Insects, being
tiny, are always worried about drying out and about being eaten.
Here
are some interesting ways to deal with those problems.
TWINBERRY LEAF-CURLING
APHID
The red, puffy,
curled-over edges of twinberry
leaves are a
shelter for a particular aphid.
The aphid injects
the plant with
chemicals that make the leaf grow
this strange way.
Aphids are tiny, delicate insects that dry out
easily but reproduce
very fast.
They suck plant juices and produce a sweet
excrement called honeydew.
Ants like to eat honeydew and
often associate with aphids,
even taking care of them. I don't
know if this aphid is native or introduced.
COLUMBINE LEAF
MINER
Leaves of columbine
often have light green or brown
squiggles or blotches on them.
These are homes of tiny larvae of
tiny flies. The larva, a maggot, lives inside the
leaf, eating
a tunnel through the green tissue between the upper and lower skin
of the leaf.
What a safe place to be! The larva
makes a small
tunnel at first and a larger one as it grows.
You can often see
the larva's frass (poop) inside the tunnel, and sometimes the
larva itself.
When the larva has grown big enough,
it chews a hole
to the underside of the leaf, drops to
the ground, and pupates there.
After about two
weeks an adult fly emerges from the pupa.
The female fly will
lay an egg in or on another columbine leaf.
The squiggly
leaf mines are made by a different species of fly than the
blotch type mines.
These leaf miners can be considerable
pests on columbines here. I don't know if they are
native or introduced.
SPITTLEBUG.
You can find
the gobs of "spit" that are spittlebug
homes on a variety
of different plant species. We found them on
grass and sheep sorrel. If you carefully push away the spit, you
will find the
little, green, jumping insect that made it by
whipping its
excrement with its legs. The spittlebug sucks the
plant's juices,
so it has lots of liquid available to keep
building its shelter. It is a nymph, so you will find no wing
on it. It will
eventually molt to be an adult of more or less
the same shape
but with wings. It looks like a leafhopper. It
seems to me that
birds would learn to look for food in the
spitballs, but
I don't know if they do.