The Last Mantis

 

I have to say that for me there is something totally fascinating about praying mantises. I never tire of seeing them as I always do in late Summer and early Fall. Take a look at this one. On the one hand they are kind of comical. On the other hand they seem alien, almost like they are not from this planet. They are slow moving but capable of flight. They are clumsy afoot in their chosen habitats but swift of "hand" when it comes to capturing prey. They are masters of stealth and camouflage but easily seen once the eye is trained to look for them. So, permit me one more entry about mantises. Actually this one is about a particular praying mantis whom I got to know over the course of a few weeks, right outside my front door. I call her "The Last Mantis." The story is not pretty and a few of the images may be upsetting to some. Click on any image to see a larger version. Reader/viewer discretion is advised.

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The Last Mantis

As the season stretched toward Winter without showing the slightest hint of what is to come, I continued to watch this one praying mantis just outside my front door where she had taken up residence in a large boxwood bush. Normally by this time of year all of them are gone. The females have deposited their last eggs into those tough brown egg cases and cold weather has weakened or killed them. Sightings are rare. The Last Mantis had already outlived her expected time. Her lifespan was extended into early November by the unseasonably warm temperatures of this year's Fall. For weeks, I had counted on seeing her in the same bush almost every morning as she basked in the early sun.

Sometimes it was not all that clear who was watching whom. At first when I approached, she would immediately turn and look at me with that typical mantis stare; the one that says, "I am watching you and I hope that's enough to keep you from getting too close." After a while, though, she seemed to get used to my presence and more often than not she just ignored me. Most days I did nothing more than just stand and look at her for a while. On a few occasions, I brought my camera out with me just to capture a few shots of whatever she was up to at the time. Sometimes she was moving slowly toward some other position. Other times she was eating. Mostly, though, she just seemed to be sitting there waiting and watching.

I suppose one could say she was hunting, but for her the hunt was not much of an active stalking, at least not at first. It was more like being in the right place at the right time. It meant being someplace where there was some reasonable likelihood that another insect would land nearby or perhaps crawl within striking range of those extremely quick forelegs. If something landed a bit too far away she would creep toward it but speed-of-leg was not her strength. It was the speed of those forelegs that really did the trick. She hung out in the upper parts of that boxwood where her favorite perch was at least four feet above the ground. That was something of a puzzle for me. Why was she so high in the bush when all of the good stuff seemed to be on the ground?

On several occasions, I had seen The Last Mantis consuming either a cricket or a grasshopper. No surprise that she would catch and eat them. The surprise was where she caught them. For some time I had wondered why I never saw the mantises down on the ground in the very thick grass where, it seems, all the grasshoppers and crickets lived. Instead mantises seemed to prefer the higher perches in bushes and heavier brush, at least during this time of year. Perhaps it has something to do with preferred egg laying sites. Whatever the choice, it did seem to work. Enough grasshoppers, crickets, and other insects ventured toward the upward reaches of the bushes to make large and presumably tasty meals for the mantises that waited there.

--- The Last Days ----

One day in late October, The Last Mantis managed to catch a really huge grasshopper,  much bigger than she could normally hope for in that bush and much larger than anything I had seen her tackle before. As it turns out, this largest meal was probably be her last, at least as far as I know.

Normally they eat from one end to the other. Everything goes down. This time it would be different. She removed one hind leg and ate the juiciest part of the large muscle before just dropping the rest of it to the ground. Then she moved to the soft body parts in the abdomen and thorax and ate her fill there. A little fly who, at any another time might, itself, have been a tasty morsel for the mantis, now sat right in front of her watching the feast, perhaps hoping to share some of the leftovers.

But this was not going to be a windfall for the fly, not that day. As I watched, The Last Mantis suddenly lifted her head from the open cavity, released her grip, and dropped what was left of the grasshopper to the ground. She was done. It was time for some preening to remove the spatters of the meal. I watched as she carefully wiped and licked every part of her face, eyes, forelimbs and anything else that had been soiled during the capture, struggle, and subsequent meal. She reminded me of a cat. The meticulous preening seemed such a counterpoint to the rather brutal scenario that preceded it.

