Naturalist Newsletter: Sep 26/ Wiggletails & Tumblers

[Rob]

JIM CONRAD’S NATURALIST NEWSLETTER
Issued from Hacienda Chichén beside the Maya ruin of
Chichén Itzá in the central Yucatán, MÉXICO

September 26, 2010

*****

WIGGLETAILS & TUMBLERS
Here during the peak of the rainy season nearly every
afternoon it rains. If a bucket or tin can stands
upright it stays full of water, and if you get down
close enough to the water's surface inside these
buckets and tin cans, you'll see what's shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926wt.jpg

As a kid back on the farm in Kentucky I spent a lot of
time with my head hung over the rim of a large, wooden
barrel bought cheaply from nearby Glenmore Distillery
(Kentucky Tavern Bourbon). The barrel caught rainwater
off the coal-house roof, for the washing of our
clothes. During my whole childhood the barrel smelled
agreeably of aging whisky, but I didn't stick my head
over the barrel's rim for the odor. I was watching a
seething metropolis of aquatic critters, among the
most common and fascinating of which were the ones in
the above picture.

My father told me that the larger white things in the
barrel, like the one at the left in the picture, were
"wiggletails," and that they developed into
mosquitoes. They were called wiggletails because they
swam through water by violently jerking their bodies
back and forth, "wiggling their tails." Later in
school I also learned that if we wanted to cut down on
the mosquito population around our house the first
thing we needed to do was to go around emptying all
open containers holding water where mosquitoes could
lay their eggs, for those eggs would hatch into
wiggletails, from which later mosquitoes would emerge.

But, there was something missing in the above story,
and the error didn't occur to me until I'd asked
insect-identifier Bea in Ontario if she know what that
dark, comma-shaped critter was to the right of the
wiggletail in the picture. She shot back that it was a
mosquito PUPA!

Of course. The thing wrong with the whisky-barrel
story was that mosquitoes belong to the insect order
Diptera, along with flies, and dipterids undergo
complete metamorphosis, entailing these four stages:

        egg --> larva --> pupa --> adult

Our egg --> wiggletail larva --> adult mosquito story
accommodated only three stages. Bea's comma-shaped
pupa supplied the missing link.

Over 2500 different species of mosquitoes are known
throughout the world, and some 150 of those occur in
the US. Therefore, there are many variations on the
mosquito theme. However, what follows applies to most
species.

Wiggletails, or mosquito larvae, frequently must rise
to the water's surface where they poke their rear ends
upwards and breathe air through a siphon tube, which
is exactly what the one in the picture is doing.
Happily, Anopheles larvae -- the adults of which
convey malaria -- bear no siphon and must float
parallel to the water's surface for air. Therefore,
the wiggletail in the picture isn't a malaria-carrying
Anopheles. Wiggletails feed on microorganisms and
organic matter in the water. As they grow, they shed
their skins four times. Usually they live in water
between one and two weeks, depending on the
temperature -- the hotter it is, the faster they
develop.

The brown, comma-shaped pupas, sometimes referred to
as "tumblers," don't feed. Even though as they move
through water they jerk about as violently as the
larval stage, in the mosquito's life cycle they
constitute the "resting stage." After about two days
of existence pupas rise to the water's surface, their
pupal skin splits and the adult mosquito emerges from
the pupa's old skin onto the water's surface. The
newly emerged adult rests on the surface awhile as it
dries, its parts harden, and its wings spread out and
dry so it can fly away.

*****

DIRTY-BLUE SATYR
Since people with enough working vocabulary to talk
about "satyrs" in the first place normally use the
word to describe degenerate, lecherous men with strong
sexual appetites, the name "Dirty-blue Satyr" evokes
some stirring connotations. However, the being we are
talking about here is clearly nothing like that, shown
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926sy.jpg

According to good ol' Bea in Ontario, our "Dirty-blue"
is CEPHEUPTYCHIA GLAUCINA. In Mexico about 87 satyr
species occur. Satyr butterflies are members of the
Subfamily Satyrinae of the huge Brushfoot Family, the
Nymphalidae. Among the satyrs there's a group of
bluish species with eyelike spots on their wings
called "blue ringlets," and the Dirty-blue Satyr is
one of those.

