MIDSUMMER 2025
In my previous blog, I was whining about the rainfall, or the lack of absorbing rain that characterised the beginning of the season. It was like the gods read the blog, because it was around that time that the good rains arrived! Just in the nick-o-time for Christmas. Since then, until the end of January, we have had 18 days of rain (out of 31 days in total), bringing an average of 230mm of precipitation to the estate. That's an average of 13mm per rainy day, or 7,7mm per day since. That's plenty water! And because of the softer nature of the rain, much of that has been absorbed into our aquifers, and so our river levels have risen nicely and are staying up. Great news!
The average humidity has obviously also increased which has been much appreciated by the myriad epiphytes (air plants), mosses and lichens which require humidity to thrive. In the above photo, it is hard to tell the branches and trunk of the Hardleaf Currantrhus, Searsia tumulicola tumulicola, apart from the rock with both of them smothered in lichens of all types, puffed out and fully hydrated. I found this community of life on the high-altitude, north-facing slopes of Little Joker koppie, high above Majubane and Steenkamps' valleys.
With the rain too, popped up all sorts of life in so many different forms! I managed to capture some of these in the gallery below:
In my blog of January 2020 (soon before the dreaded COVID virus turned our world upside-down), one of the articles I featured was on a Sawfly called Arge taeniata, where the gravid female saws into a Pelargonium leaf, into which she lays her eggs. With that species, from the Argidae family of Sawflies, the larvae chew their way out of the swollen leaf once they hatch, proceeding to eat the leaves of said tree.
With the above species of Stem Sawfly from the Cephidae family of Sawflies, the gravid female uses her saw-like ovipositor to saw into the stems of Krauss' Everlasting, Helichrysum kraussii, exclusively, where she will lay a single egg. Because of certain hormones that she injects into the plant tissue at the same time, the plant reacts to this invasion by swelling at that point, creating what is known as a gall. The egg hatches within this gall and the caterpillar-like larva eats the swollen tissue, hollowing out the gall. Once all the tissue has been consumed, the larva will be ready to pupate, which it does in the safety of the hollowed-out gall.
Alas, I, of course, interrupted this whole process when I sliced the gall open, exposing the poor larva before it entered its pupal stage, abruptly ending its journey. But if I didn't, the larva looks like it was almost ready to pupate, after which it would chew a hole in the side of the gall and emerge as an adult.
Krauss' Everlastings are a very common and widespread shrub on the estate and, I must say, I don't think I have ever seen a full-grown shrub without several of these galls present. This means that this specific Sawfly is also very common since they exclusively utilise this bush, meaning that each bush is host to multiple individuals of the same species of Sawfly..
As I mentioned in that previous post, Sawflies are a primitive type of wasp, easily recognisable by the fact that, unlike other wasps, Sawflies do not have a restriction at the waist (between the thorax and the abdomen), and that their ovipositor is modified with teeth, enabling it to saw into plant tissue. Other wasps have a very narrow waists and their ovipositors have been modified into a sting, or in families of parasitic wasps, into a tube that can inject eggs into the bodies of other insects.
This strange sight is a batch of eggs laid on a living branch by a gravid Green Lacewing from the Chrysopidae family. I did feature a photo of these eggs in my blog of May 2019, where I explained that, when laying her eggs, the adult female Green Lacewing excretes a sticky fluid from the tip of her abdomen, touches it to the substrate and then lifts her abdomen away from said substrate, stretching the sticky fluid into a straight thread, which hardens quickly when exposed to the air. She then proceeds to lay a single egg on the end of this hardened thread so that it resembles a miniature helium-filled balloon on a string. She repeats this exercise until her full batch is laid.