Within seconds of hitting the ground, the grasshopper was discovered by dozens of ants who may already have been alerted by the earlier droppings from the meal. It was amazing. They dispatched the entire corpse in less than an hour. It was like it never happened. The ground was absolutely cleaned of any trace.

As for The Last Mantis, after cleaning herself all over, she just hung in the same place for a long time, upside down, her quick and powerful forelimbs just drooping, as if they were limp. She was looking down, almost reaching, toward the fallen grasshopper, now teeming with ants. She seemed to watch as they consumed the remains particle by particle. It was as if she were contemplating her own future; a future that would come sooner rather than later.

A few days later it got very cold. Nighttime temperatures fell into the thirties. I knew what that would mean for The Last Mantis but on the following days I went looking for her anyway. Nothing. I probed the bushes, gently pulling the branches apart so I could peer into the lower areas. To be honest, at this point I was looking for her remains, hoping to take her inside for some last photographs. Nothing. She was gone. Perhaps a bird picked her off or perhaps she dropped to the ground and the ants took her away. In any case I know I will never see her again.  She is now a memory, a collection of photographs, and another source of deep gratitude for my many experiences that come from just watching.

Oh, there is one more thing. In rambling through the branches of the bush looking for her body, I discovered one more fresh egg case left there by The Last Mantis. She had not wasted the nutrients she took in during her final days. Something to look forward to next Spring.

Grandpa Cricket: Cicadas and Childhood

For me there is a certain melancholy that comes with this time of year. It is triggered mostly by the daily choruses of the male cicadas looking for mates. The adults are nearing the end of their long life cycles, some as long as seventeen years. They are spending the short summer as adult flying creatures, preparing to mate, secure the next generation, and die with the coming of Fall. Those cicada songs portend the end of my beloved Summer and the beginning of the darkness of Fall and Winter. It is the annual cycle that lifts me up and puts me down with every orbit of earth around the sun. Whatever it is for them is one thing. For me, the cicadas sing a song of coming darkness.

My introduction to cicadas came long before I knew what they were and long before I ever saw one. As a little boy I was mesmerized by that sound. I can still remember running around with a jar, catching lightning bugs on late Summer evenings . I recall being focused on the little flashing things that I could see while ignoring the chorus of things that I couldn't see as the daylight faded away. But sometimes the raspy voices would penetrate my consciousness and there they would be! Those invisible, loud singers who started as soloists then built into some kind of mysterious and magnificent choral crescendo of textured sound. Who were they? How big must they be to make so much noise? Where were they? Why couldn't I see them?

My dad supplied the only answer I had for a long time. "Listen," he would say as one of them started up. "It's Grandpa Cricket." That was all the information I had and all the information I needed. My little four-year-old mind took over and constructed Grandpa Cricket out of just the name, the big sound, and an overactive imagination. Grandpa Cricket was huge,  mysterious, formless, and probably had an appetite for little boys who strayed too far from their parents on late Summer evenings. My dad allowed the fantasy. In some way it helped keep me in check. I am sure he was amused to no end but he never let on. As far as I was concerned, Grandpa Cricket was real and at least as big as I imagined. He was real because my dad, the biologist, had told me so. That was good enough.

  Newly Emerged                Mature 

It was years before I ever saw Grandpa Cricket in person. Even as I picked up those strange brown cicada nymph casings, I did not make the connection. I think I must have been twelve or thirteen years old before I learned about the life cycle and associated Grandpa Cricket with those large flying bugs with the clear wings, huge eyes, and greenish frosty looking exoskeletons who were not really crickets after all. I had even handled a few of the mostly dead or dying ones I found lying about during the late Summer.

