop by to mate, and she would add her eggs to his collection. This egg-sitting service was provided to more than one female. At one point, a female tried to eat one of the eggs. After the male chased her off, he scurried around and seemed to be counting the eggs to make sure they were all there. He didn't stop until he seemed satisfied that his brood was safe.

Trying to find out more about this harvestman wasn't so easy. Sir Attenborough didn't mention the particular species he was observing, and it turns out there are thousands of them. But searching around the web (no pun intended, since harvestmen don't make webs), I discovered that what he showed was most likely a Zygopachylus albomarginis.

I was surprised to find out from my research that the "American" name for a harvestman is "daddy long legs". In the UK, they use the term "daddy long legs" to refer to a crane fly. The harvestman they showed in the video did not look or act like the ones I commonly see in New Jersey. Apparently Z. albomarginis lives in Panama. The Jersey harvestmen look more like the one in the photo above, but with a more rounded and darker body.

The most surprising thing I discovered is that despite their appearance, harvestmen are not spiders! They are arachnids, so they are related to spiders, but there are some differences. Spiders have a narrow waist (pedicel) between their two body sections, breathe using book lungs (more on that here), and produce silk. They eat by piercing their prey with fangs, injecting venom and digestive juices, and sucking out the digested contents. Harvestmen have an oval body (no waist), breathe by diffusing air directly from their tracheae into their "blood" (no lungs), and do not produce silk. They also do not produce venom, so they eat by ripping their prey into small pieces and transferring these to their mouth.

I'll leave you with a fun assignment for the next time you are in the woods at night (although it may be too cold to do this now in the northern latitudes). Take a flashlight and hold the butt end against your forehead, just above your eyebrows. Point the beam of the flashlight straight out, parallel to your line of vision. Then look around until you find a set of glowing green eyes looking back at you. Walk toward the eyes, keeping the flashlight on them, and you will find a spider. No kidding!

Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the photo.

Arachnid Lungs Evolved From Horseshoe Crabs

I have been watching videos of the BBC television series Life in the Undergrowth with David Attenborough. It starts off by explaining how life got in the undergrowth to begin with, in other words, how it crawled out of the sea. One example he discusses is the horseshoe crab.

The horseshoe crab is actually not even a crab, it is an arthropod of the subphylum chelicerata, which means it is more closely related to the arachnids like spiders, scorpions and ticks than it is to crabs. Sir Attenborough showed thousands of horseshoe crabs crawling out of the water for their annual spawning. Living in prime horseshoe crab territory in New Jersey, I have seen many of these ancient creatures gracing our beaches.

Attenborough explained that since horseshoe crabs were among the first animals to develop the ability to venture onto land, they had a distinct advantage in that they could keep their eggs away from their enemies who were still in the water. They no longer have this advantage, since many birds look forward to the annual horseshoe crab spawn every year. This is especially true of the red knot, which feasts on the horseshoe crab eggs during its migration stop-over in the Delaware Bay. This species of sandpiper makes an amazing annual migration from one end of the Americas to the other, from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America!

The adaptation that allowed the horseshoe crab to venture onto land was the "book gill", which you can see in the top photo just above his tail. Each of the folds that is visible in the photo has many more folds within it, with the overall structure looking like the pages of a book. This gill is on the outside of the horseshoe crab's body, so as long as he keeps it moist with the small amount of water in the wet sand, he can live out of the water up to a week. The many folds increase the surface area for gas exchange to his blood.

Fast forward to modern-day spiders, close relatives of the horseshoe crab. Below is a cross-section diagram, with #16 being the "book lung". This is essentially the book gill of the horseshoe crab, evolved to be located within the spider's body, and supplied with air through a small opening. Scorpions have a similar setup. Pretty amazing that these small land animals have lungs evolved from an ancient sea creature. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the photo and diagram.

The Armored Catfish of Wekiwa Springs

I was at a professional development class in Florida last week, and as I usually like to do, I ran off into the nearest woods as soon as the class was over. This time it was to Wekiwa Springs State Park, which is a beautiful little park about an hour north of Orlando. I saw some pretty cool things there, including an armadillo, which we don't get in Jersey (sorry, I only got a blurry photo of his butt as he was running away).

The photo above is of the river filling with armored catfish (aka Orinoko sailfin catfish, plecostomus, pleco). These are an invasive species that has been spreading throughout Florida since about 1971. It is believed that they escaped and/or were released from aquariums and aquarium fish farms. They are originally from the Orinoco River basin in Venezuela and Colombia.

Here is a closeup from the Army Corp of Engineers, who is interested in these invasives because they like to destroy what the Corp has built.



