Entomology for beginners

A couple of insect-heavy days.

1. Swarms of shiny black flies with long thin abdomens, total length approx 2-3 cm, 'playing' together at an altitude of approx 4 ft above the drained Hunter's Bog in Royal Park yesterday, which runs alongside the reedy St. Margaret's Loch at the foot of the hill. Perfect breeding ground for ephemera, and perfect hatching conditions yesterday after a spell of sunnier weather.

What were they? Well, I didn't recognise them as Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies), they didn't appear to be any of the familiar hymenoptera (social insects) and they weren't beetles or bugs either on first glance. I had the memory they had but one set of wings which would make them Diptera (true flies). However, pics of horse-, deer- and gad-flies, common names for different species of Tabanids (also sometimes known as clegs in Scotland), didn't match either, and they didn't seem to be biters (female tabanids are blood-feeders). Hmmm... yet they also weren't lacewings or craneflies, leaving most Dipterid classes excluded. I'm now wondering if perhaps they were Ephemeroptera in the Linnaean and not the poetic sense (i.e. 'mayflies'), even though I didn't notice the pronged tails typical of these.

For short searches for common invertebrates, I've found this site very useful, and for the obsessive there's an amazing downloadable tool to aid classification efforts. Go here and download a small exe file in order to view diagnostic criteria and wonderful illustrations of British entomological fauna.

Horsefly



2. The carpet-beetles are out in force now, much to the children's horror, and Her Catness is kept busy with hunting. She caught her last mouse at least a year ago now- the live one she brought to show me on the bed, while I was in it- and is starved of feline challenges. These slow-movers are really a waste of her talents, especially because they play dead when threatened, but she likes to keep her paw in anyway. In the absence of better mammalian prey they can flick the switch that induces the dilated pupils, butt-waggling and tail-twitch of the hunting response.



I call them carpet beetles, because that's where I find them, but they look more like black mealworm or flour beetles- shiny, black, 4-5 mm long. True carpet beetles are rounder and variegated with brown striped carapaces. Plus the larvae I find are blind white mealworms and not hirsute 'woolly bears' as true carpet beetles'. This means they've found a convenient foodstore in my cupboards where they're eating hearty. I had to throw out an unsealed bag of cous-cous a few weeks ago when it was found to have nourished a healthy colony of the buggers.

For comparison:
a) Mealworm (larva) and (adult) darkling beetle (Tenebrio sp)


b) Carpet beetle and woolly bear (Anthrenus verbasci)


c) But to confuse matters, our pets seem to be pictured here as carpet, not darkling/mealworm beetles


3. Shared the bus home with a worker honeybee busy trying to best the windowglass to get back to Arthur's Seat, or so it seemed to me. Although working over 15 minutes to get out in the open air, she (haploid she, remember) took rests to groom her antennae, presumably to comfort and refresh her pheromone-honing apparatus, and to check the angle of the sun against her homeward flight. Her saddlebags were packed with pale-yellow pollen and her 4 neural ganglia somehow, miraculously, counting off bee-time on some internal clock to calculate longitude. When she finally buzzes free against the draught from the open bus doors, up at the terminus in Musselburgh, she'll navigate back home to a hive at the foot of the hill in Duddingston in less than an hour, so I'm not worried for her.



Furthermore, Alasdair Gray clearly likes animals in general (see Tall Tales frontispiece/contents pages) and bees in particular. The revised Picador 1991 edition of 'Something Leather' I'm holding here has these beasties swarming across the author's biog, dedication and contents pages.



And what's that middle top on the cover of Ten Tall Tales?