Three Little Wasps

The American Pelecinid Wasp has a scary-looking tail that won’t sting you. Only the larvae of Junebugs need be afraid. Photo by Emily Stone.

“Check out this insect!” called our intern Kali from their desk in the Museum’s back office. On the outside of the window was a lanky black critter. Two long forked antennae, six long legs, smoky wings, and a long, jointed, curving abdomen all attached to a smallish head and thorax. Recognizing the creature as a wasp, and long tail as a modified abdomen become egg-squirting ovipositor, we all agreed that she looked like an ichneumon wasp.

Ichneumon wasps don’t sting, and feed only on nectar and water as adults, but the feeding habits of their larvae are more shocking. That long ovipositor allows the adult female to drill through soil, wood, and the skin of the larvae of other creatures and deposit the wasp egg in another mother’s larva. Then the wasp larva eats the other larva, sometimes quickly, and sometimes living with them while the food source grows and develops. The end result is the same, though: a grown-up wasp and an eaten-up host. Because the wasps have a close relationship with their host, but end up killing them, they are known as parasitoids.

Ichneumon wasps are incredibly diverse, and host-specific, with a particular species of wasp focusing on a particular species or genus of host insect. And, while their lifestyle may make us squeamish, they are incredibly important for keeping pest species in check and encouraging balance in our ecosystems.

A few days later, while eating ice cream at a rest area, I spotted another of these lanky, black wasps on the roof rack of my car. She flew off before I could get a photo. But, when I stopped to get gas, there was one just sitting on the vertical surface of the pump, at about knee height. This time I snapped a photo before she flew away. Having seen this same critter three times in as many days, I was keen to look them up and get an official identification on this neat wasp.

To my surprise, iNaturalist informed me that this was not an ichneumon at all!

Pelecinid wasps are similar to ichneumon wasps in that adults drink nectar, and they have long ovipositors for depositing eggs directly in the larva of another species. They just happen to be in their own family – Pelecinidae. And, while scientists estimate that there might be 100,000 species of ichneumon wasps worldwide, the Pelecinidae family contains only three species, with only one occurring north of Mexico. This was it: Pelecinus polyturator, the American Pelecinid Wasp.

Like all of our favorite parasitoid wasps, these help control one specific pest species: Junebugs. I can remember many summer nights when those huge brown beetles would buzz against our window screens in the dark and scare me into thinking that a monster was trying to get into the house.

That’s not why most people are annoyed at Junebugs, though. The larvae of Junebugs feed on plant roots for two years as they grow through three instars and become more damaging with each growth spurt. Larger trees can survive this damage, but the beetle larvae do kill small plants. Our non-native lawns can’t survive major infestations of these native larvae, and turfgrass sometimes dies, aided by the actions of skunks and raccoons who go digging for a juicy larval dinner. As Simba says, “Slimy, yet satisfying.”

We can cheer on the Pelecinid wasps, then, as the female drills her ovipositor up to two inches deep in the soil and deposits a wasp egg on a Junebug larva. The wasp larva hatches and starts munching. Some species of wasp larvae are precise eaters, and do their best to consume the inessential parts first so that their host stays alive and fresh for as long as possible. Pelecinid larvae don’t seem to mind an expired meal and just chomp right in. Once the food is gone, they pupate and emerge as adults in late summer.

Scientists aren’t sure how she finds the larvae, but the wasp’s activity period coincides with the season when Junebug larvae migrate closest to the soil surface. Parasitoid and host are closely tied.

The most fascinating thing about Pelecinid wasps might not be their creepy feeding habits. Their mating system is wild, too! In North America, almost all of them are female and reproduce by thelytokous parthenogenesis. Parthenogenesis means virgin birth. It describes reproduction from an unfertilized, haploid egg, and it usually produces males. Other wasps and bees do this to produce drones. In the Pelecinid’s version of parthenogenesis, eggs start off as diploid, and produce genetically identical females without fertilization. Strangely, it’s just our species of Pelecinids who do this. The two species of Pelecinids who live in Central and South America have the normal male/female ratio and relationships in their populations.

