Lacewing fly winter guest

When we first moved into this old house, about 35 years ago, it had an interesting and diverse invertebrate fauna. There were gaps and draughts through the doors, windows and floors and I can recall a wide range of winter visitors in those days: devil's coach horse beetles, small tortoiseshell butterflies, ladybirds, woodlice, earwigs, several species of moth. But as we renovated the place and made it more energy-efficient it became harder for small animals to find their way in. Those that arrive these days mostly come in on our clothes or on plants brought in from the garden. That's probably how this lovely green lacewing arrived, back in the autumn. It woke up from its winter hibernation in January.

 

I think it's a green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea, which is really a group of almost identical cryptic species that can only be told apart by the sounds that they make. Courting lacewings communicate with each other by drumming with their feet on leaf surfaces, creating vibrational songs, and each cryptic species has its own distinctive song frequency. 

This individual is currently spending the winter behind a picture on the wall. When spring arrives I'll let it go in the garden - lacewing larvae are useful, very effective aphid predators.

The Amazing Eyes of a Green Lacewing

We found half a dozen of these green lacewings fluttering against the window of a bird-watching hide at Low Barns Nature Reserve yesterday. They must have hibernated in there. We let them all go but before that I took a few photographs, because these common insects can be surprisingly hard to spot in the open.

They have the most beautiful gauzy wings and eyes like jewels but their colour varies depending on the way that they are lit.

The two photos above are with the camera's built-in flash but ....

... this one is with natural light. Notice how the spots on the abdomen show up so much clearer with this illumination. Flash can sometimes conceal important identification features, which is one of the reasons why identifying insects from photos can be tricky ....

Flash can also create strong reflections from shiny surfaces, like the wings of this insect, that are folded over the body like a tent.

Perhaps the most striking fetaure of these insects when they are photographed with flash is their eyes, which resemble glowing red, green and yellow jewels. In natural daylight they seem to be golden but with flash internal reflection and refraction within the separate lenses of the eye create this multi-colour starburst effect.

Lacewings, in the larval and adult stages of their life cycle, are great allies for the gardener, consuming large numbers of aphids. This is a lacewing egg, on a long stalk on the underside of a hawthorn leaf, with the larva just hatching.

 It is a voracious greenfly consumer, impaling its prey on powerful jaws and they carrying around the empty skin of its victim on those hairs on its back. There are some pictures of one, resembling a miniature walking compost heap, here.