During spring and summer, she will lay these batches on plants that she can see are heavily infested with aphids, those small little bugs that suck the juices from a plant, the enemy of any gardener. The larvae hatch as voracious predators with poor senses, moult for the first time immediately, and then embark on a feeding frenzy where they walk around swaying their heads from side to side, and if they encounter any creature that can be subdued by their massive, pincer-like, hypodermic jaws, they will clasp the victim within these jaws, inject a cocktail of enzymes, and suck up the liquesced innards that result. Even a sibling! It is surmised that this, together with the fact that aphids are often protected by ants, who also love to eat eggs, is the reason why the Lacewing deposits each egg on the tippy top of a hardened thread: to keep the hatchlings further away from each other so that they have less chance of coming into contact and devouring one another. In fact, the digestive enzymes that they inject into their prey is so potent, that it will liquify the innards of a small, soft-bodied insect within two minutes of injection!
I featured the life cycles of these lacewings in my blog of Late Summer 2023 too. Check it out.
And I was present for Fight night!!! The slightly larger individual on the right appeared to be the territory holder, because I first noticed him standing proudly on a large horizontal Plectranthus leaf in the dark forest. I noticed that quite a few leaves, all pretty far apart, had, what looked like a dominant resident male in attendance, facing outwards.
Then, on this chaps leaf, landed another, smaller individual (on the left) who approached this male and instigated THE BIG STARE-DOWN! For at least ten seconds they stood tall less than a centimetre from each other and stared intensely into the others eyes, when suddenly, in a flash, the smaller one attacked the larger one. It was way too quick for me to see (they're also only 5mm long) what transpired but the fight removed them from the ring (leaf) and they disappeared into the foliage.
Within seconds the larger guy was back on his leaf, standing proudly, facing outwards. Before I could say "well done buddy", the smaller challenger was back! The process repeated itself three or four times before I left the ringside, with the larger one always seeming to come out on top. Quite entertaining. it was!
All species throughout the family look quite similar, with boldly marked wings that remain splayed when at rest and the females are also easy to tell apart from the males by the presence of a rather thick, tapered ovipositor on the end of her abdomen, giving the impression that she has a thick, tapering tail.
These bold markings, splayed wings. coupled with large eyes suggest that the species primarily uses their vision for communication and confrontation, which is certainly what I saw.
I also caught this Common Grass Yellow, Eurema hecabe, just as it had emerged from its pupa (so it is a holometabolic insect) and I watched it dry out its wings from a crinkled blob to hardened butterfly wings. This photo was taken beyond the middle of the drying process, explaining the rumpling of the wings. I could actually see the butterfly pumping haemolymph through his wings to get them stretched into shape. The whole process took about a half an hour while I was eating my lunch.
from the Tephritidae, a notoriously pest-ridden family of flies. Notorious for their negative impact on agricultural farming of tropical fruit, celery, blueberries, sunflowers, olives. nuts and many other vegetable crops. I remember when I was a kid, we'd often bite into a fruit and there would be this little worm in the flesh, preferably in one piece, and we would pull our faces and throw the fruit away (or if the worm was in half, we would proceed to wretch!) Those little worms are the maggot larvae of a fruit fly.
The gravid female fly drills a hole into the side of the fruit, leaf or stem* of a particular plant, and deposits a bunch of eggs within. The larvae hatch and devour the flesh of the fruit, then drop out onto the ground, burrow under the surface and construct a little chamber in which they pupate. If the ground is too hard to burrow into, the larva bends over so that its head is touching its arse and then flicks itself violently so that its body leaps through the air for some distance. It will do this until it finds ground soft enough for it to dig into.
Once the adults emerge, they remain close to their offspring's preferred food plant, feeding off vegetation or nectar from flowers. The males establish a territory on the plant that the offspring feed on, knowing that a female will approach sooner or later. Competition is tough amongst these territorial males as I have now witnessed.
* Species that deposit their eggs within the stems of plants are gall-forming like the Sawfly larva featured above, and develop similarly, except the fruit flies develop together in a small group. There is also a species of Fruit Fly from Europe that drills a hole into a gall, created by a Stem Sawfly! The eggs hatch within the gall and proceed to devour the Sawfly maggot!