So, since I saw three of these lanky black wasps in as many days, I’m guessing they’re in your neighborhood, too. Let me know if you see one, especially if they have the short abdomen of a rare male. I love when nature gets weird!

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Really Old Rocks

Even from the highway, we could tell that this rock outcrop was cool. Some sections were black, others were light gray, and streaks of both shot through it all. Twelve geologists, all in hi-vis safety vests, piled out of vehicles on the side of Highway 95 just north of Republic, Michigan. Luckily, the shoulder and ditch were both wide.

Tom Fitz, Professor of Geoscience at Northland College, instructed this group of Wisconsin Master Naturalists to explore the outcrop on our own for a few minutes. He’d made sure everyone was outfitted with a hand lens on a lanyard around our neck—the favorite tool of geologists and botanists alike. We waded through weeds and looked closer.

Why were Wisconsin naturalists in Michigan? This outcrop represents history common to us both…roughly 3.2 billion years before the state boundaries were drawn.

The 20-foot high cliff was a window into the Superior Craton, one of the very first land masses to form when the planet was young. The original rocks likely included basalt from the ocean floor and volcanoes; granite from some of the first-ever continental crust; and mudstones formed as early Earth weather eroded rocks into smaller pieces and re-deposited them.

Then, they were all buried deeply by more rocks being piled on top and the actions of plate tectonics, heated to 600-700 degrees Celsius, and metamorphosed. Minerals changed. Molten rock of one type shot through semi-molten rock of another type to create cross-cutting streaks called dikes and sills. The basalt became deep black amphibolite, the granite became swirl-banded gneiss, and mudstones became shiny schist. Other land masses smashed into the craton, supercontinents formed and split, and the deep Earth churned during this complex and iterative process. “This rock has experienced a LOT of Earth’s history,” said Tom, in a bit of an understatement.

A student asked about the cracks and fractures in the rock, but Tom declared those fairly recent. Really deep, semi-molten rock doesn’t have cracks; hot rock is plastic. Not plastic as in Barbie, but plastic as in pliable and moldable, a favorite term of geologists. Instead, those fractures formed as erosion carried away 30-50 kilometers of rock that had once piled on top. Rebounding from being unweighted, now cold and brittle at the surface, the bedrock finally cracked.

Here's our group, all making hearts to represent the fact that these rocks form the Superior Craton, which is the heart of North America! Photo by Emily Stone.

We had a night to sleep on this information, ensconced in the group site at Van Riper State Park. Janet made us pasta with fresh garden veggies. Donn and Andy pulled out their guitars for a singalong around a campfire. We metamorphosed some marshmallows for s’mores.

Driving into the morning sunshine, we found Marquette, MI, and walked a beautiful trail along the shore of Lake Superior to the very northern tip of Presque Isle Park. The rocks were dark and wrinkled, weathered into a texture like elephant skin. We sat down for Tom’s lecture, and boy am I glad I did.

“You know those old rocks we saw yesterday?” Tom asked. “Those were intrusive igneous rocks.” They cooled slowly, deep below Earth’s surface, so that the minerals had time to grow into big, visible crystals. “That means they had to intrude into an older rock that was already there. This is that rock.” With no radioactive minerals in the mix, geologists can’t figure out an age for this formation through radiometric dating, but we know that it’s older than the 3.2 billion year old rocks exposed near Republic.

Peridotite is at the bottom, and lots of rocks formed on top of it over the course of Earth's history. The greenstone and gneiss are the rocks we looked at near Republic. 

Then most of that rock was eroded away, again exposing the ancient peridotite at the surface. Relatively young sandstone covered it, and now some of the sandstone has eroded away to expose the peridotite at Presque Isle Park in Marquette, MI.

Peridotite is a very dense rock formed directly from the Earth’s mantle. It was the ocean floor before there were continents. Most of its contemporaries would have been pulled by their own weight back down into the mélange of the mantle, remelted, and their chemical recipes evolved into the granites and other rocks we’d already seen.

“This rock has no business being at Earth’s surface,” admonished Tom. Even so, it was weathered billions of years ago at the surface of a very different Earth. The rough wrinkles we sat on were once at the surface of a very different Earth. Then it was buried. Now it is again exposed to the waves and wind of weathering, and to the feet and eyes of geologists who try to understand its story.

