The Yucca Insect Community

I am trying something new for this blog post. The last few weeks I have been paying close attention to yucca plants, especially the flowers, and taking many photos of the various insects (and spiders). We have a trio of plants in our front yard in Leavenworth, Kansas, USA, but I also examined plants in Okawville, Illinois, and one wild plant in eastern Missouri.

A tumbling flower beetle (top), and false flower beetle, nibble on pollen inside a yucca flower.

I created an album in my Flickr account here, with captions explaining most interactions and behaviors that I observed and documented. I am hereby directing you there to peruse the photos. I plan to keep adding photos to it, as I have many from last year that I have not yet uploaded even to my computer. Plus, there are a few more from Colorado. I thought I wrote an extensive blog post about yucca moths several years ago, but I can't find it if so.

Please let me know if this redirect is acceptable to you. There are other such communities of insects that might be easier to document this way, but if I receive negative feedback I won't repeat this experiment. Enjoy your summer!

Cochise County Bugs

On the way to visit Pat Sullivan and Lisa Lee in Sierra Vista (see “Bug Rooms”), Margarethe Brummermann and I stopped to explore a mesquite grassland habitat just off of Arizona State Route 83, about two miles south of its intersection with Interstate 10. The weather this day, March 7, was rather cool and blustery, albeit mostly sunny. The wind made finding insects and other arthropods something of a challenge.

The flora alone is quite spectacular, however. Take this yucca for example

>

The mesquites themselves were looking a bit gnarly, having suffered through a population explosion of “twig girdlers,” Oncideres rhodosticta. These are longhorned beetles in the family Cerambycidae. A female cuts a notch around the entire circumference of a twig, effectively killing the wood beyond the girdle. She then lays an egg in that doomed twig, and the larva that hatches bores inside. In this image, one can see both a girdle, and the broken end of the limb that resulted from a second girdle.

Many fishhook barrel cacti like this one were scattered among the mesquites. Careful inspection (VERY careful inspection) revealed that many of the folds in the succulent plant were occupied by leaf-footed bugs in the family Coreidae. Members of the genus Narnia were too quick and easily evaded my camera. Adult Chelinidea vittiger, or “opuntia bugs” were more cooperative.

The soil that supports this plant community is very rocky, and turning over some of the larger stones revealed a handful of hidden arthropods. The most spectacular was this centipede, Scolopendra polymorpha. At only about three inches long, it was far from a full-grown adult specimen. They are certainly formidable, agile predators at any size. The cool temperature was the only reason this image did not turn out as a motion blur.

I recommend visiting this unique habitat to any naturalist interested in exploring the many faces of the Sonoran Desert. It holds many secrets at any time of the year.