One thing about the arrival of the rains is the explosion of life! I was walking through the grasslands around Mount Prospect when I encountered this nymph Wahlberg's Katydid, Clonia wahlbergii, shedding its skin. Remember, a baby holometabolic insect (life cycle includes egg, larva, pupa, adult) is called a larva and looks (usually like a maggot) and behaves very differently from the adult, while a baby hemimetabolic insect (life cycle includes egg, nymph and adult) is called a nymph and looks and behaves similar to the adult, just growing up and shedding when the skin gets a little tight around the waist.
A Katydid (mainly USA) or Long-horned grasshopper (elsewhere) is a grasshopper that is more active at night, unlike a normal grasshopper, and is usually a predator, eating other arthropods, while grasshoppers are vegetarians. I did feature a more vegetarian katydid in my blog of "Late Summer 2023". This katydid, though, is a thorough predator and when it is full grown, it is actually quite a frightening insect with long, spiny legs and large wings that flick open and rattle when the insect is disturbed. I have heard that they can also inflict quite a painful bite!
Katydid males, like their cousins', the grasshoppers and crickets, make a loud mating call through stridulation, where they rhythmically rub their spiny legs against spines on their bodies to create a sound that, with a bit of imagination, sounds like "katydid" repeated over and over again. Once a female responds to the call and approaches him, he is required to present her with a bridal gift, a sweet, protein-rich broth prepared especially for her in special abdominal glands. This broth is expensive to produce, so only very successful males in good health are able to produce it, and if he can't, she will not allow him to mate with her.
Once she is mated with, the gravid female will drill into the ground with her rigid ovipositor and lay her eggs under the soil. The nymphs will hatch, burrow to the surface and begin hunting for tiny insects immediately, shedding its skin when it gets too tight as it grows. The wings are only fully developed in adulthood.
The Common Grass Yellow is an extremely widespread species occurring from Asia to Africa and beyond to Australasia! larval plants include a myriad species from a wide variety of plant families from Cucurbits, Euphorbias, members of the Pea family, like Vachelias and Senagalensis' (the old African Acacias) and, here on the estate, particularly the Curry Bush, Hypericum aethiopicum, with its beautiful and bountiful St. John's Wort flowers.
There are numerous local Grass Yellow butterflies in the area who all look relatively alike, with some difficult to differentiate from one another. This species, however, is easy to distinguish from the others by the characteristic uneven inner edge of the black trailing edge of the upper forewings.
.JPG)
Another butterfly for us to admire. This is the glorious Emperor Swallowtail, Papilio ophidicephalus, taken by Heidi Robertson from Rainbow Rivers (Unit 17). besides being the largest of our Southern African butterflies, it is also one of the less seen ones because it resides in the Southern African forest biome, which is our smallest biome, although we have plenty of it on the estate.
This butterfly closely resembles the pretty common Citrus Swallowtail, P. demodocus, which is found on the estate, and I featured it in my previous blog with a mention of this species. The differences, as mentioned there, is that this species is larger, and it has the swallowtail-like streamers protruding from the trailing edge of its wings.
The two species of plant from this area that are used the most as a host plant are the forest dwelling trees called the Perdepis, Clausena anisata, and the Small Knobwood, Xanthoxylem capense, both from the Citrus family, and both common in the forests on the estate.
The gravid female Emperor Swallowtail lays a single egg that she attaches with a sticky fluid to the underside of a leaf from one of these trees and flies off to repeat the process until she has exhausted her egg stock. After about six days, a tiny, two-millimetre-long caterpillar hatches and immediately eats the shell of its egg. The larva, for the first four of the five instars, has a dark brownish body with the end bit white as snow, making it resemble a bird's dropping on the leaf, a very effective camouflage. These four instars take about four weeks to complete.
