Insects vs. Insects -- My photographic arthropodous

Out of college for the first time I became City Editor at the Richmond Gazette, a weekly newspaper in northern Illinois. I was the only reporter, photographer, copy editor, and layout guy.  I carried a camera, shot black and white in ASA 400 or 1600 if the light was dim.  I developed my own pictures in trays in a darkroom.

One year I won best sports photography from the Associated Press, for a picture after a high school football game.  The little team no one had heard of had somehow  been winning like crazy all season and was about to go downstate and vie for the Illinois title.  They had one last game at home to cap it off -- an easy win, more of a send-off celebration than an real contest and the whole town turned out.  But they lost.  My shot was of the bench, four muddy guys crying into muddy towels.  The caption: "... the Rockets will be staying home."

That camera was a Nikon, someone stole it just as things went digital and Nancy gave me a Panasonic Lumix, an autofocus that fit in my pocket.  It had a Leica lens.  In my tinkering I discovered an amazing macro on it and I started shooting flowers in her wonderful garden.  Despite the rich colors, beautiful petals, and extraordinary detail it was still a point-and-shoot camera; the skill was really all in the gardening, not in the photography.

One day a fly landed nearby, a green fly, a long-legged fly, and I shot it.

New Paltz New York

What startling details!  I immediately went after flys and bugs, and saw the strangest thing I had never known.  What was that ball of water in that housefly's mouth?  What was that spider doing on that dead grasshopper? That Box Elder Bug was actually wrapped up in a spider web!  That ant, what jaws!  These became armored vehicles -- legs covered with spikes, mouth parts that shot out, feet like icepicks, eyes wrapped all around... It's like pokemon, like predatory aliens, like so many micro robots with Artificial Intelligence ... but real.

From then on I used flowers as bait and backdrop. When I shot one I didn't recognize I identifed it the old fashioned way: I googled "flat faced hairy black fly with white eyes," or "shiny black wasp with purple abdomen," sifted through the images and nail it down from there. I started posting hits on an Entomology Facebook group where, if I couldn't identify them, someone certainly would.  Judging from the speed and specificity of the response there are savants in that crowd I'm certain.  The requirements for an amateur like me was that I say where it was taken, I had to have taken the pictures myself, and I was encouraged to add the Latin name if I could find it because common names are for ... normal people.

All pictures in this Blog were  from Chicago Illinois, unless otherwise noted.

When I posted a video of 1,000 baby garden spiders fleeing their fetal spider-ball someone called it "a whole lot of No No No!" which I thought was funny but she got shut down immediately by a crowd which has no tolerance for jokes of this kind.  And you must say where it was found.  Once I said I shot a stink bug in Chicago, then corrected my self later -- no, it was in Michigan -- and got a bunch of likes for the correction.

So I've been hooked; I've taken thousands of arthropidic pictures -- insects and spiders mainly.  I lost my first Panasonic sadly (with a whole lot of pictures on it, too!) but bought two more on ebay.  It's a DMC-Z53 to be exact.

So many jaw-dropping pictures I wouldn't know where to start so I'll focus on a theme within a theme: bugs eating bugs.  Many of these were accidental shots, the horror of which I didn't realize until later...   And that's enough talk.  This post is about pictures.

... like this one of a Spider Wasp, probably, (Auplopus carbonarius, Pompilidae)  which bites the legs off of a young orb weaving spider (Neoscona crucifera) before taking it alive back to its nest to feed its young..  Woooohahaha.

.. Later I saw another one before the snipping began...

  ..  before you get too upset with the Spider Wasp, look at this one, in the mouth of a Robber Fly (Dysmachus trigonus).

I actually saw this Cicada Killer Wasp (Sphecius speciosus) take the Cicada (Cicadidae) down in flight.  After a wrestle and a sting, off to the nest we go.

Millipede (Diplopoda Julida) that came to a sorry end in a cellar spider's web.

Ok, it's not an insect eating an insect, but at least these two American Dog Ticks (Dermacentor variabilis) still have chunks of my dog Anicca (Canis lupus familiaris) in their mouths.

This Gray Cross Spider, Bridge Orbweaver (Larinoides patagiatus) wove an orb and caught a Gray Sunflower Weevil (Smicronyx sordidus LeConte).

A Yellow Paper Wasp (Polistes dominulus) enjoying the core of a young Orbweaving Spider.

