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| Walkingstick (Insect Order: Phasmida) |
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| Missing that second left leg. |
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| This one at rest on a paint roller in the creek house. |
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| Texas Giant Centipede or Giant Redheaded Centipede (Scolopendra heros) |
Both photos above feature the same friend. After we found him inside the house, we gently transplanted him outside where we hurried a photo as he himself hurried off into the grass.
Some more background to enhance viewer appreciation:
"This species of centipede has powerful jaws — modified front legs, termed maxillipeds — and its venom is known to produce significant pain and swelling that, when combined with infectious organisms acquired in its travels and feeding (this centipede is known to feed on putrefying flesh and fecal matter, and thus is subject to microbial contamination), can produce serious complications. Their bites should, therefore, be considered at least nominally dangerous. It has a cluster of simple eyes (ocelli) on either side of the anterior head. These primitive eye clusters apparently provide no assistance in hunting, as the animal hunts nocturnally and , and are not necessary for the animal to respond to light. When the eyes are covered with opaque paint, no difference is noted in its immediate negative response to bright light stimulus.
Scolopendra heros has six cephalic segments, which are closely fused in the adult, but observable under magnification in the embryo. A segmented antennae is attached to the anterior portion of the second cephalic segment. This structure is the animal’s primary sensory organ, and is extensively used when hunting for food.
It has 21-23 body segments, consisting of sclerotized tergal plates dorsally, and sternal plates verntrally, which are connected laterally by softer pleural membranes from which erupt the coxal segments of each leg, and on which are found (on some segments, but not on all) open spiracles for respiration. A single pair of legs, each with seven segments (coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia, and 3 tarsi) is attached to each body segment, save the first and last segments. Legs attached to the first body segment are modified into a pair of four-segmented poisonous jaws. The last body segment comprises the anus of the male, and in the female is further modified into a gonopod with a pair of diminutive, articulating ovipositors. The posterior pair of legs is the longest and most robust, and is modified for grasping." http://bugsinthenews.info/?p=1145
The following two passages both involve a Dr. Baerg. Seems as though the good physician was a curious one at least.
"Scolopendra heros is purported to make tiny incisions with its legs while walking across human skin. When the animal is irritated, a poison is supposedly produced near the base of each leg and dropped into the wounds causing inflammation and irritation. According to one story cited by Dr. Baerg, an officer in the Confederate Army, while sleeping in his tent, was suddenly aroused by the creepy feeling of a large centipede crawling on his chest. A number of spots of deep red, forming a broad streak, indicated the arthropod’s passage across the man’s chest and abdomen. Violent pain and convulsions soon set in, accompanied by excessive swelling in the bitten area. The victim fought with death for two days and then succumbed. The agony suffered by the bitten officer was described by an eyewitness as the most frightful he had ever observed."
"The prey is captured and killed or stunned with the poison claws. Poison glands are located in the basal segments of the claws or fangs, sometimes called maxillipeds. Each gland drains its toxic contents through a small opening near the tip of the fang. In the mid 1920s, Dr. Baerg tested the effect of the venom by inducing a centipede to bite one of his little fingers, leaving the fangs inserted for about four seconds. The bite was followed by a sharp and strictly local pain, which began to subside noticeably after about 15 minutes. In about two hours the pain was only very slight, but there was a general swelling in the finger. Three hours after the bite, most symptoms had disappeared."
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Just barely enough white petal in focus to justify including this one
(White Prickly Poppy, Argemone albiflora) |
Blue Curls (Phacelia congesta)
Here's an interesting site to explore: http://www.usanpn.org/
So phenology is the study of when we see the first walking sticks, centipedes, prickly poppies, or blue curls. It's the calendar we read when we see nature breaking out into sticky buds or laying speckled eggs.
About fifteen years ago I kept a long piece of white butcher paper taped to a hallway door in our home. Each time I witnessed a flower blooming for the first time during the year, I'd write its name and the date on the butcher paper. As the seasons progressed, I tried to also mark the last time I saw that species blooming on our piece of prairie. I found that yellowed scroll last week while packing up boxes to move out to the Creek.
Of course, phenology is an immensely important tool in our construction of aA theory of global warming because if we can document in specifics the arrival of spring or summer a week or two earlier, then we have something else to go on. And if we can detect subtle changes in the relationships between animals and plants, for instance, and see how climate change might be disrupting their symbiotic relationship, then we have something wise to go on. And maybe disheartening. Who can tell?
