Australian garden insects with Denis Crawford
An email conversation with an entomologist from New South Wales prompted the addition of a paragraph (in bold) to this article from about a year ago.
I picked a tomato off the bush the other day and noticed a little hole in it. I cut it open and saw that the contents were looking a bit ordinary, as if it was about to rot. Under higher magnification I could see the culprits – fly larvae – yep, maggots! The image below shows a close-up of one.
Many people, especially gardeners, only see ants as pests, but they couldn’t be further from the truth. These days I work weekends in a garden centre, and when summer arrived every second customer I encountered wanted a product to kill ants. One person even asked me for the “Agent Orange” of ant insecticides! They were somewhat bemused when I asked “What sort of ants are they, and why do you want to kill them?”
After a few months off for house painting one minute bugs is back!
I was prompted to write this post after completing an article for Hort Journal Australia on a similar topic. My argument in the Hort Journal piece was that insects are not mathematical or engineering geniuses, and that their behaviour is dictated by the instincts they have evolved with. All very scientific and anti-anthropomorphic. The post here is a bit different. Let’s marvel at the exquisite perfection of some of the structures that insects build.
Our first architects are moths of the family Psychidae – the case moths. These are harmless creatures found in most gardens throughout Australia. Cases are spun by caterpillars from silk to which twigs, sand, moss, lichen, leaves or bark are attached. The cases can open and close at each end, the front end for feeding and the rear end for ejecting droppings. I believe the species illustrated below is Lepidoscia arctiella – look at how precise those little bits of twig are!