... and another Orb Weaver (Araneus diadematus) with an ambitious project ahead; a Lightning Bug (Lampyridae).

I'm throwing this one in for comic relief.  The Bumble Bee (Hymenopterais Apidae Bombus) is quite alive, it's a defensive posture I'd never seen before.   I wonder why?



Maybe it's the Felis catus.

Jumping Spider (Salticidae) that I saw jump and catch this Midge (Chironomidae).

Here's another, a different day.

... and by now we know what's going on here...

Cellar Spider (Pholcidae) with a Crane Fly (Tipulidae latreille).

Orb Weaver with something -- a June Bug? (Phyllophaga?) -- apparently wrappen in celophane, for later.

Here is a Carpenter Ant (Camponotus pennsylvanicus) with a pillbug (Armadillidiidae).

New Buffalo, Michigan.

The spider of unknown species furtively emerged to feed on this live and tethered Horsefly (Tabanidae).  It went on for hours.

A Robber Fly with a hapless Green Bottle Fly (Lucilia sericata).

Here's that Boxelder bug (Boisea trivittata) in trouble.   Maybe wondering what comes next...

A Yellow and Black Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia) with a Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus).  The web ladder is the Garden Spider's signature reinforcement -- apparently they especially enjoy the larger prey

So it's about the start of a new season and I'll pay special attention for mayhem in progress.  Spring starts with ants and flies, then spiders come out and they dominate the summer. Summer brings all forms, from the pestilent Japanese Beetles and the legion Boxelder Bugs, to the bald-faced hornets, creepy plastic Earwigs, the centipedes, butterflies and moths. The smaller they get, often the more bizarre.  Most of the summer, try stopping what you're doing for a moment and get down low,  You'll find something fascinating.

I'm happy that I don't live at their scale -- I simply wouldn't stand a chance ...   but seriously, how can you not really really like bugs!?

A Canine and Feline friendship ... a Memorial

A pet is not like a real child, I’ve had some of each so I can say that with certainty.  But anyway there’s something special about your animals, maybe even more dear when you raise them with children because there are so many memories woven together.  I’ll tell you a story about my dog Anicca to commemorate her death on Nov 1 2017. 

It’s actually a story of Anicca and her brother Cloud who was a male kitten we acquired around the same time.  Anicca was a Groenendael – a Belgian Sheepdog – and she looked like any Groenendael, an unusual breed in the states.  Something like a collie/shepherd mix, long hair and all black.  Agile, smart, devoted, sweet, and beautiful.  In Chicago I used to run on the beach with her and she would heel close on the sidewalk and sit at intersections with rapt attention.  When we hit the beach she’d be “on call” as I jogged down the shoreline.  

It takes a little patience and training, but there is absolutely nothing like a well-behaved dog.   I was a good dog owner, and she was certainly a good dog. Technically, I suppose leashes were required on the beach but we would go on off-hours and she was on a verbal leash -- she’d come immediately when called.   

All the subtle communication aside, if I were to simply  count the commands I suppose it would be more than 30:  Anicca, hello, good dog, good girl, inside, outside, ok!, no, do you want?, I love you, bad/wrong, come, come!, wait/stay, lie down, lie flat out, where-is/bring me, toy, kong, sit, go over there, go way over there, hungry?, goodbye, heel, look around, you’re free!, treat, water, pee, hungry, cat, go for walk, beach, and more.

On the beach, because she really knew come, heel, sit, no, ok, and stay, I could also teach her “you’re free!”  Then she’d explore, track squirrels and play with other dogs ... always with an eye out for my next communication.  Even in the depth of winter, 20 below, she would love to hear the word “Beach!”

In the house she would sit then hunt for treats, find her kong, fetch a toy … all the normal dog games, and she loved to play hide and seek.  I’d throw a toy a few times for fetch and then suddenly hide – I mean really hide – like third floor in the closet hide … and she would not give up until she found me.  What fun, for both of us!

One day, when she was about nine, I noticed she was slipping in her responsiveness, not listening so well.  It was really a joke when I thought “what, has she gone deaf?”  So I said “BEACH” just to test that ridiculous hypothesis and to my amazement … nothing.  “TREAT.”  Nothing. 

She was deaf and I mean stone deaf.