This must be a pretty good species to have found, for
I can't find anything about the Dirty-blue Satyr's
life history on the Internet.

Therefore, as soon as the search engines catalog this
page, at least we'll have announced to he world of
science that Cepheuptychia glaucina flits about here
in the central Yucatan in September.

*****

MARANTA IN A DITCH
Biking the road connecting Pisté with the toll road
just to the north, the white flowers of a knee-high
herb in the ditch beside the road caught my eye. You
can see the grass-leafed, orchidy-flowered plant at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926ma.jpg

In this part of the world if you see a terrestrial
plant with broad, parallel-veined, grasslike blades
like those in the picture, but bearing flowers that
are too large and showy ever to be grasses, five plant
families should come to mind: the Banana, Orchid,
Ginger, Canna and Maranta Families. Orchids and Banana
Family members have their own unique kinds of flowers,
so if the plant isn't in one of those distinctive
families you can quickly discard them as you try to ID
the plant.

Of the three remaining families, the flowers in the
Ginger Family typically are arranged in spikes or
spike-like inflorescences in which one flowers or
small grouping of flowers are subtended by a
conspicuous bract, which is a modified, usually much-
reduced leaf. You can see that our flowers are held
loosely in a diffuse inflorescence, so the Ginger
Family can be disqualified.

That leaves the Canna and Maranta Families. Canna
Family flowers usually are over two inches long (5 cm)
while Maranta Family flowers are usually less than one
inch (2.5 cm). The flowers in the picture are a little
over one inch long (3 cm). Therefore: Maranta.

If we had fruits, we'd see that in the Canna Family
ovary cells contain many ovules per cell, while in the
Maranta Family there's only one.

This is MARANTA GIBBA, a denizen of moist soil, thus
at home in this ditch holding water in a land where
rainfall usually seeps underground very fast, even in
the rainy season. You can see one of the plant's snow-
white, bilaterally symmetrical (zygomorphic) flowers
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926mb.jpg

Maranta gibba occurs from southern Mexico and
the Yucatán, spottily through Central America
and the West Indies, into northern South
America.

*****

"DUCK BILL"
At the forest's edge just a few feet from the Maranta
there grew a woody vine, or liana, with compound
leaves and fairly large, purplish flowers, which I
almost ignored. That's because at first glance the
liana was so like Cydista potosina, which also is
abundantly flowering right now. Two Newsletters ago we
saw who that plant is taking over nectar- and pollen-
providing services from its close relative the
earlier-blossoming Cydista potosina. The two Cydista
species are much used in this area by basket weaving
Maya. You can review what one of them looks like at
http://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/cydista2.htm

Something about this roadside vine looked a little
different, so I took a closer look. You can see it at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926du.jpg

Maybe you remember that stems of the two Cydistas were
square in cross section. This vine's stems were
hexagonal. Also, the Cydistas' blossoms opened widely
at their mouths, but all flowers on this vine seemed
to have the margins of their upper and lower lips
fused together! Finally, this roadside liana's urn-
shaped, green calyxes were unlike any I'd ever seen,
looking like a calyx inside a calyx. In the picture
you can barely see the two rims of the top flower's
double calyx.

This new woody liana looks and behaves so like the two
more common Cydista species that you wonder if some
kind of co-evolution is going on here. It turns out
that our closed-mouth species is a member of the
Bignonia Family, the Bignoniaceae, same as the
Cydistas, but it's a different genus. It's
AMPHILOPHIUM PANICULATUM, which the locals call "Pico
de Pato," which means "Duck Bill," because of the
closed corollas' shape.

