Mantisfly and Wolf Spider-A Terrible Tango

Mantisfly - Dicromantispa sayi

Another treasure of the garden--a mantisfly. These little gems are not terribly common, and I'm glad to find one every few years. I found this one floundering in my little water garden and saved it by putting it on some petunias to dry out. Predatory, as its spined and grasping front legs would suggest, the mantisfly is a neuropteran, related to the predatory lacewings, and like them it flies reluctantly and weakly. Actually, it prefers to wait around on flowers for something to blunder by to be grabbed and eaten. Me too. But usually I wind up cooking instead.

Such a charming bug--tiny but outfitted with everything it needs to grab smaller insects, process and consume them. I'm amazed at the convergent evolution that gives this insect the same bug-eyed countenance and miraculous forelimbs of the big praying mantis. Just a real good preying apparatus, and it works for both mantids and the unrelated mantisflies.

 

There, the similarities end. And the story gets weirder, as it usually does with insects.   Larval mantisflies, which are speedy and flattened and look something like beetle larvae, parasitize spiders and their eggs. They hitch a ride on a female spider, like a wolf spider, and get into the egg sac while it's under construction. They suck the eggs dry with tubular mouthparts, then pupate in the nice strong silk egg sac. When they pupate, the adult emerges by chewing its way out of the egg sac. Wow.

Dicromantispa sayi, one of six North American species in its subfamily Mantispinae, has a wide range, from southern Ontario west to SD, Utah, NE and AZ, and south to FL, Mexico and Panama, the Bahamas and Cuba.Worldwide, there are about 400 species of mantisfly. Think about that for a moment. It's a little crazy when you think about it, and compare insect diversity to, say, mammalian or avian diversity. That's like saying there are 400 species of oh, say, gnatcatcher worldwide.

So when you see a big scary spider, know that there's something much scarier haunting it, and cut it a break. This, according to Eric Eaton of BugEric on Blogspot, is a fishing spider, genus Dolomedes, family Pisauridae. What it's doing on a dry ridge with two nearly-dry, fishless streams on either side is anybody's guess. Headed for my goldfish pond, hoping to snag a half-pound snack?

                             
I posted the photo above thinking I had a wolf spider. Below is a real wolf spider. And this is the one I hope you'll cut some slack. Because if the wolf spider had been able to hatch all its eggs in its carefully tended silken sac, which the female spider hauls around beneath her abdomen, you'd have seen something like this:

which we at first thought was a very fluffy wolf spider but which, upon closer inspection, resolved into THIS

 which I'm sure many people consider a Fear Factor moment, being covered in your own squirmy seething chillun'. I found it charming. So as much as I love finding mantisflies around, I'm thankful on the wolf spiders' behalf that there aren't a lot more of them.

Thanks to my friend Eric Eaton and the folks at Bugguide.net for helping me narrow down the choices of mantisfly. And for helping me tell a fishing spider from a wolf spider!

A Slow Surrender to Winter

Here's Liam's first published photo. Not bad for a ten-year-old, freezin' in his dinosaur jammies while he takes a picture of his mama.





photo by Liam Thompson. I'm about to toss them all on the compost pile. Cold front coming.



I don't know who listens to All Things Considered on Christmas Day. I don't. I'm too busy laying around and eating altogether too much and the wrong things and then playing Wii Fit and finding out I should be 14 pounds lighter and faster on my feet, or Japanese, whichever comes first. I'm betting on turning Japanese.



One of my new commentaries aired today. It's about hauling dying plants and praying mantises inside when I really shouldn't. You can listen to it on NPR's web site.



If the player doesn't work, hit "Download" and it'll give you an MP3 that does. That worked for me.

Or you can just read the transcript below.



But I kind of like the idea to talking to you over your 'puterbox. I miss you. I know, I'm taking a break. But I do.

A Slow Surrender to Winter

The sky couldn’t be heavier, lower, grayer, weepier. It’s 38, going for low in the 20’s. It’s winter, winter, winter. And I still have blooming flowers in baskets and containers on the front porch. Geraniums, lobelias, blue marguerite; plectranthus that when you brush its leaves, smells like a lime margarita.

Sure, they’re a bit brown, nipped around the edges, but the geraniums are blooming, shocking pink, red, magenta, like there’s no tomorrow. And for them, there isn’t. Unless…

I keep bringing them inside. I pile them up in the foyer and they weep leaves and dirt and petals that track all over the house. They block the closet doors. I can’t keep them inside, but I can’t leave them out to freeze. So I shuttle them in at night and out during the day, groaning with the effort. I’ve brought them this far. How can I sentence them to death?

blue margeurite on the compost pile, sighhh

But there’s a string of nights in the 20’s coming up, teens, even, and sooner or later I’ll have to say good-bye to summer for good. There’s something about looking out the kitchen window on blooming baskets of flowers that feels increasingly wrong. These bright jolts of color are somehow unseemly, when everything else is dead. And it's not just the plants that are dying.

Three times in my life, I’ve found a big praying mantis staggering weakly around my garden after the first light frost, and I’ve taken her—it’s invariably a female—inside. I set her up on a big potted plant where she sits regally all day, a weird alien pet, watching snowflakes drift down on the roses outside the window, where she once lived. I do this, knowing it’s wrong, but unable to leave her dying outside. I feed her crickets and mealworms, spray the leaves down with water, watch as she grabs and stabs, delicately dines; bends to drink droplets from the leaves, grooms her forearms and feet like a little otherworldly cat.

She turns her head to watch me when I walk into the room, holds out her spiked forelimbs to ask if she might ride on my arm to another plant, to sit in a spot of winter sun. This goes on until late January, February. I get entirely too attached. And then, like Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her,” she begins to decay. First it’s an antenna, then a foot, then a lower leg, simply falling off. And then she loses her balance and falls, and busts off a forearm. And I see why mantids are meant to die with the first hard frost, and it’s brought home to me why I should never have brought her inside.

So it goes with the geraniums. I have to let them die. Tomorrow. Or maybe this weekend, with a light snowfall for their funeral shroud. Oh, the intractable human heart. It does this every year.

Hope you had a peaceful Christmas. We did.