Video of Mike King's Sarracenia collection (Shropshire Sarracenias)

Mike King's collection/nursery - Shropshire Sarracenia's - is the stuff of legend among Sarracenia fanatics. I was mucking around on YouTube tonight and came across a virtual tour of his nursery that he had posted. Now THIS is a collection! And just look at the colours! Just magnificent...

Cicadas!

Like North America, Australia has very spectacular cicada outbreaks. This year has seen massive emergences in the Sydney basin, which I was very lucky to see this past weekend.

Australia’s cicadas are rather spectacular, and have been given affectionate and often colourful names by children of generations past that have stuck and even entered common useage. These include names like the greengrocer, yellow monday, masked devil and bottle cicada. Others have names reflecting their musical abilities, such as razor grinder (a species that sounds like an angle grinder being used on sheet metal). The one shown above is similarly called the double drummer (Thopha saccata). This is the songless female.

Male double drummers have very impressive soun dproducing organs (tymbals), making them one of the loudest insects on Earth. Their tymbals are so large that they even have massive covers over them that look like sidesaddles. You can see them just behind the last pair of legs, under the wings. This male has been around for a while and has milky, torn wings.

Here is a less colourful species, the aptly named red eye (Psaltoda moerens), again a female. What most people don’t realise about cicadas is how beautiful they look like as they emerge as adults.

Here is another female red eye cicada just after she emerged from her nymphal shell. Her colours are spectacular!

Her wings became iridescent blue, almost like a Morpho butterfly, as they fully expanded.

Magnificent!

Unfortunately, the colours fade rather quickly once their integument starts to dry out. The body soon becomes very dull, and fades to black as the exoskeleton undergoes a complex chemical reaction.

Unfortunately, some cicadas get stuck or attacked by ants as they emerge. Here is a poor male double drummer who suffered this fate. We tried to rescue him, but his wings had already dried out at a wonky angle.

We also ran a light sheet and saw a few nice moths. This is a Notodontid, Danima bankiae.

And to finish up, a Cossid or Goath moth, Endoxyla encalypti. This species has some blue iridescence on the thorax. The larvae bore into Eucalyptus trees.

The Sarracenia are doing well, but still recovering from the hail the other week. More photos of this season’s progress are due soon.

Good growing ‘till then!

And then came the hail.

The title says it all.

Here are some photos taken over the weekend. The wind had been back to normal over the last few weeks. New, non-malformed pitchers were up, replacing the manky looking ones. Everything was looking magnificent.

And then came the storm. Typical Bureau of Meteorology: the public pages said “chance of thunderstorms”. But the pay-to-see aviation service pages had maps showing high risk of severe storms over a large swath of New South Wales, with Canberra right in the middle.

So, around 6 PM, the skies darkened and it quickly grew quite ominous:

The storm dumped pea to small marble hail on us for 5 minutes. Lots and lots of close lightning strikes too. We got 23 mm (nearly 1”) of rain in about 10 minutes. We were lucky; a few kilometres away there was hail slightly larger than golf balls.

Here is the aftermath in the collection. I would hate to see what golf ball hail would do:

 

Well, it least the rain brought out some food:

Till next time.

Seedlings

Back in 2011, I noticed a number of Sarracenia seedlings had germinated in pots throughout the collection. As I had done a big Sarracenia flava pollination the previous season (crossing every clone of each flava form I had with each other and pinching out any other species’ flowers!), it was pretty obvious what species the seedlings would be. In order to see what I would get out of them, I transplanted them into a foam produce box full of peat, along with a bunch of sundews I recovered out of pots when I repotted the collection last year. Here is what the box looks like now:

There are a few very nice looking plants coming up in here. Here are my favourites:

To longtime readers of this blog, it is pretty obvious that I love Sarracenia flava var. atropurpurea. During the mega pollination, I crossed all of my (then) clones together: FRT 1-1, FRT 1-5 and a clone originating from Phil Reytter’s collection. This seedling is presumably the progeny of one of these crosses (I suspect FRT 1-1 x Reytter clone – FRT 1-5 has a cut-throat blotch that I suspect would have been passed on).

Sarracenia flava var. rubricorpora – nice red tube, and the only seedling true to type from these seedlings. In contrast, there are a number of flava var. rugellii, flava var. cuprea and flava var. flava / ornata.

On Sarracenia, drugs and Lepidoptera…

Saracenia flava with soon-to-be dinner.

Way back in 1976, a group of researchers extracted coniine, a narcotic drug, from the nectar of Sarracenia flava. Using the fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) as test subjects, they demonstrated that the amount of coniine in the nectar was sufficient to paralyse the ants. While I can’t access the original study online, I have often wondered what effect the coniine has on prey capture? (NB – the amount of coniine secreted by Sarracenia is not anywhere near enough to affect humans!).

Over the past couple of seasons, I have made some interesting observations with butterflies and moths coming to my Sarracenia. Last season, I watched a number of adults of the dayflying grapevine moth (Phalaenoides glycinae, Noctuidae sensu stricta: Agaristinae) drink the nectar of Saracenia leucophylla x psittacina pitchers (see photo above).

I was bemused that these moths would be attracted to Sarracenia, but became more intrigued when I found them alive but very intoxicated on the surface of the Sarracenia pots. When I picked them up, they barely but up a struggle, strange for such a strong flying (and often hard to catch) moth. However, they were never trapped by the Sarracenia hybrid they drank from, as the opening is too constricted for the moth to get inside. It was always this hybrid they were feeding at too – I never saw them at any other Sarracenia.

Now, fast forward to this season.

Over the past few days, we have had Common Brown butterflies (Heteronympha merope merope, Nymphalidae: Satyrinae) make their first appearance in Canberra. The above photo shows a male specimen, which are more conspicuous than females at this time of year.

Here is where I found one today (plant is an S. leucophylla ‘Tarnok’):

What is impressive here is the relative sizes of the common brown butterfly…

and the pitcher that caught it…

As you can see, males of the common brown have a wingspan nearly twice the size of the mouth of this S. leucophylla pitcher. In fact, the specimen I photographed (from Tenterfield, NSW), is a little smaller (and paler) than the ones I often see here in Canberra.

And yet, this leucophylla managed to snag one. Sure, with its wings folded above its back, the butterfly could fall in, but the feeding behaviour of these butterflies is such that they usually settle head up, on top of the flower they are feeding on, and rhythmically open and close their wings while they feed. Once inside the pitcher, I think the butterfly’s struggling would suck it further down the pitcher, but I really wonder whether it would fall in on its own.

Perhaps the leucophylla had a little help from some coniine?

I will keep watching what goes on with insets around my Sarracenia over the summer and see if I can photograph some interesting encounters.