Our field trip didn’t end there. We explored banded iron formations that precipitated on top of those proto continents; the extensive lava flows of the Mid-Continent Rift; the sandstones that blanketed the landscape after that; and the glaciers that sculpted much of our current topography. These geologic events are all explained in our current Northwoods Rocks exhibit at the Museum. What isn’t explained there, is what it feels like to sit on 3.4 billion years of Earth’s history.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Nine Places to Find Delight

1)

Weekend morning, I slept in, and yoga is happening later than usual. A balancing pose requires a focal point, so I gaze outside the second floor window. A shaft of sunlight, one that usually visits while I’m already at work, has found a little gap through the dense hemlocks and is illuminating maple leaves in the dark forest. The summer has been long and hungry. Two round blotches of brown fungus mar the leaves. Some tiny mouth has chewed a hole. Every branching vein carrying water, every curvaceous edge where the cells used to divide when the leaf was young, even the knobby twigs, are aglow.

2) 

I stand on the gravel of my driveway, hands full, head busy, car door open. And feel a tickle on my arm. A quick glance, then a second look, and I find that a furry white fairy was trapped in my arm hair. I blew it off (literally, with a focused little puff of air). Now free, the woolly alder aphid floats off to find a mate. All summer, females clone themselves into thick masses of fuzzy white wax on alder trees. In fall they get frisky. Females find a male to share genes, then lay eggs who contain enough variation that some will be programmed just right for next summer’s challenges. A ray of afternoon sun illuminates the delicate creature; a bag of zucchini dangles from my arm.

3)

My bike leans against the bridge railing while I admire the sunset glow on the Namekagon River. A kingfisher splashes in the shallows, every drop turning to gold. Then a shimmering V appears, and at its apex the sleek head of a beaver. Closer, closer, closer they glide, until I can look directly down on the beaver’s thick body, gray tail. Just like I teach the 5th graders, the beaver’s nose, eyes, and ears all poke above the water. Their main senses exposed, while the rest of their body should have been hidden if not for my perspective, the clear water, and the calm evening. From the beaver’s mouth trails the long stem of an aquatic plant, like a rose in the teeth of a tango dancer. They swim in circles.

4)

Pedaling up the hill from the river, movement catches my eye. The most adorable little black squirrel bounds across the road. Young of the year, their small size and youthful exuberance triggers all my instincts and I can’t help but exclaim “awwww….” As they disappear into the woods.

5)

In my kitchen, the almost-toddler holds court from her mother’s lap. Up and down the long table, her subjects make funny faces and goofy noises hoping to please the queen. The smiles and squawks she bestows on us glitter like jewels. We are giddy with riches.

6) 

My kayak bobs in the weed bed at the end of the lake and I fiddle with the camera. Focus, focus again, start recording. I plunge my arm in and hope to get the angle right. The water is cool on my hand. Weeds tickle my wrist. From above, I can see a school of bluegills among the hovering algae motes. Can the lens see them, too? They turn and move in sync, like backup dancers. Fins flutter. Tails wiggle. They weave gracefully through the weeds. Then a big one swims up and stares curiously at my camera. The star noticed me! Reel

7) 

Morning in the prairie. The blossoms of cup plants wave like constellations of mini suns above our heads. Mountain mint tickles my nose with their spicy scent. Paintbrush flowers add a dash of red. And then a whole patch of the fuzzy fuchsia spikes of prairie blazing star steal the show. Their flowers open from top to bottom on each magic wand, so fresh nectar is always being served. In a blur of wings, a hummingbird clearwing moth pokes their proboscis (which the internet tells me is either 4 cm or 4 inches long) into the fray. In my viewfinder, I discover a brown-belted bumblebee sharing the feast. There is plenty to go around. Reel

8) 

At the end of my driveway, in a rush. Morning commute. But the flash of scarlet and gold stops me short. My car is breaking. The door won’t unlock. I have to turn off the engine to be released. There on the asphalt is a lone aspen leaf in all its autumn glory. I snap a quick photo to send to a friend, and hum to myself with the promise of fall. This is a symbol of death—of leaves, of mosquitoes, of summer. And also rebirth—from the compost, into the unguarded woods, into a new season of light and color.

