The Wasp in Designer Sunglasses

There's a small colony of this little solitary wasp, which is in the genus Ectemnius, in our garden. There are about 10 species in this genus in the UK but they are notoriously difficult to identify from photographs. It's only about half the size of a typical wasp but has disproportionately large eyes that remind me of designer sunglasses.

It also has formidable jaws which it uses to catch hoverflies, which it then uses as provisions for its young. When it's not hunting it seems to have a taste for honeydew which collects on the day lily leaves where I took these photographs.

I recently discovered where these little wasps nest, in an old cherry tree stump that has rotted until it almost has the consistency of balsa wood. The wasps have chewed a nest hole that you can just see on the underside of the log, just above the centre on the left-hand side of the picture above. 

Inside the main tunnel there are side-tunnels, each with an egg and a collection of dead hoverflies that each wasp's larva will eat during its development. The only reason that I noticed this nest site was that the sawdust produced by the tunnellers has collected in spiders' webs under the hole.

My thanks to Brian Little at the wonderful iSpot web site for confirming the identity of this wasp.

The Teesdale Rhino

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about this little beetle. 

We have log piles all around the garden, where the remains of trees that have grown here in the past and are slowly rotting away play host to all sorts of insects. In amongst the logs there's holly, hornbean, whitebeam, cherry, walnut, plum, ash and several different conifers. If they had all been left to grow to full size our small garden would have become a dense forest.

My wife found this beetle in one of the log piles and since I couldn't identify it I posted a couple of photographs on the wonderful iSpot web site.

Within a few days it had been identified by Darren Mann, coleopterist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, as a female rhinoceros beetle, Sinodendron cyclindricum. Unlike the male of the species, she doesn't have a rhinoceros-like horn on her nose but a few days later we found a mate for her in a grove of beech trees in Teesdale. 

At the time we had no idea what we had found because the beetle had been crawling under loose bark and its head was covered in spiders' webs. It looked like another female but when we took it home to clean it up, gently removing its entanglements, it .....

... revealed this magnificent rhino horn, tipped with a brush of ginger hairs.

From this angle that flat, plate-like front to the thorax reminds me of the dinosaur Triceratops.

This beetle is about the length of my thumbnail.

So what does it use that horn for? It can't be feeding, otherwise surely the female would have one too. Apparently they feed on tree sap.

It must be sexual ornament. It would be good to put two males together and see if they use it as some sort of weapon in a contest for females.So that's my next move - to try to find more and see how they interact.

Meanwhile this male has joined the female in the wood pile, where I hope they are breeding.

Plicatura crispa

I was struggling to identify this fungus, found this afternoon in woodland at Houghall near Durham city, so I posted it on the wonderful iSpot web site and within a couple of hours I received two very helpful suggestions as to what it might be. Sincere thanks to Malcolm Greaves in York for this ID.

It appears to be Plicatura crispa, a fungus with a northern distribution, mostly reported in Scotland. Details can be found at this web site. There's a distribution map here. 

 The dense clusters of fungi were arranged in tiers and mostly concentrated around burrs on the trunk of the tree, but clearly spreading outwards from there. 

Each individual fructification is quite small - no larger than a thumbnail - but there are often over 100 in a cluster.

The upper surface is brownish-buff, paler towards the edge, and the undersurface is white.

From below ....

 ... the gills have a wrinkly appearance.

I need to go back and collect a specimen now, for a closer look.