During the day these catfish burrow into the river banks, causing erosion. At night they come out by the thousands to feed. All of the fish in the top photo are facing to the left, so the water flowing from the spring washes algae and small critters right into their mouths. Every once in a while, they come to the surface and take a gulp of air. All of this gulping sounded like someone was dropping stones into the water. These fish were very close to the spring, which apparently has low oxygen content as it comes out of the ground. Armored catfish can breath air fairly well, and can survive out of the water up to 30 hours!

Three types of heron - a green, a little blue and a great blue (named Henry according to the ranger) - stood to the side, patiently trying to find something to eat besides an armored catfish. Because of their tough, armored skin and sharp spines, these have been known to choke birds who tried to eat them. But the bears love them. The ranger told me that last year a group of volunteers "gigged" (speared) 5000 of them and left them out in the woods for the bears.

Here is some more info about these invasives and the damage they can cause.

Is NJ State Dinosaur from PA?

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about my visit to the site where the first dinosaur skeleton in America was discovered, in Haddonfield, NJ. This was also the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton in the world. This find has joined the list of many New Jersey Firsts (in fact there are so many that the first dinosaur didn't make the cut on this list). In 1991 this dinosaur, Hadrosaurus Foulkii, was named the State Dinosaur of New Jersey.

Unfortunately, it is not clear whether this dinosaur ever actually lived in New Jersey. H. foulkii lived in the Late Cretaceous period, around 73 million years ago. At that time, New Jersey was under water! Below is a map from the US Geological Survey.


It appears that what happened was H. foulkii and his contemporaries were scampering around in Pennsylvania, which in the Late Cretaceous is where the shoreline was. The one that was found in Haddonfield apparently died at the shore (in PA) and got swept into the ocean (ending up in present day NJ).

Supporting this theory is the fact that dinosaur bones are rare in PA, although dinosaur tracks have been found. Many dinosaur bones have been found in NJ. In fact, the second nearly complete dinosaur skeleton in the world was also found in New Jersey, in nearby Barnsboro, Mantua Township. This one was called Dryptosaurus Aquilunguis.

For more about H. foulkii check out this website. For more about D. aquilunguis look here and here. By the way, D. aquilunguis was a carnivore and probably ate H. foulkii, which lived in the same time period.

Here is a well-known and dramatic painting of D. aquilunguis by Charles R. Knight. It is called "Leaping Laelaps". It was painted in 1897, at which time D. aquilunguis was known as Laelaps Aquilunguis. Knight was an influential artist, one of the first to depict dinosaurs as energetic rather than lumbering.

Muse for the Nature Blogger

It can sometimes be difficult to summon the inspiration to keep blogging along, or to decide what to write about or what angle to approach a subject from. When the ancient Greeks had this problem, they turned to their muses. The photo above is the muse Clio. She is at the US Capitol, overlooking Congress and blogging what she sees.

I was attempting to find some modern, non-statuary muses to assist with my nature blogging. I did find a couple, which you may be interested in if you are a nature blogger. The first is a website by Robert Winkler. Here is a link to a great article by Mr. Winkler on nature writing. He has a lot of other interesting articles on his website about nature writing, nature photography and birding.

Here is another good article I found on nature writing in Conservation Magazine. If you are an urban nature blogger you will especially like this one.

Winged Euonymus - A Plant With Wings

One of my earlier posts about a hike in Wissahickon Valley Park included the above photo of an unusual looking plant. I thought for sure those weird growths were some type of shelf fungus, but I did not see anything that looked like it in the fungus field guides. Thank you to Beetles in the Bush for identifying this plant for me. It is Euonymus alatus, aka Winged Euonymus for obvious reasons, aka Burning Bush because of how it looks in the Fall.


Euonymus alatus is native to Asia, and was brought to the US starting in the 1860s as an ornamental plant. Wissahickon Valley Park was established in 1868, so the timing works out. Today this is considered an invasive plant.

I have tried in vain to figure out why this plant has wings. I did find out that the wings are made of cork, a material which is part of the bark of many types of plants, but is usually underneath the outer bark layer which is called the phellum. I even found a few sources that explain in very technical terms HOW the cork manages to grow into these wings.

But what I was looking for is WHY these wings grow. What evolutionary purpose do they serve? Also, why are they in such neat rectangular shapes? Most shapes in nature seem to be curved rather than so rectilinear. Unfortunately I was not able to answer these questions. Until I do, I propose that the wings are the plant's attempt to mimic the birds they see flying above them. Many generations from now, a Euonymus alatus will grow wings big enough for it to take off. Then the invasion will really begin ...