The fifth instar caterpillar, though, would be a little too large to pass as a bird dropping sitting on a leaf, so the caterpillar's new skin is mottled green and brown, accurately resembling a leaf instead. This larger and final instar also has a defensive weapon in case the camouflage is not effective enough: It has an organ, called an Osmeterium, that lies inverted within the front of the thorax, where it meets the head. When the caterpillar is harassed, it everts this organ, and it pops out from above the caterpillar's head. It resembles the forked tongue of a snake and at the same time emits an odour that is apparently not unpleasant to humans, but is toxic to preying mantids, ants and spiders (probably more arthropods, but these are the ones that have been proven in a lab). This instar lasts about a fortnight.
Finally, once the caterpillar has fully developed, it crawls up a vertical stick or twig and, facing upwards, spins a silken mat that the caterpillar attaches itself to, using special hooks at the end of its abdomen. It then spins a cocoon around itself from foot to head, and when it reaches its "waist", it attaches its waist to the stick / twig with a strong thread of silk looped around itself and the twig. It then continues to envelop itself in its silken cocoon and leans its upper body out until it looks a little like the small letter "r" on the side of the twig.
Two to three weeks later, the beautiful adult butterfly emerges and continues the cycle.
This is Dibaeis arcuata, resembling many typical crustose lichens found on rock surfaces around the estate. What makes it different, though, is the design of the apothecia, the fruiting body of the fungal portion of the lichen.
Lichens, a combination of two or three species of unrelated organisms, a fungus, a photobiont (either an alga or a cyanobacterium) and a yeast, normally produce small disc-like structures that look like tiny buttons called apothecia, constructed out of tightly woven mycelium, the collective name for the fungal strands that make up a fungus. These apothecia are the site where the fungal spores of the fungal part of the lichen are produced.
The apothecium of this species differs from the others in that they resemble tiny mushrooms like a true fungal fruiting body, instead of the button-like discs that are normally produced by the fungal partner in a lichen. The spores produced here will be dispersed by the wind, unlike most other lichens with disc-like apothecia that disperse spores when water splashes on the disc.
The problem with this sort of reproduction is that only the fungal part is reproduced this way. The fungal spore has to now come into contact with the specific photobiont to be able to produce another lichen. Chances are small indeed.
A slightly more efficient way, although it would be more like cloning, I suppose, is when it gets very dry, tiny fragments of the lichen break off and disperse in the wind to establish itself elsewhere.
This teeny-weeny arthropod is called a Slender Springtail, from the Entomobryidae family of Collembola. I featured my very first encounter with this primitive group of animals in my blog titled "Summer's End 2024" last year. But the ones I encountered were minute, less than one millimetre long! And floating around in my little pond in my rockery. This is a much bigger one at just over two millimetres long, and that's almost as big as they get.
In that introduction to Springtails, I mentioned that the reason they are called "Springtails" is because of the presence of an organ called a furcula, attached to the final abdominal segment. This organ is a limb that looks like a forked tail that bends backwards, under strain, beneath the abdomen and is attached to the third abdominal segment. If the Springtail is threatened or harassed, it will release this organ which then flicks open and propels the Springtail violently into the air, escaping the area very suddenly. The springtails in that blog were among the few that do not have furcula's because they live in water.
This landlubber does have a furcula. Furthermore, the Entomobryidae is characterised by an elongated abdomen, allowing for an even longer furcula. With this enlarged furcula, members of this family can achieve some staggering results in physics when the furcula is employed: This two-millimetre-long Springtail can propel itself up to one-hundred-and-sixty millimetres. That's eighty times its body length! Also, the acceleration of the Springtail reaches well over nine-hundred meters per second! That generates a g-force (gravitational acceleration) of over ninety-eight! Compare that to a g-force of just over five for the driver of a suped-up dragster. Wow, that's some force.
Also, if you look closely, you will notice stiff hairs protruding from the dorsal part of the Springtail. These are called trichobothria, and they are hairs that are anchored in a sort of pit with a stretched membrane covering it. This set-up makes the hair extremely sensitive to air movement, picking up vibrations made by sound, enabling the Springtail to identify sounds and movement nearby.
