Highlights
November 2020 - Hibernation, Mushrooms
INFO ALERT - Our last organized walk was way back in March. Much to our distress COVID apparently likes it here and doesn't want to leave.
The beautiful mourning cloak butterfly spends the winter hibernating in tree hollows and crevices. How does a delicate butterfly survive a New England winter?
In late February or early March the first butterfly to be seen out and about on sunny days is the mourning cloak. Windy March is a harsh month in New England with plenty of wet snow, rain and nighttime temperatures often below freezing. Not the kind of weather one normally associates with butterflies. So, what is this butterfly doing out now and where did it come from?
Let’s take a close look at one of these hardy butterflies. The mourning cloak is a large forest butterfly with a 3 to 4 inch wingspan. The wings are a dark purplish-brown to maroon with a pale to dark yellow, ragged, irregular edge. Iridescent blue spots line the inner edge of the yellow band. These colors are the colors of traditional cloaks people wore, in the past, when they were in mourning …hence the name of this butterfly. The underside of the wing is colored a camouflaging pattern of grey and brown and the wing edge has the same yellowish band pattern as the upper surface of the wing. Males and females look alike.
Mourning cloaks are out so early in the spring because they are looking for mates and they all went into hibernation as young adults last fall, in the very same areas where we are now seeing them. Where have they been all winter? Hibernating In hollow trees and hidden away under loose and shaggy bark of dead trees.
Mourning cloaks, like all other butterflies are “cold blooded” and their temperature is the same as that of their surroundings. When temperatures drop below freezing the moisture in their cells would freeze and kill them except that mourning cloaks produce an anti-freeze chemical that protects their body when temperatures begin to drop in the fall. By winter they have sufficient amounts deposited in their cells to prevent them from freezing.
Once the overwintering mourning cloaks leave their hibernaculums they must warm-up before they can fly. They walk to a sunny spot on a tree trunk or position themselves on a branch high in a tree facing the sun. Dark colors absorb more heat from the sun than light colors. As the sun moves east to west they adjust their dark colored wings accordingly to absorb the highest amount of solar radiation possible.
Once their wings are warmed males fly to a sunny clearing and display seeking to attract receptive females. The male will usually return to the same clearing each day and mate with the females drawn to that location. Males are territorial and fiercely defend their individual sunny locations from other males. A healthy, vigorous male may patrol and defend as much as 1200 square feet of territory.
Shortly after mating the females lay their light green eggs on twigs and leaves of willow, birch, aspen hackberry, elm and hawthorn. The eggs are densely packed together and are arranged spirally around the twig or massed together if on a leaf.
Twelve to fifteen days later tiny green-bodied black-headed caterpillars hatch from the eggs. Unlike the young of most of our local butterflies the morning cloak caterpillars, when small, stay together and move about as one unit feeding together on tender spring leaves. If disturbed they will all act in unison twitching about and staying close together giving the appearance of a larger animal perhaps moving to attack.
Older caterpillars are black with red feet and red dots along their backs, covered in black spines. As they mature, getting ready to pupate, they wander about, individually, searching for the ideal location to attach. They secrete a small silk pad to a twig or other object which they cling to and transform into a tan and grey chrysalis. The adult butterfly emerges from its chrysalis after 12 to 15 days.
When adult mourning cloaks emerge from hibernation what do they eat? Especially when it is way too early for flowers to be blooming. Although mourning cloaks will feed from flowers in the summer, in early spring they feed on tree sap often following around sapsuckers and other woodpeckers and feeding from the holes in the bark left by the woodpeckers. In fall, rotting fruit is a major food source.
The range of the mourning cloak is circumpolar. In North America they are found across the continent from the edge of the tundra to central Mexico.
The mourning cloak has many predators. Although their camouflaged underwings, when folded, resemble dried leaves many mourning cloaks are eaten by large predaceous insects such as the praying mantis and small wasps that parasitize them. Voles, mice and shrews will eat chrysalises and most forest insect eating birds and bats will take adults.
Our common mourning cloak has some very uncommon behaviors. Watch for them on sunny days in late winter/early spring.
The red eft form of the eastern newt is very common away from the coast in western and northern New England. Not very common in our neck of the woods although the aquatic adult newts are common enough over here in aquatic environments on the south coast. Why? Only the newt really knows. A moist red eft is a living jewel, the strange, dry land dwelling form of the very odd eastern newt.
