Life and Death Struggle....

We encountered this life-and-death struggle between a ground beetle larva and an earthworm that had ventured out of its burrow in Teesdale.

The beetle sunk its jaws into its victim and refused to let go, even though...

... the worm twisted and turned...

... rolled over on its attacker.....

... and glued it down with sticky mucus.

We didn't watch the end of the contest. I suspect the worm might have reached safety, though some segments may have been severely damaged.

More examples of mortal combat:

Between a spider and a wasp

Between a wasp and a moth

Between a house sparrow and a ground beetle

To the Woods.....

The bluebells in Durham's woodlands are just about at their best now, with the leaf canopy overhead allowing shafts of sunlight to sweep across the mist of blue flowers on the woodland floor. This is a woodmouse-eye-view. In the hot, still humid air the whole of this woodland, just outside Durham city, smelled like a florist's shop....

... but with a few more days of this heat the bluebells will soon begin to fade.

This breathtaking annual display of bluebells has its origins in the previous year's summer. As the flowers fade the plants use the brief window of opportunity before the leaf canopy closes overhead to build up food resreves in a new bulb, where next year's flower initials will already be formed by mid summer. By late summer the leaves will have wilted, leaving only the papery seed heads, while underground next years bulb, primed and ready to go, will sit out the winter ready to burst into life when spring returns. 

Meanwhile, down amongst the bluebells the spreading fronds of buckler fern Dryopteris sp. have already expanded. The whole plant is a living waste-paper basket, catching leaves in that funnel of foliage in autumn and trapping them around the crown of the plant, where they'll decay and create humus around its roots.

One-Sided Relationship

Dandelions are a terrific source of nectar and pollen for bumblebees ...

.... and for small solitary bees like those above. Can anyone help me identify any of these?

It might seem that this is a perfect example of a partnership between plant and pollinator, with generous rewards for services rendered by the insects, but this is a very one-sided relationship. Unlike typical flowers, most dandelions don’t actually need any pollen to set seeds.

Seeds are usually produced when male pollen fertilises a female egg cell inside the flower to produce an embryo inside of the developing seed, but in many dandelion species seeds are produced without the need for fertilisation, so the seedlings are genetic clones of the mother plant. All that pollen and nectar that sustains the bees, as well as the elaborate mechanism for presenting pollen to bees to maximise the chances of cross pollination, is redundant as far as the dandelion is concerned - a needless expense.

This production of seeds without pollination is called apomixis and in recent years it has attracted the interest of genetic engineers, because if it could be enginerred into GM crops they wouldn't require pollen for seed production. This would remove one major objection to these high-tech crops – that they can transfer their genes via pollen to organic crops or wild plant relatives. Without pollen, an apomictic crop could not contaminate non-GM crops, with the added bonus that it could reliably produce seeds without depending on insect pollinators.