The black widows are growing fast! The juveniles are getting their young stripes.
Only a few weeks old and growing prettier day by day.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The black widows are growing fast! The juveniles are getting their young stripes.
Only a few weeks old and growing prettier day by day.
I told you we’ve got multiple monarch chrysalides decorating our house right now.
They pig out on milkweed, and then they start wandering, and once they find a vertical wall they climb and climb until they find a nice overhang. And then they pupate.
Our garden is full of monarchs — here are three at once chomping through the foliage.
The caterpillars are doing great, but look at those poor leaves. They’re a wreck.
Also, the eaves of our house and any overhanging bit anywhere are beginning to be festooned with chrysalides.
Except that that would be a big mistake. We’ve got a great many dagger moth caterpillars nibbling on some of our trees.
Mary brought in a branch with several of these things to show me. I had to recoil and tell her to get them out of the house.
They’re beginning to metamorphose.
Mary also took a photo of the same chrysalis, with her iPhone. Hers came out a little nicer, with more context, and shadows that weren’t as dramatic.
In my defense, it was very low to the ground beneath a stony overhang, and it was killing my knees to try to get that low.
They’re all over my yard.
Mary found this lovely lady hiding in the shrubbery — it’s the shamrock orbweaver, Araneus trifolium, and it was sheltered inside a folded leaf stitched together with silk.
In case you were wondering how big it is…
Thumbnail sized.
I was feeling a bit robust this morning, and managed to hobble all the way out to the backyard, where I could explore the fauna thriving there. Mary was hovering at my elbow to make sure I didn’t topple over, but I did OK — another week or two, and I might be going on real walks (as long as I don’t do anything stupid.) Things I saw that made me happy:
We spotted two monarch butterflies flitting over the garden. No photos, though, they didn’t land and pose for me.
The place is hopping with grasshoppers, which, while not normally associated with good gardens, is fine with me — the purpose of the garden is making spider food, not tomatoes. Mary may disagree with me.
Oh, and it was so bright. I’m not used to that anymore.
We also had lots of interesting pollinators, like this two-spotted longhorn bee.
Of course, the queen of the garden, the devourer of grasshoppers, the true monarch, was Argiope trifasciata.
It’s a fine crop, and congratulations to Mary on her superlative gardening skills. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to the front yard to see what wonders flourish there.
Mary has planted lots of milkweed in our yard, and it’s paying off. We keep finding more caterpillars, and we’ve seen as many as a half-dozen butterflies at once fluttering over the tasty field of monarch food growing here.
It’s nothing compared to the swarms we’d see 20-25 years ago, but we’re doing our part to cultivate more.
We know we have a lot of bats living above our garage — it’s non-trivial to check, though. There’s an access panel in the garage ceiling and you need to use a ladder to climb up there. But I imagine it might look a little like this if you climbed up and rummaged around behind the insulation.
I think maybe we’ll leave our bat colony alone.