For months I mourned the loss of my connection to this wonderful creature until I suddenly realized ok she was deaf ... but she was neither blind nor dumb.  Coincidentally, I had taken a class in American Sign Language just because it's wonderful.  So I taught Anicca, in ASL, all the commands she once knew.  Inside, outside, come, stay, treat, walk, love you ... everything.  She learned it all again, and fast.  We were back in business!  

Now a bit about Cloud, my son Aidan’s cat.  One of the family ceremonies we created was the “big boy celebration” at the age of five or so when they could read, add, ride a bike, etc. (we had a fun little list that included "going on a boat.") ... and then they got to choose a pet.  Isaac chose gerbils so I built a little PVC track running from their main cage to a vacation home mounted by his bed, and Captain and Cuddle-Captain would run back and forth to get treats and such.  Aidan chose birds but a series of tragedies led to him picking out the next family cat.  He selected a sick little white kitten which fell so ill we had to take it back for transfusions.  Anicca, a pup herself, was concerned and licked and licked and licked this poor creature like a mother would lick a pup.  Cloud, a stoic little tissue of a kitten, leaned into the loving. 

Cloud not only survived, he turned out to be an athlete and quite a character.  There are so many, but my favorite story about Cloud is when he prowled intently into the living room, tracking a fly that was bumbling along about three feet off the ground.  Cloud leapt into the air, caught the fly between his paws and landed on his haunches.  Staring, he slowly opened his paws like a book.  The fly escaped.  I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

So Anicca and Cloud grew up together, nothing like your normal cat-dog relationship.  Two free spirits and unlikely friends.  When Anicca went deaf it didn’t matter.  But at 12 or so Cloud fell ill again and this time he was diagnosed with something more serious -- feline diabetes. The vet gave him a week and a half to live, or we could admister daily insulin shots and blood draws to manage his blood sugar.  We discussed it and chose palliative care instead.  Too many shots, too much pain.  

Cloud stopped eating almost immediately but lasted more than a month.  As he lost his weight he spend his days in the yard under a large-leafed plant and then he’d come in for the evening and sleep with one or the other of us. While he was wasting away, he was always purring.  Visit him under his bush?  Quietly purring.  Touch him at night?  Faintly purring. 

So Cloud was prostrate on the couch, skin and bones and I was fixing a screen when Aidan called  from college.  I chatted on Skype a while and then asked if he’d like to see Cloud.  Yes, of course ... 

But Cloud was not on the couch; he wasn’t anywhere. He was in no shape to jump out the open window so I searched the  house.  Then I looked again -- I looked every place a cat could possibly crawl into to die.  Finally -- although I couldn’t believe he could get to the window then jump to the deck --  I looked in the yard.  The entire garden, under every plant, every crevice and corner.  Twice.  Then a third time with Aidan, on Skype.

Cloud had simply disappeared.  I scoured the chain linked fence to verify there was no place to crawl through.  The only possible thing I could imagine is that Cloud had gotten up, climbed to the window, fallen to the deck, and had been carried away by a hawk. 

The next day was Monday, no Cloud still and I had to go to work.  As a last resort I turned to my deaf dog and asked “where/find/bring me”  “cat” … “where/find/bring me”  “cat,"  though "cat" was not a word she used often.  To you that would just be palms-up-pulling  … pinch-and-pull an imaginary whisker … palms-up-pulling  … pinch-and-pull an imaginary whisker.

Anicca got excited, she was on full alert!  She scanned the yard and sniffed and then suddenly honed in across the fence to our neighbor’s yard, like a pointer.  And there was Cloud, struggling and stumbling across the grass.  Somehow he had climbed to the window, survived the fall to the deck, clawed himself to and over a 4 foot fence, and survived all the nighttime carnivores.  

I jumped the fence and scooped him up. Aidan got to say goodbye, and so did Nancy and I.  

Cloud died in our arms that afternoon.

Then Anicca died, also in our arms, last fall.

Teaching My Amygdala a Lesson!

Robert Sapolsky, in his recent book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), has quite a lot to say about the amygdala, that small, very old, bit-of-an-almond-shaped unit found on either side of the brain in all mammals. It’s right under the temporal lobe.  The popular joke is that it triggers the three F’s: flight, fight, and sex ...but it’s fundamentally about fear and anxiety.

The amygdala receives direct sensory input -- vision, olfactory, tactile, etc. --  and it also has complicated relationships with other parts of the brain.  It sends signals to other areas and it can be influenced by the other areas too -- most important for my purpose, by the rational prefrontal cortex which, as Sapolsky  puts it, encourages you to to the harder thing, when it's the right thing.

