Category Archives: Prairie Insects

Photo of the Week – July 23, 2015

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As I mentioned in my last post, we spent much of this week up in beautiful northwestern Minnesota, at the annual Grassland Restoration Network workshop.  In fact, I’m writing this as we travel back home to Nebraska (no, I’m not driving as I write).

This morning, a small group of us got up early to take photographs at sunrise.  It was a beautiful morning, but there was enough breeze to make insect and flower photography pretty tricky.  Did we give up?  No!  We are Prairie Ecologists!  (Plus, we had dared each other to meet in the hotel lobby at 5:15 am and no one wanted to back down from that).

Despite the wind, we managed to enjoy the morning,  and even got a few nice photographs out of it.  Here are two of mine:

Spider on web before sunrise. The Nature Conservancy's Bluestem Prairie - Minnesota.

I took approximately 500,0o0 shots of this spider as it and its web bounced around in the pre-sunrise breeze.  Two of them came out relatively sharp.  This is one of those two.  The Nature Conservancy’s Bluestem Prairie – Minnesota.

Stiff sunflower (Helanthus pauciflorus) at sunrise. The Nature Conservancy's Bluestem Prairie - Minnesota.

The peaceful appearance of this stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus) silhouetted against the rising sun is merely an illusion.  In reality, the sunflower was waving back and forth like a maniacal metronome while I tried desperately to push the shutter release just at the moment it came into focus.  I actually managed to catch it several times, and this was my favorite of the batch.

P.S. For you kids out there, a metronome is an old fashioned device that had a kind of upside down clock pendulum that rocked back and forth while it ticked.  Music teachers used to use them in vain attempts to get their students to keep a steady rhythm while playing “The Entertainer” on the piano.  Now there are smartphone apps that do the same thing.  …I hope kids still have to learn that song – they deserve it.

P.P.S. A clock pendulum is what used to help clocks keep time before…oh, nevermind, go ask your grandmother.  

Photo of the Week – July 16, 2015

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Scaly blazingstar (Liatris squarrosa) is just starting to bloom in the Platte River Prairies.  It has beautiful and intricate flowers with very long anthers protruding from its tiny blossoms.  At least it usually does…

Blazing star (Liatris squarrosa) The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Scaly blazingstar (Liatris squarrosa). The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

I was photographing some blazingstar flowers earlier this week when I saw one with a grasshopper sitting on it.  It sat still long enough for me to get a few photos of it.

Grasshopper on blazing star (Liatris squarrosa) The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

A grasshopper standing innocently(?) on top of scaly blazingstar.

Only when I looked the above photo on my computer screen did I notice the absence of most of the long white anthers I’d seen on other flowers.  Surely, I thought, it’s not a coincidence that the grasshopper is present but the anthers are not…?

Grasshopper on blazing star (Liatris squarrosa) The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

The grasshopper eating one of the long anthers.

Sure enough, looking back through my other images, I found one of the grasshopper eating an anther.  Caught red-handed!  (So to speak.)

Just because they are called “grass”hoppers doesn’t mean that’s all they eat.  In fact, many grasshoppers eat pollen and other parts of wildflowers.  Some are fairly specialized, while others are generalists in terms of the plant species they feed on.  Even among the grass-feeding grasshoppers, there is great variety in which grass species and which parts of those grasses each species eats.

For the sake of the scaly blazing star (and our seed harvest efforts this year), I hope at least some of the anthers survive uneaten so the plants can make seed.  As more flowers open, maybe their abundance will be more than the grasshoppers can keep up with.  At least in past years, we’ve usually gotten pretty good seed harvests from blazingstar, so I’m not too worried.

Just interested…