Vine weevil 'playing possum'

 

Our bath acts as a giant pitfall trap for spiders, woodlice and silverfish that often become trapped when they come to drink from a dripping tap, but this was the first weevil that has fallen in.

At first, I thought it was dead, laying on its back with legs in the air but it was performing thanatosis - the strange behaviour of some animals that pretend to be dead when they are threatened. It’s also known as ‘playing possum’, because the most famous exponent is the Virginia opossum, but many other animals do it, from grass snakes to tiny insects..

This particular individual seemed to have had a close encounter with a spider’s web and was wearing some of it like a silken vest.

The adult vine weevil is a slow-moving cumbersome beetle that cannot fly, so when disturbed it simply tucks its legs under its body and either drops to the ground or rolls onto its back, keeping perfectly still. In this state it’s hard to spot in the soil. Eventually, when it thinks the coast is clear, it stretches out a tentative leg, rocks itself until those sickle-shaped claws grip a leaf, hauls itself right-way-up and ambles away.

Vine weevils are notorious horticultural pests, because their larvae feed on the root systems of garden plants - especially those grown in pots. The first sign of their presence is wilting of the leaves, by which time they have destroyed most of the root system, symptoms I became aware of when my collection of show auriculas was devastated by their larvae.

Vine weevils are parthenogenetic, laying fertile eggs without the need for a male to fertilise them, so it only takes one weevil to start an infestation.

 

Since they can’t fly, the vine weevil in our bath must have either climbed in through an open window, arrived on our clothing or had been carried in on towels dried on the washing line in the garden.

A random digression on thanatosis

If, like me, you were a teenager in the 1960s you might have listened to a rock band called the Grateful Dead, headed by Jerry Garcia and noted for their eclectic range of musical genres.

Taxonomists - those who assign scientific names, rooted in Latin and Greek, to newly-discovered species, - are not generally noted for whimsy, but in 1987 one fan of the Grateful Dead, entomologist John H. Epler, honoured them with a scientific name for a new midge species that performs thanatosis - Dicrotendipes thanatogratus. The specific epithet, thanatogratus, means ‘grateful dead’, amalgamating thanatos (Greek for “death”) with gratus (Latin for “grateful”)

Tansy in a churchyard

 

Tansy Tanacetum vulgare, flowering in Wolsingham churchyard this week.

A wild flower species that’s often found near human habitation because it was so convenient to be able to gather it close to home.

Full of pungent chemical compounds, of untested toxicity, its leaves, at various times in history, have been recommended by herbalists -

• as an antiseptic treatment for wounds
• for enhancing female fertility and preventing miscarriages. “Let those women who desire children,” wrote Nicolas Culpepper, “love this herb, ‘tis their best companion, their husband excepted,”
• as food flavouring, in tansy cakes made with milk, eggs and flour
• as an insect repellent, rubbed into fresh meat to keep flies away
• in burials, interred with corpses to keep worms at bay

Some know the golden inflorescences of tansy as ‘bachelors’ buttons’, a colloquial name applied to numerous other wild flowers. 

Geoffrey Grigson, in The Englishman’s Flora, listed the same name, applied in various counties, to flower of marsh marigold, buttercups, columbine, red campion, white campion, greater stitchwort, shining crane’sbill, herb robert, pennywort, lesser periwinkle, field scabious, devil’s-bit scabious, burdock, cornflower and knapweed.

And that, in a nutshell, is why an internationally agreed scientific name, derived from classical languages that are universally recognised, is such an aid to communicating knowledge about the living world, avoiding confusion.

 

Chicken of the woods

 

Chicken of the woods Laetiporus sulphureus, growing on a decaying oak trunk in Backstone bank wood in Weardale’s Tunstall valley. This is the third crop of these spectacular toadstools that has erupted from this tree in recent years. Their webs of fungal hyphae are slowly hollowing out the oak’s trunk, turning it into something with the texture of a crumbly biscuit.

Woodland fungi are a furtive bunch, living mostly unseen under the soil or inside other organisms, digesting whatever their creeping threads can find: nature’s recyclers. Their public appearances are often fleeting, limited to a dusting of rust spores on the underside of a yellowing leaf or overnight eruptions of toadstools in autumn. But bracket fungi are a class apart: big, durable and sometimes a little sinister, and none more so than Laetiporus sulphureus.

Gastronomes relish chicken of the woods as a delicacy, comparable in texture to well-cooked chicken breast, with a rich fungal aroma. So do insects: these are fine young specimens but soon they’ll undoubtedly be full of maggots. Once the dinner-plate-sized brackets were past their best they become chewy and tough, having lost the plump fleshiness of youth.

Six years ago, I picked up a mature fallen chicken of the woods bracket and took it home, to see what might hatch out. Nothing for four days, but on the fifth a blizzard of minute flies swirled out when I lifted the lid of the container. Then, on the 10th day, something special.

It was, I think, a cork moth, Nemapogon cloacella, just 5mm long, scuttling across the surface of the decaying fungus. At first it seemed just another dull, brown micro-moth, but a magnifying glass revealed fringed, upswept wings clothed in scales of mottled brown, white and gold; an insect of exquisite beauty.

Heartwood of oak, created by a sapling’s sunlit leaves perhaps two centuries ago, broken down, molecule by molecule, reconstituted into fungal tissue, then reincarnated yet again as a tiny jewel of an insect.