The margin of a corollas' top lobe bears a low, narrow
rim which snugly fits inside the lower lobe's upturned
sides. You can see a corolla's two lips forced apart,
showing pollen-producing anthers flush with the top
lobe's ceiling, and pollen on the bottom lobe's floor,
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926dv.jpg

How do these flowers get pollinated? Every blossom I
could find was sealed. All would snap open with a
little pressure, so maybe the flowers are adapted to
keep out all pollinators except those who know how to
pry the lobes apart. Several of the flowers I examined
had been robbed -- holes had been cut through their
corolla tubes so that the robbers could enter the
corolla and take what they wanted without doing their
pollinating job.

The sealed-flowers strategy seems to work for
Amphilophium paniculatum, however, for my Maya friends
tell me that the species is fairly common, plus the
species enjoys a large area of distribution, being
fround from Mexico through Central America and
northern South America to Argentina.

*****

LANTANA BESIDE THE WALL
You can see one of the prettiest shrubs flowering in
Pisté these days, one with its flower-laden branches
tumbling over a stone fence beside a thatch-roofed hut
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926ln.jpg

That's one of the most commonly planted ornamental
shrubs in the world's tropical and subtropical zones.
It goes by many English names, such as Spanish Flag,
West Indian Lantana, Wild Sage, Red Sage, Yellow Sage
and a host of other names. It's LANTANA CAMARA, and
despite so frequently being referred to as a kind of
sage, which belongs to the Mint Family, this pretty,
six-ft-tall shrub (1.8 m) belongs to the Verbena
Family, the Verbenaceae. An eye-pleasing close-up
highlighting a multicolor flowering head is at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100926lo.jpg

You might recognize a strong similarity between these
dog-faced little lantana flowers and those of
verbenas, which belong to the genus Verbena. The big
difference between the two genera is that Verbena's
ovaries are four-celled and develop into four discrete
sections, or nutlets, while Lantana's ovaries are two-
celled and develop into two separate nutlets. Back in
Chiapas in 2007 we ran into fruiting Lantana heads,
which looked so much like blackberries that I plopped
some into my mouth before realizing what I was doing.
They were bitter! You can see those fruits at
http://www.backyardnature.net/chiapas/lantanaf.htm

Many cultivars of Lantana camara have been developed,
including "flava" with sulfur-yellow flowers changing
to saffron, the dwarf "hybrida" with yellow flowers,
"nivea" with white flowers, and "mista" with yellowish
outer flowers changing to saffron and brick-red, and
yellow inner flowers.

This pretty species is native to Mexico, Central
America, the West Indies and northern South America.
Unfortunately, in warm countries where it's been
introduced as an ornamental it tends to escape into
the wild -- including the US Gulf Coastal Plain. It's
listed as a Category One Invasive Toxic Species in
Florida. The species is especially common in India,
Australia and much of Africa. This is bad news for
livestock growers since the herbage is poisonous.
Livestock losses have been reported from the US, South
Africa, India, Mexico, and Australia.

Still, Maximino Martinez's "Las Plantas Medicinales de
Mexico" reports that the cooked leaves are used
against "rheumatism" and for making a stomach tonic.
In Sinaloa a cataplasm of its cooked leaves has been
used for snakebite.

*****

HOT COLDNESS AND THE ORGANIC GARDEN
I've mentioned that the Maya I speak with believe that
when raindrops descend through the rainy season's hot
afternoon air the droplets absorb the air's heat, then
scald the leaves of plants they land on. When I
pointed out to one person that these rains actually
feel chilly on the skin he told me that it was "hot
coldness, like you feel sometimes when you first touch
ice." The belief in scalding afternoon rain is so
pervasive that after such rains many Maya homeowners
douse their plants with city water or water that has
been sitting around cooling off, to save their rained-
on plants from burning up.

If I had made the mistake of openly laughing at such
an idea, right now the Maya would be laughing at me,
for nearly every plant in the organic garden -- even
the peppers who until now looked so promising -- have
leaves that look like they've been scorched. To the
Maya, that garden is absolute proof that afternoon
rains burn plants.