Nymph Skeleton and Adult Remains

My very first focused encounter with an active cicada turned out to be my most exciting. I was maybe fourteen years old at the time. I heard a cicada calling from a nearby large bush and decided to try to find him. I wanted to get close enough to watch him make that noise. I wanted to be close enough to see every detail of that elusive big bug. So began the dance. I would move toward the sound. The sound would stop. I would freeze in place and wait. The sound would begin again and I would move again, closer and closer. It would stop. So would I. Sometimes I could barely move before it stopped but I was a determined cicada stalker. After what seemed like a lifetime of juvenile stealth, I was close enough for the sound to be almost deafening. But I still could not find the cicada. Something about his sound made it impossible for me to pin down his location, even though I knew I was within a few feet of my quarry.

I may have been having trouble finding the cicada but somebody else had no trouble at all. Something streaked past my head and into my field of view! Wham! My eyes followed it to where it landed and there right before me was Grandpa Cricket! But he had company. That streak was a large wasp, heavy bodied with bold yellow stripes on the abdomen. It had flown right past my head to attack the cicada. The two of them were locked in a struggle that was going to have only one outcome. The wasp stung the cicada who let out one last weakened crackly call then fell silent and motionless. After a short time, the wasp took off carrying the cicada into the air! They vanished as suddenly as the wasp had appeared. The once mighty Grandpa Cricket was gone, carried away by a creature smaller than himself but impressive enough. Grandpa Cricket's magic power over me was gone too, at least most of it. A bit still lives inside that little boy who still lives inside of me.

Grandma Cricket still looks pretty formidable

In the age long before the internet and long before Google, I set out to find out about that flying streak that had taken down the mighty ghost of my childhood. I was not ready for what I found.The flying predator does not kill her prey to eat. In fact she doesn't kill it at all, at least not right away and not directly. She is known as the  cicada killer wasp. As with many such wasps, they sting their prey, not to feed themselves but to feed their as yet unborn young. Cicada killer females are specialized predators. They sting cicadas to paralyze them, not to kill them. They bury the living cicada in a nesting chamber they have dug in the ground. They lay a single egg on the hapless cicada who remains sealed in the chamber until the young wasp larva hatches. The youngster feeds on the cicada throughout his early development until he becomes an overwintering pupa. The following Spring it emerges as an adult and begins the cycle all over again. Adult wasps don't eat cicadas. They are vegans like lots of wasps and seem satisfied with flower nectars alone.

Just recently as I was having one of my frequent walkabouts in the backyard I came upon a cicada in the grasp of a cicada killer. Unbelievable! There it was again. Just what I had been writing about in this blog. Now I could have the perfect photo to go with the rest. I ran for my camera but by the time I got back to the scene the wasp had gone. The cicada was still there, motionless but abandoned. I was so disappointed but not surprised. Sometimes the wasps  will abandon prey if it seems too much trouble to get it to the nesting site. I waited at a distance for almost two hours to see if she would return and claim her prize. She never came back. I guess I will have to publish this one without my own picture of one of the stars of the show.

As for the cicada, not to worry. Nothing goes to waste in nature. The ants had already begun to investigate. If they had not come along, a bird certainly would have. It was fresh protein. It was also a fresh opportunity for me. I shooed the ants away and brought the cicada inside for a more formal photo, this time of Grandma Cricket. She is still here. I thought about returning her to the outside to meet her already sealed fate. But then I began to imagine that she might be aware of what is happening. Being eaten by bird might make for a quick and merciful end. Being slowly dismantled by a swarm of tiny ants seems like a pretty horrible way to go. Perhaps neither is as bad as being a long term meal for the offspring of the creature that paralyzed you in the first place. Maybe nature is more merciful than I think. Maybe with the paralysis comes complete unconsciousness. I hope so. In any case, for now she is here, uneaten but not going anywhere.