In a prophylactic sort of way thoughts from the prefrontal cortex can moderate the intensity with which the amygdala attaches meaning to sensory input.  It's as if the cortex can coach the amygdala, but the amygdala takes the first swing at incoming signals and that starts the mind off in a certain direction.  We're talking about a fifth of a second.

The amygdala goes a long way explaining our natural sorting into Us's and Them's.  That sorting, Sapolsky explains, is generally along two dimensions: warmth and competency.   For the true Us's (high warmth and competence) we feel pride.  At the other extreme (low warmth and competence), disgust.  Low warmth/high competency evokes envy, high warmth/low competence, pity.  (It gets even more interesting when the categories change, p 413).  My point here is that the amygdala sets in motion some perspectives that can have real emotional ramifications.

After the amygdala takes its first whack the other parts of the brain kick in with their assessment, possible adjustments/corrections, and perhaps an emotional/behavioral response.  For some people that initial intuition becomes quite a guide for behavior; others prefer to later think things through.  The key for my purpose here is that the amygdala is a direct  recipient of sensory input, is the first-processor of it, and it operates within a fifth of a second before we are consciously aware.

That makes it a potential enemy, as the algorithms it has developed are less relevant now in the modern world.  If someone or something in the thicket looked dramatically different from you 50,000 years ago there's a pretty good chance that it might be an immediate threat, you should be anxious, you should feel threatened, and maybe you should react.   But unfortunately in the world we live in now the amygdala remains (or, Sapolsky suggests, has become) highly sensitive to race.

Quoting Sapolsky: “A hugely unsettling sensory cue concerns race.  Our brains are incredibly attuned to skin color … We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But our brains sure as hell note the color, real fast.” (p85)

Sapolsky again: “Threatening faces produce a distinctive change … in under two hundred milliseconds.  Among white subjects, viewing someone black evokes a stronger [threatened] waveform than viewing someone white.” (p 86)

Other things activate the amygdala too.  Gender, age, and occupation often trump race (p 408) and social status also is used sorting Us's from Them's. (p 388)  Facial expression is processed too, but only for people already identified as an "Us". (395)   In most situations, most of these attributes matter less today, you would think.  And so "we feel positive associations with people who share the most meaningless traits with us." (390)

Because it works before our awareness we can't be blamed for the amygdala's behavior .. that is, until we learn that we can override its suggestions, and even prime it with thought.  Sorry about this: we can.  A few hundred milliseconds after that first amygdala hit, messages start merging from the frontal cortex which can dampen or begin to correct that primitive impulse.  Also good: the amygdala can be influenced by a little advanced processing.  "Race as a salient Us/Them category can be shoved aside by subtle reclassification." (p 408)  For example, when subjects were shown pictures of vegetables and asked to guess whether people would like them, the amygdala wasn't activated by those people's different races!

These thoughts were playing in my own brain as I walked through the Newark Airport recently.  I have found airports to be extraordinary places to think about people.  When foot traffic is high I often marvel at how the human rushing flow finds its own patterns with rivulets of more hurried travelers finding smooth ways around the slower groups, constant merging and diverging at intersections, large moving masses easily flowing around sudden obstacle -- all without any rules or instructions or enforcement and without the frustration and rage you might get on a real road.

But that day foot traffic was not heavy and I thought instead of how international airports are an amazing confluence of strangers.  Is there anything else is quite like them?  A shopping mall, you might think, but people there are more homogeneous and the crowds are generlly smaller and less hurried.  Sports stadiums are huge too, and full of strangers.  But there is a clear sense of shared purpose at a football game; there's the "Us" on this side against the "Them" across the way.  There's traffic on an interstate, all strangers there too, but far less dense or personal.

But in an international airport you will find people from all over the world -- all races, ethnicities, languages, classes, religions, and ages.  And aside from small traveling groups and employees everyone is pretty much a stranger to everyone else.  It's a nice place to think about strangers, I found.  That day I was trying to notice my amygdala sorting strangers into "Us's" and "Them's."

