This Week in Anting 06/24/2017

Bloodroot

A few years ago I threw a packet of Bloodroot seeds out in the front garden. I dug a little trench and planted them, and two years later I started to see very tiny leaves poking out of the ground. One leaf per plant. They remained this small size for two more years and then suddenly one or two made the jump to a great big leaf more typical of the species. 

This year three of those plants have decided to flower which is great, but also I'll say so far none of the others have emerged... of the whole seed packet maybe only three have survived. What's odd though is that last year one may have flowers because I found one with a seed head. But this one plant has yet to emerge, whereas the three I see flowering today I didn't even notice last year and I find this to be odd. Perhaps rodents or something are making off with the young shoots before the plants have a chance to grow?

Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, is in the poppy family. The flowers only produce pollen and don't have any nectar or floral oils of note. So you'll never see Bloodroot Honey being sold unless someone is grinding up the root and physically mixing it in with the honey, which begs the question, why?

The flowers to the true species the true species are short lived, lasting about three "good" days. If the flower stays closed due to rain or it being too cloudy, it doesn't seem to count towards the three days. I believe there are cultivars which bloom slightly longer which tend to be "double flowering" but this term is a little tenuous. 

All three of my Bloodroot plants are technically "double flowering" because they have more than 8 petals, which is what you find in established plants in the wild. No plant wants to be "double flowering" because it means they're producing more petals instead of reproductive structures, and thus won't make as many seeds. Plants do this when they're not getting the right nutrients or enough of them in the soil. It's the plant's way of cutting its losses, but can get to the point where they don't have any reproductive structures at all. 

This isn't restricted to Bloodroot. A flame Azalea I bought at Lowes actually came that way, very likely because in the 7 years it takes a nursery to grow a shrub to a sell-able size it wasn't fertilized enough. The following year it flowered normally though so it may have been stressed. 

So clearly "double flowering" is a nutrient issue... yet there are cultivars that are reliably "double flowering." This is because the plant likely has a mutation which hinders it's own ability to take in certain nutrients. This also means this cultivar can't be propagated by seed. That's not to say that they don't produce seeds, rather and the inability to take in certain nutrients is likely from a recessive gene, so the plant has to be reproduced by cuttings or division of the roots. 

Coming back to my Bloodroot plants, hopefully their rhizomes get a chance to spread out and grow into a nice sized clump. Ants actually disperse the seeds to these plants, so hopefully I'll get to play around with that later this year. This is the main reason I'm growing this and several other native ephemerals.

In the past, I've bought Bloodroot plants as bare roots. These grew the first year and flowered, but sadly something came along and ate all of them. Which is annoying. I've noticed with several species though that plants started from seed tend to fair better and aren't devoured by wildlife as much.

Twinleaf

 Twinleaf is flowering, Jeffersonia diphylla.

One of the most fleeting of our spring wildflowers, they only bloom for between 8 hours to 2 days, and that's it for the year!

This one plant in particular is flowering sooner than other ones in my yard, likely because it's positioned in full sun and not in a place where leaf litter piled up. I don't bother to remove the leaves from my gardens and use them as a natural mulch; even so, they still tend to gather up or blow out in places. Twinleaf plants that are only a few feet away from this one have only just pushed out of the ground.

Pollination has always been an issue for this species. The flowers basically open with the pollen anthers touching the stamin so they almost always self pollinate. I'd love to test out and see if cross pollination would increase the size of the elaiosome packets on the seeds but rarely get more than one individual plant flowering.

Just a few feet away, other Twinleaf plants are just emerging. Clearly I should have put them all as one clump instead of spreading them out as I did. You wouldn't think 3' would make that much of a difference in bloom time but for this species it does. The slightest difference in sun exposure and leaf litter greatly effects when they emerge. And for a species with such a short flowering time, it's an issue. 

This one is just coming up with it's bud and likely won't even flower for another week or two. By then the first plant will have faded.

This Week in Anting 03/23/2017

Ants in Order of Appearance: Formica pallidefulva, Tetramorium caespitum (species e.), Ponera pennsylvanica, Lasius interjectus.

Focusing on the Lasius interjectus a bit. I was surprised to see these under the stone because other species like Aphaenogaster rudis and Camponotus castaneus were no where to be found under the rocks and logs I usually find them on. Apparently L. interjectus is a bit more cold hardy than I gave them credit far though it's not surprising as the related L. claviger has queens which spend the winter wondering out of the nest.

