Most predators, on land and in the ocean, have a relatively poor success rate when it comes to snagging prey. Even when they’re successful, there’s no guarantee they’ll get to savor their prize.
I don’t know whether this Gold Dust Day Gecko was the one that caught this moth because, an instant after the capture, two or three other geckos swooped down to snatch it. There was a flurry of bodies and this one emerged from the scramble with the moth firmly stashed in its jaws. This look suggests it was guilty of robbery.
I spotted this shiny creature on the trunk of a mango tree, but wasn’t sure what it was. So I searched online using the striking details – iridescent green, red on legs, Hawaii – and the first result was a post on whatsthatbug.com. It was headlined, ‘Emerald Cockroach Wasp from Hawaii turns Roaches into Zombies!!!’ (link here). That got my attention! Within that posting was a link to a longer post with more details (here).
In brief, the female Emerald Cockroach Wasp (Ampulex compressa) stings a cockroach to temporarily disable its front legs. It does this to buy time to deliver a second sting to a precise spot in the cockroach’s brain that controls the roach’s escape reflex. The roach isn’t paralyzed, but it just stays where it is, that is until the wasp takes it by the antenna and leads its zombie prey back to her burrow. There she lays an egg on the roach, before walling up the burrow’s entrance. Back inside, the roach just waits while the egg hatches and the larva eats its way inside the roach and devours the roach’s organs. Four weeks later, a new wasp emerges from the roach and the burrow.
I was astonished to learn about this, in particular how, for the second sting, the wasp locates the exact spot in the roach’s brain using sensors on the stinger.
The source of the whatsthatbug.com description comes from Carl Zimmer who has a great article here. More information about this remarkable wasp can be found here, here, and here. And finally, a must see video of the wasp in action, including leading the cockroach to its lair, can be seen here.
Clouds off Upolu, a scene not greatly different in color.
A black and white cow with her mostly white calf.
A trio of black and white cows, the middle one looking particularly suspicious of what I was up to.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Daylight in Black and White.’ See more responses here.
I was going to post a single image for this but then got caught up with the idea of black and white images of black and white things. This is the result.
Black and white sheep doing sheep things.A black and white Great Frigatebird gliding into a stiff breeze off the coast of North Kohala.
Some shadows on a wall, not so different in black and white from the full color original.
I thought this Gold Dust Dy Gecko looked quite scenic on this railing, surrounded as it was by tropical foliage. It has a sort of purposeful look, but wasn’t doing much of anything while I watched it.
For whatever reason, I don’t usually see much activity on bougainvillea flowers and I don’t see a lot of monarch butterflies. On this occasion though, this monarch was one of several insects feeding on a group of bougainvilleas.
I had to go back more than a week to find my last photo for Bushboy’s Last on the Card photo challenge (see more responses here). It might not be the last photo I took, but it is the last I saved, and I’d already processed it for posting later this week. There’s really not much difference between the original (above) and the adjusted version (below). I cropped the photo a bit and lightened the shadows a bit to bring out the anole more, but it works pretty well even without that.
My house has been surrounded by spiders and their webs for most of the winter. One female Hawaiian Garden Spider has a web which angles across the living room window. I can follow the activities there from the comfort of the couch.
One morning, I raised the window blind and found this scene. The large, yellow-backed spider is the female. The much smaller drab, brown spider above her is the male, and when a male is seen on a female’s web there’s only one reason – he’s looking to mate with her. I’m not sure what the third character in this scene is. It might be a mango beetle, but it was securely trussed to the web.
What happened can be seen in the gallery. The male tried his mating moves, the female remained largely unmoved. Much of the time the male stayed on the relatively safe opposite side of the web to the female, but to mate he must venture to the other side. When he did, sometimes the female swung into action. Mostly, she seemed responsive, but one time the male disappeared in an instant. Then I saw him climbing back up the thread he’d dropped on. Something must have gone awry, but no harm done. Through all this activity, the beetle looked on, waving its little legs and antennae.
The presence of the beetle seemed to affect the delicate negotiations going on between the spiders. Sometimes, the male went over to the beetle and sort of prodded at it, but nothing more. In the early evening, the female lost patience. She straddled the beetle, shot out strands of threads, and rebound the beetle as she spun it with her legs. It turned like a rotisserie chicken in overdrive. I didn’t get photos of this as the light was fading.
Next morning, nothing much had changed. The female was still the central figure, the male still holding his position. The only difference is that the beetle had managed to push its legs and head through the engulfing threads and it was back to waving its little legs and antennae. Later that day, the male appeared to successfully mate with the female and escape alive. I last saw him wandering over to the next web along where he positioned himself carefully on the opposite side of the web spun by another large female.
The next day, there was still a female on the web but I think it was a different, smaller one than the one in these photos. The beetle was still there, still waving its little legs and antennae. That evening, the new female did the rotisserie chicken move on the beetle and retrussed it. Next morning, the beetle had freed its legs and head again and was waving its legs and antennae again.
The following day, only the new female spider could be seen!
Posted in response to this month’s Becky’s Squares challenge theme of ‘Odd.’ See more responses here.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Love Your Pet.’ See more responses here.
Since I don’t have a regular pet, the next best thing would be The Big Galoot, our resident House Gecko. He (or possibly she) has been the dominant gecko in the house for several weeks now. House Geckos are nocturnal, but The Big Galoot does not seem to have seen that memo. He makes appearances at any time of day.
Nocturnal geckos tend to be very shy. If they’re caught out in the open, they scoot to shelter. This appears to be another memo missed by The Big Galoot. When I see him, he tends to remain in place and looks at me with a puzzled expression. There have been occasions where he has held his position so long that I’ve wondered if he was still alive!
The behavior of The Big Galoot has brought to mind the memoir, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. In it, Frank’s father, who hails from Northern Ireland, is described as having the ‘odd manner.’ This seems, to me, to be a perfect description for The Big Galoot!
Also posted in response to this month’s Becky’s Squares challenge theme of ‘Odd.’ See more responses here.
Graham's Island 