Female Cicada: Alive but Paralyzed by Cicada Killer Wasp

Many years ago and miles away from here, I had another encounter with the cicada killer wasp. It changed my whole outlook on the insect world. But that story will have to wait for another time. In the meantime, before it is too late in the season, go outside this Summer and listen carefully to that chorus of the cicadas. Imagine yourself to be a little boy who had been told that those voices have a name: Grandpa Cricket. If you listen carefully, you may hear one of them emit a short stutter of a call, one that sounds like it has been interrupted or choked off. Chances are that one has just met a cicada killer (or perhaps a hungry bird).


August 14, 2010 Update:

While Grandma Cricket might have remained alive but paralyzed in the confines of the cicada killer's nest, she did not survive the week here with me. Now I am wondering what keeps them on life support during the period of confinement before they are eaten by the young wasps. In any case, I have sought to immortalize her with one last photo before I release her to the elements.

Panoramic View of Cicada. Click on Image to Enlarge

Who Else Lives Here?

The place I call home is home to others as well. Not all of them are cute, furry, or feathery. Once one gets past the bunnies, squirrels, and birds, there is much more to see.  I try to pay attention to the seldom seen beings and their stories when I can. This is a small collection of some of those episodes from my yard.  All of the images are from right here on Nelson Street. It is amazing how many dramas are played out on a small scale right under our noses. They are all parts of the ordinary cycles of life and death amongst the small creatures that for the most part escape our notice. For them almost every encounter is a zero sum game that has a definite winner and a definite loser. We can start with one I have rarely seen, let alone photographed.

This female parasitic wasp has captured, stung, and paralyzed a caterpillar. She will drag it into a nesting hole she has dug in the ground.
There she will entomb the caterpillar and lay a single egg. The caterpillar will remain alive but paralyzed and sealed in the hole until the young wasp hatches. You can guess what it eats until it is ready to emerge and begin the cycle all over again.


Had that unfortunate caterpillar escaped the sting of the wasp and lived to complete its normal life cycle, it might have grown up look something like this beauty just out of the chrysalis.


Then there is the magnificent black and yellow mud dauber as seen here from underneath. I caught this lovely one inside my house and couldn't pass up the opportunity to take a closer look. After keeping her in the fridge long enough to slow her down, I placed her on my scanner and got this image. She was later released unharmed. Mud daubers, another of the parasitic wasps, build those crusty clay nests that seem to show up under eaves, mailboxes and other protected places in our homes that we do not clean very often. They sting and paralyze (but not kill) mostly spiders which they stuff into cylindrical clay tubes. Once they have enough spiders in a tube, they lay a single egg on one of the spiders and seal the tube with clay. She may create multiple tubes, each containing one egg and enough spiders to do the job. Then the whole thing is plastered over to make it look like a clay blob. When the young ones hatch, -- well you know the story by now. I will do a more detailed blog on the mud daubers later.

Speaking of spiders, I don't necessarily recommend allowing black widow spiders to hang around in places that you frequent, but they do make interesting neighbors, worth paying attention to.

This one has just captured a June bug in her web. If all goes according to plan, she will wrap her prey with silk bindings, paralyze him with venom, inject digestive juices into the body, and leave the chemicals to do their work of turning the insides of the bug into a juicy pulp. Then she will return, suck out the nutritious bug juices, and discard the empty shell of a carcass.

June bugs are probably not a favorite prey for the spider. It would be a big meal but they  have too much strength and too much armor. This captive has already wrecked the web with his struggles. He eventually escaped before she could wrap him up. As it turns out, this arachnid mother  had more than a few mouths to feed. Shortly after the June bug escaped, dozens of miniature black widow spiders emerged from an egg sac that had been hanging hidden under a nearby rock.

There is no way such a small area can accommodate that many black widow spiders. Most won't survive anyway since they are cannibalistic at that age. Others will fly away attached to a fine thread of silk blown by the wind. My guess is that some of them will wind up in one of those clay tubes that the mud daubers prepare.