If any of you have not walked the Steenkamps river path in the last few weeks, you need to do it! The paths have been completed and the walk from the confluence of the Steenkamps and Majubane rivers to S7 is absolutely beautiful! This is a Montane Pineapple Lily, Eucomis montana, in full bloom, and there are crowds of them inhabiting the cliffs opposite the paths in that stretch!
There are twelve species of Pineapple Lily, and all are endemic to Southern Africa, of which I have found four on the estate, so far. This species, the Montane Pineapple Lily, is endemic to Mpumalanga and Eswatini only. They all have those strap-like leaves, arranged in a rosette at ground level. Then, from the centre-point arises a stout stalk with a compact raceme of flowers arranged vertically, topped by a rosette of green, leafy bracts, which make the whole flowering mass look very much like a pineapple, hence the common name.
The flowers emit a smell of rotting meat, which attracts flies, the dominant pollinators of the plant. Once pollinated, the ovaries swell and capsules, which dry out into a maroon colour, form, and once fully developed, open to release the wind dispersed seeds.
Another photo contributed by Dave De Vos from "The Croft's". Thank you, Dave.
This is a common little bird found on the estate that everybody should recognise. It is a male Fiscal Flycatcher, Melaenornis silens, and each house on the estate should have their own resident couple during the summer months. They are most often observed perched on an exposed spot a few meters off the ground, from where they search for insects, usually crawling on the ground, but sometimes flying by. They also eat the smaller fruits found on the estate, like the little red berries found on a Dogwood or one of the many Currant species. Unfortunately, they are also responsible for the spread of Bramble and Cotoneaster seeds, which are invasive exotics!
A male and female pair up in the spring and establish a territory which is often the garden of your house. The male brings gifts of plant down, presumably to line the future nest with, which he holds down while chittering and dancing for the female. He then deposits it in a place where he has deposited other gifts, and if she accepts, she will pick it up and follow him to his perch, where they will mate.
Nest construction is left up to the female, who constructs a cup-shaped nest in the fork of a tree, often Ouhout, the most ubiquitous tree on the estate. Afterwards, she will lay up to three eggs in the nest, one day apart, and incubate them alone for about two weeks, while the male brings food to her regularly. The male's other job is to defend the nest, which he does with gusto!
In fact, the plumage of this bird closely resembles that of the Butcher bird, or Common Fiscal (previously Fiscal Shrike), which is a notoriously aggressive bird, and other birds think so too, sometimes mobbing the Flycatchers like they mob the Common Fiscal. Maybe this trait has emboldened the Fiscal Flycatcher because it often attacks other birds bigger than itself and drives it away from the nest. This is especially so for Red-chested Cuckoos, or Piet-my-vrous, because the Fiscal Flycatcher is one of their chosen hosts to raise their chicks.
Once hatched, the chicks are fed exclusively by the female for a further two weeks or so before they are driven off and the couple will prepare for a second brood. Although the male is noticeably present, he does not take part in feeding the fledglings.
Like many other smaller birds, the Fiscal Flycatcher often takes part in an activity called "anting". This is when the bird sits on the floor, in the vicinity of the activities of Pugnacious ants (see blogs of MARCH 2019, where I show how they overpower much bigger termite alates, and FINSBURY AUTUMN WILDLIFE of April 2020 where I explain their breeding), and spread their wings and feathers apart, inviting the ants to crawl all over it. The bird then picks an ant up and rubs it over its feathers. This harassment causes the ant to spray defensive formic acid over the feather of the bird. This, in turn, excites all the other ants when they come into contact with it, and they also begin to spray formic acid on the birds' plumage. It is believed that the formic acid repels bacteria and fungus, keeping the feathers critter-free.
This a photo of a pair of Harvester ants, Messor capensis, communicating with each other while walking by. The genus name "Messor", is the name ascribed by the romans to their god of crops and harvest. This genus has been given that name because they harvest seeds from the grasslands for food.
The colonies of these ants can be, and usually are, massive, and founded by a single queen ant. They live in a huge, complex nest with many passages and chambers. Some of these chambers have been constructed to stay as dry as possible, as granaries, to ensure that the seeds stored there do not germinate, even if stored for many years.