9) 

Everywhere. Wrote Mary Oliver, “the farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list.” Go on, you, keep adding.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Community Science by Jillian Finucane

Jillian Finucane is from Madison, Wisconsin, and is currently studying Geological Engineering at University of Wisconsin – Madison. As a lover of the outdoors, she spends her summers hiking, camping, and rock climbing; she adores Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Jillian is a Summer Naturalist/Geology Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum.

A light breeze brushed through the pollinator gardens surrounding the Museum. Happy children and singing birds filled the Museum courtyard with sound. All this noise didn’t bother me; I zoned into the pollinator garden. I was completing my weekly butterfly survey as a participant in the Wisconsin Statewide Community Science Project.

Despite having finished the Master Naturalist course my second week at the Museum, I am still far from considering myself a pro at any plant or insect identification. My specialty lies with the rocks. As a senior studying Geology at University of Wisconsin - Madison, I have spent the last several years honing my rock identification skills. With all the time spent on that, I’d neglected my interests in learning about living nature. When Mollie Kreb-Mertig, Museum Curator, asked me to help with a butterfly survey in partnership with Milwaukee Public Museum, I was a little nervous. Would I be able to identify down to the family, let alone genus or species? Was I qualified enough to participate in a community science project?

Jillian Finucane (right) looks for butterflies in the Museum’s pollinator gardens while Kali Sipp (left) stand ready to record sightings. They spotted several butterflies and contributed that data to the Wisconsin Statewide Community Science Project. Photo by Emily Stone.

Community science is defined as a scientific project undertaken by members of the general public. As someone who is a part of the Northwoods community, I am perfectly qualified to participate. Mollie prepared me by covering the basic butterfly families and a few important survey protocols.

With Kali Sipp, my co-intern, as my scribe, I felt a lot more comfortable starting my first survey. A peer into the sky and a check with my weather app helped me gather all of the environmental data needed to start the survey. At a here-comes-the-bride pace, I began my short 0.2 mile walk that would take me 20 minutes. I slowly gazed between the pollinator garden to my right, and the open courtyard to my left. Much to my delight, I spotted a brushfoot. I snapped a picture and tallied it on my clipboard. By the end of the survey, I had identified a few brushfoots and even a couple monarchs!

Jillian's phone photo of a monarch butterfly (in the brushfoot family!) from one of her Pollard Walks this summer. You don't need to have a nice camera or be a professional photographer to participate in community science. Often a quick snapshot is all the data you need. 

What I have come to appreciate most about these community science projects is how they force me to slow down and truly appreciate nature. I don’t usually meander through a pollinator garden or drive out to isolated forest roads just to observe some critters. But when forced to “stop and smell the roses,” I find myself appreciating even the smallest things.

So, when invited to a DNR Mink Frog survey by a local naturalist, I was excited to tag along. Unlike the bright and colorful butterfly surveys, frog surveys occur in the dark, after night has completely settled in. Visiting 10 different survey locations, the naturalist and I stepped outside into the mosquito-infested air.

For five minutes, we stood in silence waiting for frog calls in the black night. A cool wind bristled through the trees. Something cracked a branch in the woods. Two wolf packs howled back and forth at each other. But that wasn’t what we were listening for. Then we heard it. The call sounded like two pieces of wood being clanked together, but we knew it was the mink frog looking for a mate.

Using a code rating how frequent calls are (1 - individual calls are heard, 2 - some calls overlap, 3 - full chorus of overlapping calls), surveyors track the size of populations in different ponds. By mid-July, the only frogs making noise are the bullfrog, green frog, and mink frog. Most calls we heard during our stops were ranked as a 1, with an occasional 2.

Now, you may be wondering why data like this may be useful. For the annual DNR frog surveys, data is analyzed to estimate frog species abundance, determined by the presence of their calls. This helps wildlife biologists monitor frog populations in different parts of the state.

