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Found in an Italian swimming pool: a spider with little ones
Mark Bogers has been away from Brabant for thirty years, but still follows Stuifmail and now has a question. During his vacation in Italy, a spider had landed in the pool. Not just a spider, but a very big spider with all the spiders on the body. Mark has saved the spider and the spiders and now wants to know what kind of spider it is.
First of all I thought of the Spanish bull’s spider, but those spiders do not wear their descendants on their backs. Spider family that certainly do that are spiders from the wolf spider family. Two members of that wolf spider family live in Italy. These are the Tarantulawolfspin (Lycosa Tarantula) and the false Wolfspin (Zoropsis Spinimana). We now also know the last one, the false wolf spider, in our country, see this link.
The first, the TarantulaWolfSpin is the biggest spider within her family, See this link. This Wolfspin is named after the Italian city of Tarente in the Apulia region in Italy. That is why this spider has been named Tarantulawolfspin. Just like the false wolf spider, the spider is harmless to people. If the spider is driven into the corner, the bite can be just as painful as the stitch of a honey bee.
The famous large hairy bird spider has been completely wrongly named Tarantula. That confusion arose because emigrants from southern Europe in North and South America saw the large bird spiders living there for the well-known wolf spider from their countries. Readers of Stuifmail now know that the real Tarantula is a sympathetic and harmless wolf spider from Southern Europe.
Nice moth
Unfortunately, the beautiful large butterfly, who saw Palux Bruyninckx, did not survive. On the photo above is a moth from the large moth of the pile tails. The name is great evening red. These moths are very beautifully colored. They have olive green front wings and some pink in between. They are also moths with a considerable wingspan ranging from 4.5 to six centimeters.
Big Avondrood-Naachtvlinders go from dusk in search of hemkperfoelie. You can often come across the caterpillars of these moths in public gardens and gardens. Then there must be plants such as cat tail, water tray (pond) or fuchsia. Special is that great evening red butterflies, according to research, can distinguish colors with their big eyes.
Which caterpillar was there the leaves of the Amaryllis bulbs on a terrace?
Yvonne Rommelaars sent me a photo of a caterpillar that sat on the leaves of an Amaryllis. She wonders what the name is. On her photo is a caterpillar of the Gamma owl. Gamma owls, also called guns, are moths that belong to the owl family. The moth has white spots in the middle of the front wings. Sometimes these spots look like a Greek Y, also known as a range. Hence the name of this moth: Gamma owl. But sometimes you come across a different name: gun. This is because the Gammateken also looks a bit like an old -fashioned gun.
The front wings of this butterfly are brown and gray, with sometimes a purple -like shade. Gamma owls are real pull butterflies that go to our country from the area around the Mediterranean – in the night, but also during the day. They regularly visit flowers during the day and are sometimes confused with the hummingbird butterfly. This is because, once they have landed on such a flower, they sit on that flower with vibrating wings.
Hommel found in a bucket
Lous Zurcher found a wet insect in an empty bucket. He suspects it is a solitary with or a bumblebee. I think Lous is right and he saved a stone bumblebee from the bucket. On that photo you see a black hairy insect with a nice pale Oranjerode hair at the end of the abdomen. You will encounter Steenhommels in various landscapes in our country, but are also regularly seen in Stadstuinen.
Queens of the stone bumblebee are looking for a suitable place to make their nest from the mid -March to the end of May. Such a nest can, as the name suggests, be made under stones. But you also come across them in wall gaps, stables and sanding. In addition, stone -hop nests are sometimes found underground, just like with the earth. That is a family member of De Steenhommel. A fully -fledged stone bumblebee nest, also known as a colony, consists of one hundred to three hundred workers next to the queen.
Why do so many beech trees die?
Marie-Madeleine Sadée strikes that there are a lot of beeches dead. What causes that beech mortality? This is a question that has been occupied me for some time. I have already frequently explained why beeches die during excursions. The main cause is very clearly with climate change. First of all, beech has a thin bark, so that they can suffer from sunscreen in full sun. The SAP stream is less good and at temperatures above 30 degrees that is disastrous. In short: lack of food.
In addition, we have had periods (from the year 2018 to 2022) with enormous drought. Then beeches can get poorly water for their juice streams. After that, from 2023 to 2025, we had many large rain showers, with a lot of water fell. As a result, large floods of streams and rivers and also saturation of the soil at other locations. This created a very high groundwater level in many places.
The consequence of this is that forest parts and avenues were also flooded, so that the roots of the trees could no longer attract minerals, but also no oxygen. The result was that the roots were full of water and that the trees were licking. Beech and also many conifers have had a lot of problems with that. You saw that on the brown leaves and needles in the summer. Sometimes the suffocation went that far, that it had death as the end result.
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Metamorphosis Big Avondrood – Maud Maas Geesteranus
One of our most beautiful moths, great evening red, belongs to the family of the arrow tails. They fly at night and are not seen much. The metamorphosis shows from egg to butterfly. The butterflies are sometimes found on a host plant during the day. They fly from dusk looking for food already flying on honeysuckle and on other plants with tubular flowers. They come to the light. The candy pink butterfly can distinguish colors in the dark. Big Avondrood has eyes with larger lenses with which the distance that the light needs to reach the receptors is shortened. This allows them to detect ultraviolet, yellow and blue.