You can sort of make out her one of their root aphids producing dew. (This was directly in the middle of the stone they were under so I don't think I squished it.)

I chanced upon a worker with a curious gaster (abdomen) which has a large white patch in it. As you can see in all my other photos, this is not the norm.

Most likely it's just full of honeydew and the crop (social stomach) is positioned oddly inside the ant. Though other possibilities include a parasitic nematode, the worker was born with ovaries and is readying to produce eggs, or maybe I'm just seeing things.

The Twinleaf plant featured in the video a few days ago, Jeffersonia diphylla. I'll be sure to take pictures when it opens.

This Week in Anting 02/23/2017

Wildflower Season Begins!

Alright it's spring time and you know what that means; it's wildflower seasons! Yay!

I got a new camera for this season along with a fancy new lens that does a great job at showing a real depth of field. So far I've found it to be ideal at photographing wildflowers, but smaller things like ants are going to be more difficult with it. Larger insects will likely be okay as well, but it captures too big of an image to really home in on just an ant or two. It's a manual focus too so I have to take like 20 images of the same thing lightly adjusting the focus to hopefully capture a good one. I'm still learning.

Ideally here I wanted to see the inside of the flower, Twin Leaf, Jeffersonia diphylla, but I didn't get one where it was in focus enough to really get what I was going for. I planted a tone of these last year and I'm really happy to see they're all mostly coming up, and at slightly different times of one another. Even though they're next to each other, it seems the amount of leaf litter and sunshine they get really effect the bloom time of this plant. It's both a shame and a good thing for me. Twin Leaf is notorious for only flowering 8 hours to 2 days long, making pollination very unlikely on most years. It's good though because I get more chances to photograph the flower.

Here is a Hepatica which I had an easier time photographing. The one failing though is the flowers wanted to aim towards another plant that I couldn't get my camera and twin flash into. So I ended up having to take the second bloom (out of focus behind this one) and putting it in front. See below. 

This second flower isn't quite as blue as the first one but it's just as pretty.

STUDY: Mutualism fails when climate response differs between interacting species
I recently learned that Hepatica may set their seed "early" for our local species of Aphaenogaster (an ant) to take interest in dispersing their seeds. At least for where I am in New Jersey. The Aphaenogaster rudis we have in my yard and forests throughout New Jersey apparently become active "later in the year," than a different species, Aphaenogaster picea. To be honest though I didn't understand what the author meant in the study when they talked about later in the year or active earlier. A. picea is more common in northern parts of the US and Canada for sure, and apparently they're better about taking an interest in Hepatica seeds than A. rudis. However, when the Hepatica in my yard are dropping seeds it's already May or June and Aphaenogaster rudis very much "active" at that time. I'm not sure why the A. rudis don't bother with the seeds, maybe it's because the Hepatica I grow were all store bought and not a local genotype, but something is a miss here. Elaiosome should = ant food and for Aphaenogaster of all genera to ignore it means something is up here.

Attention All Coffee Drinkers!

Keep an eye you for this symbol when buying coffee.

There are two species of Coffee plants in the world that are farmed. One grows in the shade of tropical rain forest trees and the amazing diversity that entails. Roughly 700 tree species in one square mile! The other grows in Sun and requires the rain forest be cleared and any sort of mountainous terrain to be bulldozed into a flatter slope. This is devastating stuff!

You can plant all the native plants you want to save the birds, but if they can't get their food when they migrate south it's all for nothing. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, right behind oil! For some countries it makes up 40% of their exports! This is an issue!

One problem pointed out by the symbol though is that certification only requires "trees" be grown in the coffee field, but doesn't specify what type. So farmers are free to do a more Permaculture approach with their farms. Permaculture is great but not on such a large scale where, if the plants still don't provide food for wildlife. Sadly it's currently not know what species of trees should be planted in these types of farm conditions. Anything native would certainly be better than nonnative but we don't have a detailed list of plants to say which genera and species are most beneficial to that part of the world.

So the symbol has some kinks to work out, but it's my understanding that they will update their standards when the research comes out. Until then, some trees are better than no trees. And Shade Coffee is better than Sun Coffee.

Honeybees on Fall Flowers

While visiting the Mt. Cuba Center this past weekend I was treated to a variety of fall wildflowers with fall colors right around the corner.

The gardeners there do such an amazing job, and they've introduced a number of cultivars over the years that I find well worth the effort in tracking down.