The butterfly surveys serve a different purpose, as they track migration patterns and populations of butterflies in specific areas. Milwaukee Public Museum, our partner organization, has been notified that researchers in Europe have been using Pollardbase, the butterfly database, to track migration patterns!

Community Science has taught me a new way to appreciate the finer details of the Northwoods. If you’re also itching to learn more about the natural world, or hoping to use your knowledge for the greater good of a project, consider getting involved in community science. Contact Mollie Kreb-Mertig at mollie@cablemuseum.org here at the Museum for more information about getting involved in our surveys!

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Kale: Servant or Master? (or friend)

Ten years ago the Cable Community Farm broke ground through a daunting thatch of quack grass in its location just north of Cable on Perry Lake Road. This decade has been filled with hours of backbreaking work, friendly conversations between gardeners, and untold pounds of delicious, organically grown produce. This is our final summer at the original site. We look forward to finding a new home and creating a new garden with all that we've learned. For now, I'm enjoying my relatively weed-free plot and the jungle of veggies just starting to ripen. My garden and I have finally gotten to a place where I don’t feel like kale is either servant or master…we are old friends who support each other's health and happiness. It’s nice to look back and see how far we’ve come. This article is republished from 2013.

Hot sun beat down on my neck as I crouched in the dirt, pulling thin blades of quack grass from out between my kale plants. Weed by weed, I slowly reached the end of the row, stood up, and stretched my back. A quick survey showed that my work was not even close to being done. My plot at the brand-new Cable Community Farm had only recently been sheep pasture, and even after three rounds of tillage, quack grass roots still ran deep.

The kale looked relaxed and happy, though, in its spacious row. For a second, I felt a twinge of resentment. Why does kale get to just sit there and grow, doing the only thing it really wants to do, while I have to toil away, tilling the soil, planting the seeds, watering the garden, and weeding away any competitors? By offering up its tasty, nutritious leaves, the kale has seduced me into catering to its every whim.

“…the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offered to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or passive. All these plants, which I’d always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves,” Michael Pollan wrote in his excellent book, The Botany of Desire.

When I first picked up this book off a friend’s coffee table and read the introduction, it completely changed the way I think about domesticated plants. Although I love to eat kale and almost every other fruit and vegetable, I have always had more respect, more reverence for native plants. If you think about it, though, everything in our gardens started in the wild somewhere, once upon a time.

Pollan flips our perception of plants upside down, and asks us to think about domestication “as something plants have done to us—a clever strategy for advancing their own interests.” Their own interest, as with every living thing, is to make more copies of themselves, to reproduce.

So, just as plants use nectar to trick bees into transporting their pollen, plants bribed us with sweet fruits, crunchy leaves, nutritious seeds, and beautiful flowers. In return, we chose the seeds of their genetic kin to be collected, sold, and replanted year after year. We bring them to a good habitat, protect them from pests, reduce their competition with other plants, and make sure their every need is met.

The tastiest, most prolific varieties (think Brandywine tomatoes, Provider bush beans, or my Winterbor kale…what’s your favorite?) are first developed through selective breeding, and then replanted over and over again. In the meantime, the quack grass and other weeds are tilled under, pulled out, and repeatedly beaten back. Says Pollan, “our desires are simply more grist for evolution’s mills, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others.”

When I write about nature, I usually choose to just write about wild things out in the woods. But, as Pollan observes, “Nature is not only to be found ‘out there’; it is also ‘in here,’ in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen…” My relationship with nature does not stop at the edge of my garden. In fact, by planting, nurturing, and eating these other living beings, I develop an even more intimate connection with nature, and weave myself more fully into the “reciprocal web of life that is Earth.”

Yes, kale and other vegetables have persuaded me to pamper them, and to pay others to make sure they reproduce every year, but I also receive benefits, just like the bee on the rose bush. Instead of a hive full of honey, I will survive winter with a freezer full of kale!

My 30x30-foot garden plot grows more than kale! From left to right you’ll see potatoes, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, green beans, broccoli with kale in the background, more broccoli, cauliflower, and zucchini. Yum! Photo by Emily Stone.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.