The ants are active on warm nights, where different castes of workers, from five millimetres to one centimetre in size, roam the surrounding fields for seeds, which they carry as far as two-hundred-metres back to the nest! The largest workers have outsized heads with massive jaws designed to crack open the husks of the largest of seeds, which is done at the entrance to the nest, before the seeds are taken underground to the granaries for storage. The piles of seed husks concentrated at the entrance to the nests are characteristic of Harvester ants and often enrich the soil in the immediate surroundings, producing more nutritious soil for plants to grow on. In areas like the Karoo, this soil engineering is important to plant growth in the area.
Interestingly, Western Cape Rooibos farmers are faced with a challenge when trying to collect seeds from their plants because the seeds are mechanically dispersed by a spring-load action of the seed pod. When the pods containing the tiny seeds ripen, they burst open, flinging the seeds all around onto the floor. This same mechanism is used in many other plants, but a good example is the wild version of the Pea plant. Those pods are also spring-loaded and fling the peas away from the plant when ripe. During the domestication of the pea plant, though, through a mutation and selective breeding, this spring-loaded seed dispersal method was removed, otherwise peas would be very difficult to harvest.
Regarding the Rooibos plant, local Bushman knowledge enlightened the farmers that Harvester ants love to collect Rooibos seeds and store them in their granaries, even for years until needed. All the farmers had to do was locate the nest of the harvester ants and expose the granaries, allowing them to easily collect seeds for planting the following season. This method is still used to this day.
Now, isn't this a pretty little flower? It is tiny, though, about three millimetres long and standing on a slim stem about 40mm from the waterlogged ground. It is called a Lead Bladderwort, Utricularia livida, and we encountered a few of them in the waterlogged, rocky ground where the mountain was leaking on our exciting Brewery Hike over the festive season. But what makes it special is that it is a carnivore!
A long time ago, and over a long time, a group of plants began producing proteinase, an enzyme that breaks down protein, and began excreting it, via glands, from their leaves as a defence against insect predators. Research has shown that these glands can and do work both ways, resulting in the glands absorbing nutrients from proteins that were trapped by the proteinase, and so on, and so on, until the plants became carnivorous.
It is believed that plants evolved carnivorous traits independently at least twelve times, although, in South Africa, our carnivorous plants are represented by only two indigenous families: the Droseraceae or Sundew family which is represented on the estate by two species of Sundew (mentioned only briefly in a blog "The Jolly Season 2018"), and is also the family that the famous Venus Fly Trap belongs to; and the Lentibulariaceae or Bladderwort family, to which this beauty belongs.
I have managed to find two species from the Bladderwort family on the estate so far. The Corkscrew Plant, Genlisea hispidula (featured in my blog of February 2019), and this one, the Lead Bladderwort. The Bladderwort, though, has a very different trap to the simpler one found on the Corkscrew Plant, although the traps are also located where the roots of a normal plant would be.
Both plants lack roots, instead, they have modified leaves that serve the purpose of anchoring the plants to their waterlogged substrate, like roots would. With the Corkscrew Plant, it acts almost like a screwy filter with hairs to trap escapees, while with the Bladderwort, the bladders are interspersed among the root-resembling leaves, ready to trap microscopic animals like rotifers and unicellular organisms.
This plant's trap is much more advanced than the corkscrew type of filter of the Corkscrew Plant, in fact, the vacuum-driven bladder traps on the plants in this genus are regarded as the most sophisticated carnivorous trapping mechanism in the plant kingdom. I'll try describing the process:
Firstly, the vacuum-driven bladder trap is called an Utricle, from the Latin Utriculus which refers to a leather wine bladder, hence the genus name. The utricle actually looks a bit like a balloon with a seem along one plane and a soft, sealed, hatch-like door on hinges with rigid spines protruding from it. The entire utricle measuring about two millimetres across.