I've given up offering an alternative explanation. My
explanation is that the garden plants with their
yellowing, crinkling leaves and crisp, brown, dead
leaf margins are succumbing to a wide range of fungal
diseases, because our hot, very humid days provide a
perfect environment for fungi.

However, though I blame the garden's miseries on fungi
and not scalding rain, I've begun thinking that maybe
the practice of washing off our afternoon rains may
not be such a bad one.

For, our overheated afternoon air certainly is full of
fungal spores. Almost daily I enjoy a fine sneezing
fit even though we're experiencing something of a
flowering lull, so the air isn't particularly full of
pollen. I'm guessing that my sneezing is caused by
fungal spores. The entire landscape even smells moldy,
as if you'd put your nose right next to the moist
forest floor.

So, raindrops plummet through the air gathering into
themselves untold numbers of fungal spores -- which
they deposit onto plants on which they fall. This
isn't just my guess. An interesting study by J.
Gönczöl and Ágnes Révay of Hungary found spores from
71 fungal species in their local rainwater. That
study, in PDF format, is accessible free online at
http://www.fungaldiversity.org/fdp/sfdp/16-14.pdf

Spores deposited by rainfall may germinate into
disease-causing fungal communities infecting garden
plants if they're not washed off, either by subsequent
raindrops in a substantial storm, or city water from a
Maya lady's dishpan.

It's often like this, I've found. Folks do something
strange and their explanation is so unlikely that you
simply can't buy it. However, that doesn't mean that
the strange thing they're doing makes no sense,
especially when it's done in a traditional society
where everyday practices may have filtered through
centuries of trial-and-error experience.

Actually, it's pretty impressive that the Maya,
despite being unable to see and know about fungal
spores, figured out for themselves that these
afternoon rains cause problems for garden plants, and
it's even more impressive that they learned that you
might ameliorate the problem if you, counter
intuitively, wash off rain that's just fallen.

By the way, Luis's milpa, or traditional cornfield, is
doing just fine, since it's planted with traditional
seeds -- corn, squash, beans -- developed in this
area. Those plants are mostly resistant to the
diseases my regular garden plants succumb to.

*****

DAWN RAIN
As the jog began Orion's familiar star-pattern
twinkled overhead almost violently, but by the time
I'd reached the highway already stars were fading
as clouds moved in from the east. Rain hit just as I
huffed past Mayalandia's horse stalls, where I ducked
beneath a dense Bec tree hoping to avoid drenching my
running shoes. If it hadn't been for the shoes, which
already were falling apart, I'd have run in the rain,
for the cold droplets felt good on my sweating skin.

In fact, that morning beneath the big Bec everything
felt good. It felt good just standing in the darkness
hearing rain move through the woods around me and
listening as big water droplets cascaded down through
the Bec. It felt good breathing in air that just a few
seconds before had been heavy and muggy but now was
saturated with chill, misty freshness, and charged
with that electric tension that all rains carry with
them when they first come upon you.

The horses whinnied through the darkness and I
whinnied back to let them know who it was, and the
rain carried their horsy odor over to me, and the odor
of wet hay and manure, and mud. I liked thinking of
the horses there in their thatch-roofed stalls calling
to me, maybe twitching their ears as they smelled me.

Then all of a sudden a gust of wind burst out of
nowhere, swirling the rain in under the tree and all
at once shaking the Bec's stored-up droplets onto me.
There went my dry shoes, so now nothing kept me from
running out into the rain, splashing and listening to
my breath, and to the wind and the rain in the woods
beside me, as dawn's first light started washing the
sky.

Times like this, you feel alive, feel that maybe it's
right that all we're supposed to do as humans is just
live our lives moment by moment, paying close
attention to all the details, until it's over.

*****

Best wishes to all Newsletter Readers.

Jim

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