Mystery Flora/Cryptopod Double-Header: Flowery Sprays

Mystery Week continues! In this edition, I’ve got some lovely flora and fauna for ye. Well, lovely as long as you love sprays of flowers and the occasional insect.

Our selections today come from Juanita Bay, where in early July we had many loverly flowers blooming, and lots of insects buzzing round.

Image shows a spray of tiny white flowers dangling from a tall plant. There's a long, narrow brown insect dangling upside-down from it.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod I

I think we may have had this white one before, but I don’t honestly remember. There are enough new folks round the cantina we can have another go with it anyway. But the most essential part of this photoset is the wee little brown beetle.*

Image shows a long brown beetle with horizontal black stripes nestled amongst the wee flowers.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod II

And now we’ll see why applying RQ’s rule isn’t so straightforward for this one:

Image shows the cryptopod from the top. Now it can be seen that the head is separated from the thorax by a straight line, but there's a triangle marking between its wings.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod III

Soooo, the head and thorax aren’t separated by a triangle… but there’s that triangle marking… Y U NO BE EZ, INSECTS?!

Right by that same bush with the beautiful white clusters, there was a yellow-flowered one.

Image shows a bush with long, narrow leaves and tall stems, with huge sprays of tiny yellow flowers at the top. The white flower bush is in the background.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod IV

I took a close-up of the flowers for ye, for identification purposes.

Image shows a cluster of the flowers up close. They look almost identical to the white ones.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod V

And got another cryptopod quite by accident.

Crop of the previous image, showing a teardrop-shaped brown insect carapace dangling from a web between sprays of flowers.
Mystery Flora/Cryptopod VI

So there ye are – four mysteries in one post! Well, I mean, this time of the year is all about abundance and such, right?

 

 

*I think it’s a beetle. I’m trying to apply RQ’s rules for identifying beetles. But I’m really REALLY bad at this just yet.

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Mystery Flora/Cryptopod Double-Header: Flowery Sprays
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3 thoughts on “Mystery Flora/Cryptopod Double-Header: Flowery Sprays

  1. rq
    1

    It is a beetle! It has to be a solid triangular body-part, not just a triangular marking. So you’re right! Probably a banded longhorn beetle of some kind. Very pretty!

    The yellow flowers are goldenrod, though I’ll be darned if I can speciate that for you. I know it’s one of those pollen-causing hassle-flowers of the autumn, but I’m a big fan of the colour and the smell of goldenrod. In addition, they are a sign that summer is in the second half of its short term, and that autumn in coming. Goldenrod and asters are good for that.

    The white spray is, I think, Oceanspray, and it is native to Oregon! Apparently it is also called ironwood, which is pretty awesome. It looks like it smells pretty, too.

    And just for fun, advice on gardening native plants, which I thought is a nice idea. :)

    I think the cryptopod is an airborne seed of some kind, stuck in some spider skein, perhaps. (This may be an indictment of my discerning vision, though. :D)

  2. 3

    The usual disclaimers (beetles aren’t really my line, there are absurdly many of them, etc) but it looks like a flower longhorn beetle, which would put it in the subfamily Lepturinae of the cerambycid (longhorn) beetles. The pattern on its elytra (the outer wings) isn’t really typical — they tend to run to longitudinal bands — which helps to rule some of them out. Of the ones left over, it looks quite a bit like Leptura, the type genus. Leptura obliterata are reasonably common around the Puget Sound, are about the right size, and a quick image search shows them foraging on Holodiscus, so that would be a reasonable guess.

    (Data point: paging through a beetle ID turns out not to be a cure for insomnia, but it is surprisingly entertaining.)

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