The utricle pumps water through its sides via the process of active transport, a molecular process that allows molecules to pass from one side of a cell membrane to another. This displacement of water creates a vacuum that forces the sides of the balloon to collapse inwards, concentrating the digestive juices and remains of the previous victim still inside. Once no more water can be pumped out, the trap is set.
Now, if anything just touches the rigid spines attached to the soft door of the utricle, it bends the door and breaks the seal, allowing the sides of the balloon to pop out again, simultaneously sucking a column of water, together with the animal victim, if it is small enough, into the utricle. The door slams shut again, trapping the animal inside with the digestive juices to digest from within a few hours to a few days, depending on the prey. The process, from the animal touching one of the rigid spines to being trapped in the utricle takes about a hundredth of a second!
Often, when I take people on the Zebra Trail hike in the summer, I search for, and find the white form of the above plant, so join me one day and I will show you...
.JPG)
It's like something out of a sci-fi movie! In profile, this Giant Cone-headed Mantis, Hemiempusa capensis, looks like an intelligent alien life form coming to invade earth!! Some stunning colours and patterns too.
I stumbled across this massive, eighty millimetre-long Giant Cone-headed Mantis, the region's largest Praying Mantis, in the grasslands beyond Pebble Creek. I would never have seen it if it didn't have to move to escape me standing on it. It has the most bizarre shape that helps it remain camouflaged as it lies in wait for prey to come close. It has leaf-like appendages in all its joints and hanging off its abdomen, very much like a camouflaged sniper in the war.
The Mantis is active in the night and day, so the camouflage is more important in the former, whether the Mantis is trying to ambush prey, or trying to hide from predators. In the night, the darkness helps hide the Mantis while hunting, but while it is flying, the biggest danger comes from bats! But never fear, the Giant Cone-headed Mantis has a cyclopean ear situated on the posterior end of the thorax where it meets the abdomen, and this ear can hear the echolocation clicks emitted by bats! When it hears a bat approaching, it does a quick loop-de-loop and then folds its wings and drops to the floor like a stone!
Night and day, the Mantis uses its excellent vision to track down prey. It has been proven that it can even distinguish between species by sight alone.
The males tend to fly more (some species the male has wings and the female not) because they need to range far and wide to detect the pheromones in the air that have been released by a female, then follow them to find the female. Then the sports begins...
The male needs to jump on the female's back, hold onto her shoulders, and try to deposit his sperm in a chamber on the end of the female's abdomen where she can store it and use it when she needs it. The problem though, is that in about ninety percent of species of Praying Mantis, the female tries to eat the male during copulation! She succeeds most of the time in laboratories or in unnatural scenarios, but according to research, it only happens about a quarter of the time in nature. It is speculated that, because of their excellent eyesight, the males are easily intimidated by unnatural movement, distracting him and affecting his efficiency in escaping the females clutches when the time comes.
It has also been found that hungry females tend to eat the males more often, and that males actually avoid hungry females if they can for the very same reason.
Anyway, once the male has escaped, or provided a nice nutritional meal for the female, the eggs begin to develop, and in about six weeks, the female will construct a foam-like egg sack, filled with about forty eggs, each in their own little chamber with snorkel, from the end of her abdomen with the help of two tiny appendages.
After about six weeks. the minute little mantids emerge from their eggs and escape the egg sac via the snorkels. The Mantids are hemimetabolic, which means that they have a simpler life cycle, egg to nymph to adult, than the higher insects with their egg to larva to pupa to adult, and so look like miniature adults from the beginning, sans the wings.
Finally, if all goes well, which is unlikely, after about ten moults, an adult will emerge and, with the larger species like this one, will have only one season to find a female and continue the cycle.
_______________________________________________________
Groovy! The estate is lush and green right now, so you need to get here to play! Remember that I am mostly available to guide you and / or you guests on an outing while you're here. Simply contact me on the radio when you are here, or beforehand on WhatsApp (0645237058) or email jimmy@finsbury.co.za and we will make a plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment