2016 October 24

   Jeff Gaskin writes:  Yesterday, October 23, I saw two Cabbage Whites on Tillicum Road. There was one on Tillicum Road at Carey Road and the other one was on Tillicum Road at the Island Highway.  And today, October 24, Devon Parker saw two on the hillside along Latoria Road.

Jeremy Tatum writes:  Bill Savale and I visited the Kinsol trestle yesterday (October 23).  The river below was in full flood and the scenery quite spectacular, but this note, of course, concerns invertebrates seen there.  The fence on either side of the bridge has a handrail made of a shiny aluminium tube running the full length of the bridge.  A shiny aluminium tube sounds an unlikely habitat on which to find anything of natural history interest, but in fact there was a fantastic variety of creatures there – beetles, bugs, stoneflies, large colourful globose springtails, mites, etc. I am sure the large harvestman we saw was not the usual Phalangium opilio, but was a more impressive species. There was a huge variety (possibly about 15 species – we lost count) of spiders, nearly all of them unfamiliar to us, and not the usual run of spiders that are commonly seen on this site.  They ranged in size from tiny ones barely visible to our aged eyes to huge, frightening ones. One of the commonest was a species of Cyclosa, with its odd-shaped abdomen and its beautiful web with stabilimentum.  Also of great interest – there were lots of things that looked like tiny (5 mm) fragments of general detritus on the aluminium tube.  At first that’s just what we thought they were – until we noticed that some of them moved slightly, seemingly of their own volition.  On looking at them closely, we saw that each of them was a tiny tube, and from time to time a small head and a pair of legs poked out.  It seems hardly credible, but I think they may have been caddisfly larvae.  Caddisfly larvae are, of course, familiar objects under water in ponds, but I have never heard of one out of water, let alone dozens of them on the shiny surface of an aluminium tube, nowhere near water other than the raging river hundreds of feet below.  Quite extraordinary!

Also found near the bridge was a mushroom (Bill will know which species), and, in the spaces between the gills was a horde of mites with exceptionally long legs – especially the front pair.  Thanks to Dr Heather Proctor for identifying these as members of the family Eupodidae.

Libby Avis sends photographs of two caterpillars found on alder on a logging road near the Alberni Inlet on October 22^nd.  One is the Peppered Moth Biston betularia  (of industrial melanism fame).  The other is a hooktip moth Drepana sp.  Jeremy Tatum writes that he can’t be totally certain whether it is Drepana arcuata or Drepana bilineata, but he’d put his money (maybe not a lot of it) on the latter.

Peppered Moth Biston betularia (Lep.: Geometridae) Libby Avis

Peppered Moth Biston betularia (Lep.: Geometridae) Libby Avis

 

Drepana sp. (Lep.: Drepanidae)  Libby Avis

Drepana sp. (Lep.: Drepanidae)  Libby Avis

Liam Singh sends a spectacular photograph of a jumping spider Phidippus sp. from his yard.  Although it has no red, it is believed that this is probably a young Phidippus johnsoni

Jumping spider Phidippus (probably johnsoni)  (Ara.: Salticidae)  Liam Singh