Eastern newts, aka red spotted newts, are a type of salamander. Newts differ from salamanders by being more aquatic and having vertically broad flattened tails and webbed feet. Most local amphibians, frogs, toads and salamanders, have two life stages. Newts have three. They hatch as tadpoles, have a juvenile terrestrial "eft" stage and an aquatic adult stage. Sometimes, however, some newts stay as efts and apparently refuse to become adults. Some adults never go through the eft stage and just go from juvenile tadpole to fully aquatic adult. Even more bizarre is that the aquatic adult, should its pool or pond dry up, can revert back to being an eft.
Wikipedia - Brian Gratwicke
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INFO ALERT - Every season Mother Nature has something new to show us. Great exercise exploring late fall and until at least next May, no pesky mosquitoes out looking for an easy meal. Some unusual fungal things a solo hiker may see while out hiking the forest on a sunny November day.
Eastern hemlock is one of our most beautiful evergreens. It is usually found growing in shady ravines, along brooks and on the north side of narrow valleys. Our most shade tolerant native conifer, it thrives in areas the sun barely reaches.
Although you won’t see any of very large size in the Southeastern Massachusetts Bioreserve, hemlocks can grow to a height of over 150 feet with trunks over 6 feet in diameter. They grow very slowly and do not produce seed cones until at least 20 years old. Some do not reach maturity and bear cones until over 100 years old. Large specimens can be over 1,000 years old.
Unfortunately our hemlocks are under extreme stress, many dying, from attacks by the Asian hemlock woolly adelgid. The invasive woolly adelgid is a very serious threat to the continued survival of the hemlock and those species that depend on the hemlock. You’ll find more on the woolly adelgid, below, in this article.
Eastern hemlock have short, flat needles, a half inch to an inch long, dark green above with two narrow white lines running the length of the needle’s underside. The needles are attached to their twig by a slender stalk.
Tiny flowers are produced in spring with inch long cones ripening in the fall and releasing seed during the winter. Many winter birds and small forest rodents depend on hemlock seeds as a winter food source.
The eastern hemlock grows best in damp, acidic soil from extreme southern Ontario and Quebec east to Nova Scotia. From Nova Scotia south along the Atlantic coast to New Jersey and then inland following the Appalachian Mountains to extreme northern Georgia and Alabama. To the west, the hemlock range extends south from southern Ontario to eastern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and then down the western side of the Appalachians.
On the northern edge of their range whitetail deer depend on eastern hemlock for food and/or shelter. Dense stands of hemlock slow the accumulation of winter snow beneath them. When heavy snows, frigid temperatures and strong winds buffet our northern forests small family groups of deer gather at these hemlock stands, called “deer yards,” for shelter, feeding and bedding. Young, dense hemlocks also provide food and shelter for snowshoe hare and various species of forest voles and mice.
A fortifying tea can be made from hemlock needles. And, no, this is not the “hemlock” Socrates drank. Socrates’ death-sentence drink was concocted from poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, an herbaceous plant, not a tree.
Not that long ago hemlock bark was rendered for tannin, which was widely used for tanning leather prior to the development of various chemical methods which require less labor and are more economically advantageous.
There are numerous insect species that feed on hemlock. Only two of these are capable of killing their host. One of these is the previously mentioned alien hemlock woolly adelgid and the other is the native hemlock borer which preys on weakened hemlocks often killing woolly adelgid compromised trees.
Old eastern hemlocks and hemlock stumps and logs occasionally nurture an interesting and much sought after medicinal fungus. The hemlock varnish shelf polypore, Ganoderma tsugae, is very closely related to the highly valued Asian “miracle” mushroom reishi or ling chi/lingzhi, Ganoderma lucidum.
Both mushroom species contain triterpenes, polysaccharides and sterols and both can be made into a “tea” reportedly containing immunotherapeutic properties, anti-tumor inhibitors and enhancers for anti-viral and anti-bacterial activity.
One can easily see the eastern hemlock is a species we do not want to lose. Unfortunately, like the American elm, American chestnut and various other native species, that have been extirpated from vast areas of their natural range by introduced insects and diseases, the future is not bright for this grand American tree.
The hemlock eating woolly adelgid is a fairly recent arrival to our Bioreserve first making an appearance around 1990. They are a Japanese species first arriving on the west coast in 1924 and have been expanding their range east and north ever since.