And of course now that they have a few honeybee hives on the property it's become far more apparent what native plants the bees really love. Now that Mountain Mint has finished blooming, I believe the winner of most perennial beds will be the common New England Aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae.

New England Asters come in a variety of colors but I've found the purple to be the most common. Pink, brilliant shades of Red, White and everything in between are also possible. Lost of cultivars are available on the market today and they're pretty easy grow by division or spreading seeds in pots of dirt outside over the winter. They can be slightly weedy but sometimes it's worth it to let them flower before pulling. A friend of mine had New England Asters take over his meadow garden but now he has every color in the rainbow.

Symphyotrichum laeve 'Bluebird' is an up right perennial that grows more flowers than the true species. This is because it's actually a hybrid with another species, though I don't know the particulars on that. They look great if you can grow them. I've tried in the past and believe they benefit from regular watering, and or mulch, as opposed to testing out their drought tolerance. I don't believe this cultivar is prolific by seed, but they are pretty when grown beside other asters or goldenrod of similar height.

Aromatic Aster 'October Skies' is wonderful in mass plantings. A cultivar of Symphyotrichum olongifolium, this is a low growing aster which lays on the ground forming thick cloud-like pillows of flowers. Perfect at the edge of a flower bed or scattered among a meadow/garden of low plants.

White Woodland Aster... actually I'm a little unclear what species this one in particular is. It's one of the lower growing species with masses of white blooms. Oddly enough I have a species or two of these that come up wild in my yard and I only rarely see honeybees take a liking to them. At Mt. Cuba the clumps they had growing in the sparse woodland were getting a decent amount of attention. Not as much as any of the other asters but certainly more than anything else flowering in the woods.

Vernonia angustifolia 'Plum Peachy' is a form of Narrow-leaf Ironweed with darker foliage and is more compact than the wild species. I believe it may also have flowers more evenly spread around it as opposed to just at the tips of stems but I could be confusing that with another the Mt. Cuba Center has/is working on.

 I didn't think to take photos of the foliage at the time but it has nice narrow leaves and looked similar to other cultivars of ironweed I'd seen in local nurseries. It was getting a decent amount of attention, slightly more so than the goldenrods growing around it but I know honeybees don't go nuts for goldenrod until after the peak Aster blooms. I'm planting three of these this fall and putting them right in next to my narrow-leaf Amsonia to see if they grow well at all.

Stiff Goldenrod, Solidago rigida, was blooming well. This was the first time I've ever seen this species and I was taken by how big and fat the flower petals are which you usually don't even notice on Goldenrods. They had a patch of 50 or so plants, or at least that's about how many flowering stems there were.

Just thought this was a good shot. Had the bee been posed a little better I'd go as far to say excellent.

Noticed some spittle bugs on the stem. They produce a foam or "spit" to hide within while they feed on the plant much like an aphid. 

Solidago 'Fireworks' was also flowering, though not getting as much attention as I've seen it get in the past. (The huge hungry mantis about to lay an egg casing might have something to do with that.) It's also not quite at its peak bloom yet and that's really when honeybees tend to take over such nectar sources.

Obedient Plant is typically swarming with pollinators but I didn't find that to be the case that day. At least it wasn't for the patch that was next to the path. They also have it planted out in the meadow itself for a lovely pink effect but I didn't notice much flying around.

Mistflower, Conoclinum coelestinum. I was slightly surprised to see honeybees on this one. First off I've never been able to get this species to grow in my yard. They have water requirements that are somewhat finicky; too wet and they don't survive the winter, too dry and they won't reproduce. I read they're ideally a shade plant and the more sunlight they receive the more moisture they require. The Mt. Cuba Center had them in full sun, at the bottom of a slope.

Honeybees use other plants that were formerly in the Eupatorium genus. Pretty much all of Joe Pye Weeds are a hit with them, but only some of the Boneset species.

Our native Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, is an upright, sometimes hard to establish and other times weedy perennial, with tube shaped pale blue flowers. I observe that while this is a wetland species, specamins growing closest to the water are among the shortest at around 2' at most while those growing farther away could reach up to 5' though 3 and a half certainly seemed more the norm.

Honeybees are perfectly capable of working the flowers but I noticed none of them were bothering to do so. The only flowers they visited were ones which carpenter bees had already chewed holes in.

And lastly, I noticed honeybees working one of the Heucheras. This is a genus of plants with hundreds of cultivars that offer every color imaginable. They're mostly pollinated by flies but a certain few, typically ones with larger (for the genus) white flowers are visited by bees.