My favorite predator neighbors are the preying mantises that show up every year. They deserve their own blog entry which is forthcoming. For now just consider this beauty looking back at me as I invade her space. Imagine being a fly and coming face to face with this.



That's it for now. In future postings I'll talk in more detail about other specific animals or plants that inhabit this little corner of the ecosystem and share some of my photos of them. For now I hope you have enjoyed these little sketches.

Time at the Tracks

After much hesitation, I have finally resolved to begin a blog. I use the word "resolve" advisedly since, well, you know. Sometimes these things just do not have legs. For now let's just say I will try.

Recently I have been spending lots of time at a couple of sites in Durham, NC where I have been photographing railroad tracks. The two sites, one in East Durham near the old grain silos, the other near the new train station in downtown Durham, are both abandoned. The tracks have not been used in years. Ties are rotting, hardware is rusting, and vegetation is slowly reclaiming the tracks. 

I go there because of an almost lifelong fascination with railroad tracks. My childhood wanderings often led me to the railroad tracks, either along some  neglected and rusty remote spur surrounded by woodlands or across the dangerous territory of an active urban switch yard. The engines and cars were thrilling to see up close but it was the mechanics of the track that always fascinated me. 

This current project is about those tracks, the old ones. The images are close examinations of what made the tracks work and survive. While it is a series about technology, it is also a series about human imagination. The images reflect the  sculptural elements inherent in engineering solutions to technological problems. They also show the interplay between industrial production of components and manual installation of those same components. It is industrial perfection vs. human imperfection. In some sense there are ghosts of dead industries present in the images, references to defunct US manufacturers and former steel cities. Some of the older spikes might show hammer blows from some long-gone Gandy dancer while others show the precise marks of hydraulic drivers, the new robotic dancers that sing no songs but have work rhythms nevertheless. It is about  progress and decay. 

I have made a little slide show of some of the earliest images. You can find it at the Track Pix page on my website. This is only the beginning of a longer project that I hope will result in a show someday. For now the collection of images is growing and the project is taking on a life of its own.

In addition to making photographs of what I am seeing, I am also picking up little pieces of discards from years of track maintenance and track neglect. There are the railroad spikes, tie plates, track bolts, track anchors, and other odds and ends that I just pick up and bring home. Some of them have become parts of an ongoing sculptural exercise in my front yard. At some point these will be incorporated into a formal showing of photos and sculptures in some gallery or other public venue. That was a hint to any curators out there who might like to take this on.

As much as anything, this is about childhood vision. I am going back to a place I loved and seeing it all over again, through he same eyes, naive, full of wonder and fascination, but now with a sense of perspective. All the time I am hoping a real train will happen by while I am there. It never happens. Not on these tracks.

Like many kids, I had toy trains (after a certain age we started calling them "model" trains because "toys" were not cool) and all of the interest in trains that came with that youthful territory. In the real world though, I was always most fascinated with the tracks themselves. Sure the Locomotives and various cars were great, but for me the infrastructure was the most interesting part. I just loved the tracks. I used to walk along the very tracks that were recently torn up to make way for the American Tobacco Trail. I loved to walk them, even the trestle that crossed South Roxboro Street, a dangerous enterprise that has its own set of stories.  Now that is where I ride my bike. The area is built up on all sides of the trail now. It is truly an urban trail. The temptation to leave it and wander around in the wilderness is gone.

Back in the day the tracks made their way through undeveloped territory, across streams, through woods and small farms, across roadways, and even through little neighborhoods. It was far from the urban area that is now that part of Durham City/County. One could stay on the tracks and see all sorts of wildlife from snakes sunning themselves on the rocky ballast to the occasional fox or deer who always seemed surprised to see a human on foot in their territory. The tracks were something like a main trail from which one could have any number of adventures. A little detour into the woods or along a stream would always lead back to the tracks. They were the marker, the way back home.