And I heard this piece on the radio yesterday evening:
Looking for Consequences of Shifting SeasonsBY
CLARK BOYD ⋅ APRIL 6, 2012
In a small park at Wageningen University, biologist Arnold van Vliet points out the signs of spring that are all around—a prunus tree, with nice white flowers, a hazel bush unfolding its leaves. It’s a lovely sight on a beautiful spring day.
The only problem is that these flowers and leaves really shouldn’t be here yet.
“Everything is now two to three weeks ahead of schedule,” van Vliet says. “Butterflies are appearing very early—extremely early because of the very warm March we had.”
But a warm March here isn’t that much of an anomaly these days. Van Vliet says spring is regularly coming weeks earlier than it used to in the Netherlands. In fact, he says, with temperatures on the rise the whole climate of the country has shifted in the past 10 years to become more like southern France.
Van Vliet has been following this climatic shift for more than a decade as head of an effort here called “Nature’s Calendar.” The program enlists the help of more than 8,000 scientists and ordinary Dutch citizens to track changes in the seasons through what’s known as phenology. That’s an old-fashioned word for the study of the timing of seasonal, life-cycle events, such as the first flowering of a particular plant, or when a species of bird first lays its eggs in spring.
People who work close to nature have been tracking this kind of data for centuries. But environmental scientists in the Netherlands and elsewhere are more concerned about it than ever, because the shifting of the seasons is having real environmental effects.
“We see that the length of our growing season is already one month longer than before 1988, when the temperature started to change,” van Vliet says. “We see already an enormous change in species diversity in the Netherlands—very many southern species that live in Belgium, France and even farther south, that (now) appear in the Netherlands. And the more cold-loving species are significantly decreasing. So we see that signal.”
And the Dutch aren’t alone. As the planet warms up, scientists are seeing a similar trend around the world. Jake Weltzin, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Tucson, Arizona, and coordinator of the USA National Phenology Network, says spring has been coming earlier in much of the United States.
Weltzin says maple sap started running earlier than normal this year, and species as different as butterflies and horseshoe crabs turned up earlier as well.
Many plants and animals can adapt to earlier springs, Weltzin says, but he adds that what’s really important is how these shifts in timing can affect an entire landscape.
“We’re starting to get a handle on that as a complex system,” he says. Among other things, he says there’s more potential for what he calls “mismatches” in an ecosystem.
“If you have a plant, and an animal, and the animal depends on that plant for nectar, or forage or food, and if the plants are coming early, and the animals aren’t arriving at the same time, you can end up with this mismatch. So there may not be enough pollination, there may not be enough food. There may not be enough milkweed for the Monarch butterflies.”
In some cases, these mismatches that are coming with the shifting seasons could even affect food crops for people.
Weltzin says what’s needed to better understand these trends and changing relationships is greater cooperation and data sharing among national phenology networks.
Like the Netherlands, many European countries have such networks, and in fact there is now a European database of historical phenological data.
Kjell Bolmgren, who directs Sweden’s National Phenology Network, says the data suggest that spring is coming a week earlier there than it used to. But he notes that isn’t necessarily bad news for all of Sweden’s plants and animals.
“My prediction would be that most organisms in Sweden will benefit from the improved growing conditions,” Bolmgren says, “simply because the difficult part in Sweden is the winter. So once that gets shorter, it’s going to be easier for most plants.”
Bolmgren says it also means a longer growing season in Sweden, but he cautions that the Swedish summer might get so long that drought becomes a problem.
There’s also no guarantee that important parts of the country’s ecosystems won’t get out of whack.
Arnold Van Vliet at Wageningen University says he’s already seeing winners and losers in the Netherlands.
Plants and insects seem to be adapting fairly quickly to the earlier Dutch springs, he says, but migratory birds do not seem to be getting the clue to come back sooner. And he says that could mean trouble for some ecological relationships.
Still—what’s the big worry about all this?
“Yeah, why worry, that’s one of main questions asked,” van Vliet says. “You have to look at the bigger picture. And if you look on a global scale, 40 to 50 percent of all the plant and animal species are located on two percent of the earth’s surface. And if 50 percent of all the plant and animal species are in danger because they are in a climate zone they’re not used to, then I think we have a major issue there. Many species will be lost.”
Van Vliet says the trick to driving home the importance of phenological data, and what it’s telling us about the impacts of climate change, is to enlist the help of the public. To the end he has set up websites where citizens can help scientists track the tiniest changes in nature—things like the time and place of new hay fever symptoms or tick bites, or even the number of bugs smashed on a license plate after a summer drive.
They could all contain clues about how local environments are changing as the world warms up and the seasons continue to shift.