This particular species was mass planted near the Round Garden and the bees were gathering up nectar, and just look at that wonderful deep red pollen.

The 4th Annual New Jersey Ant Together!

For the even I bought some specially labeled tubes which I intend to hand out at these events. The idea being to put queen ants in them to get what I refer to as the "money shot" and try to sell the event and get more interest. I can use this as the banner image for future Ant Togethers.... but dammit if I'm not the worst ant keeper in the whole god dam world. Later on we're in the parking lot and of all the test tubes to fall out of my bag.... I ran her ass over!    Somehow she survived and upon putting her in another tube she seems to have recovered well, a little twitchy though. I believe she is the dark form of Formica pallidefulva which is more common in this part of New Jersey. It's odd how just a little bit south this species becomes a brassy brown tone. We found colonies of both color forms around but the darker one was by far more common.


This one made it to the car!


Camponotus chromaiodes. (Same ant as seen above) This is typically the dominant Camponotus species in the forests here.


We also found a parasitic Formica wondering which I still need to ID. We actually didn't find any colonies of this at that location so it might be one of the more exclusive slave making kind such as F. pergandei. (Their colonies always require host Formica and never grow beyond what they can capture.)



Finding a colony of Pyramica was something of a highlight because it's not commonly found in suburban habitats.



Slightly less of a highlight but still interesting was this patch of bright white sand where colonies of Dorymyrmex were located.


This sand patch is also where a dried out sort of sphagnum moss was growing which we tried not to disturb. There were some large colonies of Monomorium there too.


Just up the trail we found a Pine Snake.


I liked our first location a lot because Wild Blueberries were coming into season. I'd never realized how much better Low Bush Blueberry tastes compared to High Bush because the plants grow in full shade the berries are at a more reasonable temperature. High Bush blueberry is more of a forest edge, full sun plant, thus the berries have a sharp taste to them unless chilled.



Sweet Fern was also growing all over the place along with droves of other types of ferns. This one in particular is adored by gardeners because the leaves have a pleasing smell to them.


I was calling this Wintergreen all day but now that I google it I'm not convinced. Anyone know what this is?


I also got to see Red Milkweed, Asclepias rubra, which is one of the rare species not yet in mainstream cultivation. It seems to be a bog plant requiring constantly damp muddy soil to grow.


Ants actually really like Milkweed so it's one of the plants I pay attention to. Formica especially seem to like stealing the nectar from Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca.


This is the dark form of Formica pallidefulva I believe.


At our second location, Turkey Swamp Park, I'm happy to say they seem to finally be doing something with that wide open field. Namely just not mowing patches of it here and there so the milkweed gets to grow.


It's here where we found yet another species of Formica all over the flowers. And I think this is the same as the next one below... this milkweed patch was right between the F. exsectoides super colonies, and a population of some other Formica who's majors rivaled the size of C. chromaiodes majors.




What's neat is they actually had foraging trenches dug out that occasionally dipped down underground. And we found multiple trails like this coming from the forest to some plants that were growing along a lake/stream where they were tending to droves of aphids like an assembly line.


We found quite a few more Formica exsectoides mounds this years. They were far more active, like 10 times more aggressive, and very pissed off that I inserted an endoscope into their mound. The video didn't really come out though... kind of like a horrifying colonoscopy video really.




We also found Termites nesting just beneath the bark of a tree, and just below that a Crematogaster colony had a brood chamber which we broke into unexpectidly thus starting a small war.


This is a Dog Bane Beetle. I like that their feet are blue.


Frogs!


Frogs for days!


High Five?


Last of all found this to be an ideal time to go looking for Indian Pipe. This is a rare wildflower that you will only ever see growing in the wild. It's a parasite that requires a beneficial fungi to be prescient in the soil to exchange nutrients from an established tree, typically a 60' tall Oak.


Oddly enough though we kept finding it trying to grow beneath logs. Not just on one occasion but on several! Suggesting that the seeds somehow find their way under dead wood structures, or maybe this is where the beneficial fungus most often occurs?


Basically because it's a parasitic plant, it doesn't produce any chlorophyll, thus it's not green but rather a frail white.


After flowering, the plant almost sorts of melts, and shrivels up into twig-like stems.


Fallen leaves in a spot that floods on occasion, apparently dyed a silver tone from the algae or something growing on them.