I remembered a trick I've used with some success  to sort in ways that are more meaningful than my almond-size amygdala is inclined to do.  I reasoned that race and gender are pretty much a given and they're not very revealing unless I want to draw on -- and perpetuate -- crude stereotypes.  But clothing is a choice.  Why not try to sort people on the basis of something they actually have some control over?  That man's suit suggests he's doing business right off the plane.  The woman with the scarf over her hair looks Muslim.  That child in the Buzz Lightyear outfit is carefree and cool, I have shoes like that, I'd never wear that sweater, and so on...  It seemed a more useful and realistic  sorting of Us and Them, I thought.  It took a lot of effort, it was an interesting exercise, and I could feel the difference.  I also tried it with facial expressions, noting "happy," "sad," "anxious," "confident" as another way to override my crass biases ...

But people wear different sorts of clothes for all kinds of reasons and facial expressions are fleeting and hard to read.  Are the sweat pants because they're cheap, or because they're comfortable?  Is that group laughing because they are happy or are they laughing at the homeless man?  She's anxious, yes, but just until she sees her gate ... not too useful.  So I asked myself again -- what is the most important thing about people, something fundamental and real that I can easily assess.  If I’m going to make a purposeful note of something to prepare, override, or dampen my initial evolutionary impulses, what would it be?

I may have found it, it’s a beautiful solution, it's very egalitarian, and it's super easy.  What’s the most important thing about people?  They’re there. They exist.

What's more, there is nothing particularly important about their proximity to me.  Just as the Earth is not the center of the universe, I am not the center of this airport.  Sure I do have a particular vantage point that limits my experience but the woman sitting at Gate 8 across the way is no more or less important than the man I'm passing.

I think my experience with Robert’s Rules helped me come to this.  When I was made chair of the senate it was, to be honest, in disarray.  It was considered a "snakepit" by some and there was a move underway to disband it.  So I read Robert's Rules, the Constitution and Bylaws and then simply treated every senator as equal, with an equal voice, equal right to speak, with a perspective of equal value, and with a perfectly equal vote.  It didn't matter that some would rather bully, interrupt, intimidate, or try to force their views, Robert's Rules required me not to let them.  No one had more or less of a role than any one else.  That approach, I found, had a leveling effect and after a time I felt it helped to dramatically heal and strengthen senate behavior and process.

So in the airport, just the same, I gave up the sorting hat altogether, gave up the goal of figuring out who might be more of an Us and who more of a Them.  I wanted to jam my amygdala with a predisposition which my prefrontal cortex can get behind: we’re equal.  Of course I didn't expect that everyone would suddenly be my friend, I was just trying to override those default, hardwired, outdated, quick  biases which jam me up a bit in the modern world.  One fifth of a second override, that was all I was looking for; relationship building can still come later.

My trick -- which may sound either brilliant or crazy -- was to replace every person in my field of vision, for a instant, with an identical marker: I used a stick but I suppose it could be anything: a dot, whatever, but all the same.  So many human beings, so many posts, so many equals.  I simply noted their number and their distribution.

This was so easy! Just a flash now and then, identical sticks, one per human regardless of age, gender, race, anything.  First hit: no judgment.  Just how many and where.

The result?  It seemed to make a difference on my outlook, I felt a little more informed about my environment, and the initial leveling was right in line with my egalitarian convictions.  I was just a stick too.  Then, of course, my prefrontal cortex came flooding in with its own observations, but it felt like a better place to start!

To make it a little more fun, though maybe to overextend it a bit, next I tried to notice something more, to add the next meaningful layer.  What is the next most important thing, once I know number and distribution?  Simple.  Next, tell people apart.  So the second layer of Environment Scan 2.0 was not faces (because so many new faces do look alike) and not race (because there just aren't that many different ones).  But those crazy red shoes! … that zebra-striped bag .. those baggy pants and sneakers…  Back to clothes!  But this time without any judgment, no sorting.  It took a little effort but clothing can make pretty good unique identifiers for total strangers.  And I actually surprised myself by later recognizing a few people I'd seen before, by that t-shirt or striped scarf.  Hey there’s the stick with the baggy pants again, there’s that stick in red shoes!  I’m joking of course, by that time they were fully human.

But I liked it! Ha! Take that, amygdala!

Here's a well known and highly respected "Implicit Bias" test conducted by Harvard, in which you can see your own by clicking "e' or "i" on your keyboard when you see pictures; they explain, it's easy.  Read about your results and their overall findings on this site as well.  Remember to select your letters fast if you want to test your amygdala.  If you take your time, like most of a second, that sophisticated prefrontal cortex begins to kick in!  

TAKE THE HARVARD TEST