Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Fungus or Insect?

Just before Christmas, I was rearranging the my pot plant garden outside my door as the fig tree had grown so that it was shading some of the pots. While doing this, I uncovered a very fine looking snail beneath my strawberry pot. I was confronted with a problem – I didn't want Mr. Snail eating my strawberries (and/or other plants) but I couldn't stomach killing him. Solution: Keep him as a pet instead :) I will post more about him later... But tonight's post comes from something I found when picking a leaf from my plant for Mr. Snail to eat.

It was almost dark, so I didn't really look too closely at the leaves before I picked one, it was just one that was handy. As I came inside, into the light, I noticed something near the base of the leaf, that at the time I thought was a fungus of some sort. I decided seeing as my snail's new home is a little bit confined that I didn't want to put that in there for him with the rest of the leaf, as he doesn't have the option of running away if it ends up being noxious. So I broke that part of the leaf off, before giving him the rest of the leaf. I left the piece of leaf with the 'fungus' on my desk, because I intended to come back and look at it a little closer later – it looked quite unusual. I started work last week and have been quite busy, so I forgot about it for a few days. Then one day, I noticed the 'fungus' had moved! It was no longer on the leaf, which was by now a bit dried out and shriveled. Instead I saw it on a nearby box. It was then I discovered it was not a fungus at all, but a bug.





Turning it over I discovered it had little legs...






A google search soon revealed it was a cottony cushion scale insect (Icerya purchasi). The white 'cotton cushion' it makes is its egg sac, but this one's egg sac was only just beginning to be made. The egg sac can end up being bigger than the insect.





Like other scale insects, it feeds on sap. This made sense, as when I first found it, it was on the mid vien of the leaf. As the leaf shriveled up, it wouldn't have been receiving sap anymore and evidently it went off exploring in search of a new food source.

I was also intrested to find out that it was first described from specimens collected from New Zealand, despite it being a non-native pest species. It comes from Australia instead. It apparently will feed on a wide range of plant species, but is particularly partial to Pittosporum and Citrus species.


So that was my interesting find this week for Reconnect With Nature :) 

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Yellow Daisies

I have been doing a horticulture course one evening a week. One of our recent assignments was to make a herbarium. For the assessment we were required to collect specimens from 10 different exotic species used in amenity horticulture, including trees, shrubs and climbers. I wasn't the smartest (in terms of doing the assessment) as I just went out and found ten specimens that I had no idea what most of them were, and then I was confronted with the challenge of finding out! Which was good, because I learned a lot, but was not so good for my assessment as I struggled to positively identify all ten specimens. Oh well! During my research, trying to identify my specimens, google kindly directed me to a neat wee blog Living a Good North Coast Life. The author has this brilliant idea where each week she finds something interesting out in nature, photographs it and shares about it on her blog, and then encourages her readers to go out and do the same. And to share links to their post on hers, so that everyone can all check out each others finds :) I really like this idea, and I need some motivation to get things going here again, so I'm keen to take part.

So here is something I thought was neat, that I discovered on Sunday. I had to go back later to take photos as I didn't have my camera with me at the time.


If you're walking down Rock's Road, heading towards the port, just past the beach, you round a corner where there is a little bit of a garden between the road and the footpath. If you are driving, you probably only see the pohutukawa trees, as the road is a little higher than the footpath and the garden. There are a few benches for people to sit on, some young pohutukawa trees and a lot of yellow daisies.



 At this time of year, the yellow daisy flowers are pretty much past it although there are still a few out. 



But a lot of them have gone to seed now. I've never paid much attention to the seeds before, but I was sitting on one of the benches, and I noticed this flower head next to me which had gone to seed. It was full of little red 'flowers'. 



Some plants have seeds with little parachutes to help carry them on the wind (think dandelions). These seeds were like that, but each seed had a little red, flower shaped parachute. 





Very pretty.


If you want to check out what interesting things others have shared this week, you can go to Reconnect with Nature to find out :)