More on the swarm?

The swarm referred to is that covered in this post from Tuesday.  I mentioned in that post comments by Frances about some nearby willows having many little black insects on them.  Today she showed me where they were and I have perpetrated photography on them.

This first shot is one of several small clusters of insects on the willow.  My guess is that the insects are about 5mm long on average.
This shows them a bit better (click to enlarge the image).  It may be significant that one of them, in the upper left of this image, clearly has wings.
Finally I caught this one doing a runner.  There seemed to be others moving about with wings but they escaped my attentions. 
A colleague has nailed the ID:
He has subsequently advised that "..they don’t form swarms as far as I know, although they do have a winged form for dispersal."  That makes two knowledgeable votes against the swarms being this species. 

 Interestingly there are no records of this species in the Atlas of Living Australia.  So I have offered my photos for a record.

 Another colleague has commented that it would be very difficult for the aphids to have traveled on the wind as suggested in the linked article.  He went on (paraphrased by me) to note  that people  assume that an insect that has appeared in Australia from a NZ source has migrated on the wing.  This would be very unusual but apparently the aphids were first found in Tasmania after a period of strong Easterly winds so in this case it might be possible.  More generally there are many ways that aphids move around and includes on clothing, plants, freight and almost anything. They are parthenogenetic that helps. 

 The aphids are still on the willows a month later.  They are in such numbers that the honeydew they deposit is dripping off on to the drive so as to make it seem wet and the metal picks up on our tyres.

Comments

Ian Fraser said…
Hi Martin. I'll wait for Steve's or others' more informed opinion but my gut feeling (without having seen them first hand) is that I'd not expect these characters to form the sort of flying swarms you photographed, but then again I'm a mine of ignorance on inverts. I'm intrigued by the use of 'orange gooeyness when squashed' as a taxonomic character, but I'm always open to new information! I can't see mouthparts, so can't say for sure if they're hemipterans as you suggest, but wouldn't be at all surprised. Not sure if this helps at all.
15 January 2015 at 17:51:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Thanks Ian. I'm always excited when I find I have contributed an innovation to scientific thinking. I would be even more excited if it wasn't for the fact that, so far, the new thoughts tend to resolve to being hallucinations rather than visions.

Martni
16 January 2015 at 05:23:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
I am perhaps less nuts than I feared. Cochineal comes from a member of Hemiptera, not as I feared possible coleoptera. That is what made me think of the colour!
16 January 2015 at 06:22:00 GMT+11
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more