In the garden of the Eco-house

Leicester has its very own Eco-house where folk can go and see how to live environmentally. It all seemed a bit stuffy to me. They recommended against buying windows that could open to save heat waste! However they seemed to have overlooked the great cooling qualities of a nice draft in the summer. The house was boiling, so much so that I ended up moving on to enjoy the garden slightly faster than I expected. I saw this Green Shield Bug (Palomena prisina) enjoying a cultivated ragwort like plant.

Another creature found in the garden was this Speckled Bush-cricket (Leptophyes punctatissima). It seemed to have climbed to the top of a flower stem and wanted to go further and so was reaching for a nearby flower.

On the buddleia I saw another wonderful Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui). It really has been a good year for them.

All in all a little wildlife haven. My garden is much smaller than this and so you would think much less able to attract wildlife?!?! Well check out these images from garden in recent days.

Take a look at this Rose Sawfly (Allantus cinctus) on my rose. This is a different species to the usual yellow bellied Rose Sawflies that I have been following in recent days.

Another visitor to my garden is this House Mouse (Mus musculus) who I found hiding behind our shed. I think he was eating the fallen fruit in the alleyway behind our house. That's enough for now, I'm off to explore somewhere else and see what I can find!

Sawflies emerge!

Happy days! The Rose Sawfly (Arge pagana) in the cocoon hatched today. I opened the jar this morning and seeing that the leaves had gone a bit moldy so left the lid off. The next thing I new was that there was a Rose Sawfly flying around the kitchen. I went back and checked my jar and indeed there was a hole in the cocoon. This chap went in on 26th of July and emerged on the 9th August after 14 days pupating.

So the first thing I did was scoop it up and place it back on its cocoon for some publicity shots and then released it into the wild (my back garden). It could fly right away and made a bee line to the rose bush of its birth. Once there it landed and cleaned its wings (above) it went for a walk around the rose bush, fly occasionally and basked in the sun.

Within a minute another Rose Sawfly arrived! I spotted my one doing this. It can't be egg laying yet so it must be the laying of chemical messengers to potential mates. They grow up so fast!

One last thing of note, it turns out that I got the species wrong before. This is Arge pagana.

A first for science, or at least the internet

One of the things I love about the Internet is the slow and deliberate fashion in which human knowledge is appearing on it. I think that in the future people will look back and see two discrete waves of scientific renaissance. The first wave was perhaps the initial discovery and the second, the time when that discovery was put on the Internet. For a lot of things the second renaissance has not yet occurred and it is up to us to make it happen.

Imagine the scene, a caterpillar is found in a garden by a child. The child looks on the Internet and finds out exactly what kind of caterpillar it is. Not only does he make an identification but finds out what plants the caterpillar eats, and maybe what creatures like to eat the caterpillar. The child will find out when in the year the caterpillar will hatch from its egg, which is pictured, and when it will go into its chrysalis, which is also pictured. The child will see a picture of the adult butterfly and learn about this creature. Now imagine that quality of information on every species of plant and animal in the UK. It would be amazing. Knowing more about our wildlife will help protect it.

With this going on in the back of my mind I went out into the garden. On the roses were three green caterpillars. I did a quick look on the Internet and soon found that they were Rose Sawfly (Arge ochropus). It amazed me so much that these green caterpillars could turn into flies that I went searching for a picture of the metamorphosis phase. I google image searched, I looked on Wild About Britain and do you know, I couldn't find a picture anywhere. Turns out there is not one. On this whole Internet there is not a single photo of this species in its cocoon. Well, let me tell you, there is now.

This is one of my Rose Sawflies. I took two into captivity and watched them over a few days. Soon they started spinning these silk cocoons from their mouths. I have uploaded this onto Wild About Britain. It is satisfying to know that I have uploaded the first picture of this type of cocoon onto the Internet. Go me!

Whats next? Well, I want to see the flies come out of their cocoons and then I will let them go. Alongside my Sawfly enclosure I also have a jar full of Raspberry Beetles (Byturus tomentosus) in their larvae stage. But more about that another day.

Operation Sawfly

Check out these beauties! The bottom three are Marmalade Hoverflies (Episyrphus balteatus) and the top two are simply called Hoverflies (Eupeodes corollae). Together they are busy fertilising a poppy in my garden. My garden does seem to be a resting place for a lot of fly species. Check these out.

There is nothing glamorous about this Blue Bottle (Calliphora vomitoria). With a Latin name like that you can guess how it eats. That's right, it vomits stomach acid on its food and then sucks it all back up through a straw like mouth. Nice.On another leaf of my clematis was this Green Bottle (Lucilia caesar). Compared to the blue bottle this fly is seen less and hated less. The reason being that blue bottles are attracted to human cooking since they find food by scenting the air. The green bottle finds food in other ways and so will not enter your house.

Even more reviled is this the Flesh fly (Sarcophaga carnaria). This is the fly that specialises in laying its eggs on the dead and dieing. This is what maggots turn into.

One thing I find interesting about the web is this drive we are now seeing to get all human knowledge out there where it can be accessed by anybody. One project that I admire especially is the Wild About Britain project. This aims to photograph every species of plant and animal found in the UK. I, ladies and gentlemen am about to contribute photos unknown to science.

The Internet contains pictures of Rose Sawfly "slugs" and Rose Sawfly flies but there is no images of a Rose Sawfly undergoing the metamorphosis. i.e. a Rose Sawfly cocoon. Nobody knows what one looks like. Well folks, I have found three Rose Sawfly slugs on my Rose and have taken two into captivity for observation. As we speak they are happily munching rose leaves in a jar on my desk.This was one of the Rose Sawfly (Arge ochropus) slugs on the 20th of July and the following picture was taken today (23rd July) and you can see that it is now almost twice as big.

When will it cocoon? Who knows, but we shall follow this very closely!