The present range of this adelgid is from Virginia, North Carolina and east Tennessee north up the Appalachian Mountains and the coast to southern Maine.
As with almost all alien invasive species they found a bountiful food supply and few predators. In the woolly adelgid’s native Japan there are species of native insects that have evolved to prey on wooly adelgids keeping their numbers in check and doing only minor damage to Japan’s native hemlocks.
Wooly adelgids are supposed to have difficulty surviving temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, but a check of Bioreserve hemlocks in February, when the temperature was in the teens, showed many adelgid infested trees.
Wooly adelgid abundance also comes from the fact that they not only reproduce sexually, but also reproduce by parthenogenesis. Adelgids produce two generations a year. One generation overwinters on the hemlock. In this overwintering generation the adelgids are called “sistens.” Sistens are wingless and reproduce parthenogenetically. In the second, spring, generation the adults are “progrediens.” There are two forms of progrediens, another wingless form that remains on the hemlock and a form that has wings that flies off in search of a different host tree, a species of spruce not found in North American forests. The winged progrediens are all viviparous (producing living young instead of eggs) females which give birth to both males and females which mate and the females then lay fertilized eggs. However, these guys do not survive to reproduce and add to the adelgid population in our area because, as mentioned, we don’t have the required host spruce necessary for their survival.
The eggs of the hemlock staying progrediens hatch into nymphs which are so tiny and light that the wind easily disperses many of them throughout the forest. Those fortunate enough to land on a hemlock crawl to the underside of a hemlock needle and insert a pointed mouthpart, stylet, into the base of the needle. There they remain feeding on phloem, the food conducting tissue that supplies the hemlock with the nutrients it needs for survival. The nymphs pass through four growth stages on their way to becoming adult.
A hemlock heavily infested with wooly adelgids slowly turns grey and dies. Biologists have been studying a number of beetles and fungal diseases that keep the wooly adelgid population under control in Japan. Whether they will be effective predators of this invasive insect species on this continent has not yet been definitively determined.
More on chaga here:
Chaga is a polypore (fungi that release their spores from the underside of the fruiting body) usually found growing on various species of birch (Betula) in northern Europe, Asia and North America. In the SMB it is found on yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis).
Brewed as a “tea” chaga has been used as a tonic and medicine for centuries by the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, Russia and Siberia.
The West “discovered” chaga in 1968 when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's autobiographical Cancer Ward was published. In his novel Solzhenitsyn's Dr. Maslennikov notices how cancer-free Russian peasants are. Could this be due to their habit of drinking chaga tea? He makes the connection and patient ...and main character ...Oleg Kostoglotov (Solzhenitsyn) benefits from his discovery.
Today, chaga is in demand worldwide. A celebrity fungus among us. Like ginseng it is touted as a cure for hundreds of ailments and conditions. Is chaga potent medicine? What are its therapeutic effects? Is it just an old, dried hunk of fungus? Much ado about nothing? Maybe something in between? We don't know.
Chaga extracts are still being tested and studies being done at leading medical facilities and research labs around the world. Chaga extracts contain the polysaccharide beta-glucans and the terpenes sterol, inotodial and betulinic acid. A Russian cancer treatment, Befungin, is made from chaga extract and cobalt salts stabilized in alcohol.
Those wanting some chaga tea no longer have to go off into the woods hunting for it. Today, chaga tea, chaga capsules and other chaga products can be found for sale by simply doing a “Google” search. Checking around on the Internet we even found Befungin for sale. Chaga products can be also be found at your nearest health and nutrition store, pharmacy and some supermarkets.
Chaga is a brown to black woody perennial mushroom with deep cracks, here and there, showing the lighter yellow-brown interior. It is very hard and dense and difficult to remove from the tree.
Chaga is usually found growing ...protruding from the trunk or from a large branch of older trees. It can be found and observed during any season of the year, but is easiest to spot during winter when the trees are bare of leaves and the dark mass of chaga stands out against the light bark of the birch and winter snow.
Chaga is also known as one of the tinder polypores. These polypores are perennial mushrooms, dense and woody, used to start and carry fire. Otzi the 5,300 year old “iceman” found in the Alps was carrying a belt pouch that contained a sophisticated fire starting kit and pieces of a tinder polypore, related to chaga, to hold the spark when Otzi wanted fire.
For more on oyster mushrooms go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleurotus_ostreatus
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