We've all heard of a pride of lions, a gaggle of geese and probably a waddling of ducks, but how about a an inflation of aphids or a slime of slugs or a writhing of worms? I've been playing with names for collections of insects. Being a gardener, I see a lot of bugs, or if not the bugs themselves, the damage they cause, such as the sudden wilting of a cucumber vine or holes in my lettuce leaves or seedlings dying from some underground menace.
All insects begin life as an egg. In some that have only an incomplete metamorphosis, a nymph hatches from the egg and grows quickly into an adult. The insect who completes the more complex metamorphosis also start life as an egg, but what hatches out of it is a larva which in turn becomes a pupa and from there transforms itself into an adult.
The larva stage in a fly is called the maggot; in moths and butterflies it's the caterpillar; in beetles it's an underground grub. Ants, wasps and bees also have a complete metamorphosis, but their larvae are called larvae. When your squash plant's leaves are suddenly curled and dry or your radishes are full of holes, trying to identify which bug and at what stage of life it's at can be a major problem.
At least 75% of the species in the animal kingdom fall into the bug category. They have a lot in common with Homo sapiens. Their bodies are bilaterally symmetrical just as ours are, each side mirroring the other. Their appendages are jointed so they can bend, and they have the same five senses we have - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. When it comes to the skeleton, however, we go our separate ways, thank goodness! Can you imagine what it would be like if our bones were on the outside instead of on the inside? That coat of armor, the exoskeleton, must be shucked off each time an insect grows too big, and another bigger, better one created.
An insect's legs help tell you about his lifestyle. The cockroach has long thin legs for zipping back into the cupboard; crickets have muscular ones for leaping through the grass; flies have little suction cups on theirs so they can look down at you from the ceiling; bees have concave baskets on their legs so they can collect pollen. And lice - ugh, lice have clinging legs with clasps on the end. His antennae also give a clue, some designed for smelling, and others for feeling, tasting or even figuring out the temperature or the humidity.
When it comes right down to figuring out which individual insect is killing your squash plant or your broccoli seedling, what matters is his method. His mouth tells a lot about him, whether he's a chewer or a sucker or a bore, as in borer. Aphids, for instance, are suckers. There are dozens of varieties - violet aphids, green peach aphids, mint aphids, asparagus aphids, and on and on. Some have wings and some don't, but they're all as soft-bodied as mosquitoes. They're shaped like a teardrop, have long antennae and tube-like appendages projecting from their backs that they use to suck sap from plants. Taking the life blood of a plant results in withered leaves and eventually death.
Aphids love lupines. Periodically I find a writhing gray coating of them on the stems of a lupine in the border. Sometimes I just grab hold of the stem and squeeze as I slide my hand down, not a pleasant way to get rid of them, but it solves the immediate problem. Then I go get the Rotenone and dust the plant. Another approach is to put out traps. Since aphids love yellow, put a piece of yellow cardboard painted with Tanglefoot or another gooey substance near plants that may become infected.
Ants, who do little harm themselves in the garden, often bring in aphids. They treat them the way we treat cows, milking them every day by stroking and tapping their bellies. This inspires the aphids to produce a sweet liquid called honeydew. In the fall the ants carry aphid eggs into their nests, then carry them back out in the spring and set them on plants. To keep the hatched insects from straying, they chew off the aphids' wings.
Enough about aphids! Let's look at the menace of leaf miners. They are aptly named as they tunnel through the leaves of spinach and chard, making them blister. The miner is actually a maggot, the offspring of a tiny gray fly covered in black hair. She lays her eggs on the underside of a leaf and in just a few days the eggs hatch into pale green maggots. Covering new plants with cheesecloth is the recommended solution to this problem, a finicky job I find so tedious that I no longer grow spinach, their preferred food. Fortunately my chard rarely has leaf miners.
One of the most repulsive rogues in the vegetable garden is the tomato hornworm, a four-inch green monster when fully grown. His sides are decorated in white diagonal stripes edged in black and his tiny front legs are a squiggling bristle just below his mouth. He's called a hornworm despite the fact that the sharp so-called horn at his back end has no useful purpose.
It's hard to believe, but this disgusting caterpillar is the larva of the sphinx moth, a beautiful brown moth who flutters over flowers at dusk just like a hummingbird. His, no, her single egg, hatches in less than a week and the tiny newborn caterpillar begins devouring a plant's leaves. Before a hornworm gets large, he's really hard to see as he is so well camouflaged. The ones I've finally spotted are always very large. I've pulled off quite a few in my day and squished them under my foot, a job not for the squeamish, but definitely effective.
The hornworm has another enemy besides the gardener, the braconid wasp. She not only stings this great green caterpillar, she also deposits a number of eggs just beneath his skin. The eggs hatch into young grubs that feed on the fatty tissues of the hornworm. As adults they emerge from beneath the skin and proceed to weaves themselves into little white cocoons that stand on end all over the hornworm's back.
There are plenty of other powerful pests out there, but it's not the pleasantest subject to write about, so I think I'll quit for today. Probably it's time to go out and actually look for those horrible hornworms anyway.
