Capers With Carroll

I took this picture of a female Nephila sp. near Zhaotong, north-eastern Yunnan, on August 10, only about two hours before a 5.6 earthquake hit Zhaotong. The Chinese have studied watching animal behavior to predict big earthquakes, but if this Nephila knew the earthquake was coming, she didn't tell me. The genus Nephila is common to tropical regions around the world, and I had a species where I lived (1985-1995) on the Colombian Llanos. They were the biggest web-spider that we had there. The web spun by Nephila is the strongest fiber occuring in nature. It is much stronger than a piece of steel of equal weight. The Nephila webs are sometimes built across trails in the jungle. I have been walking down a trail and suddenly walked face-first into a Nephila web. The first few times, it shook me up, but then I learned to watch for them, and they became one of my favorite spiders. I also saw many Nephila at a Buddhist temple near Dali, in far western Yunnan.

A couple of days ago, I promised pictures of the wasp galls that cover the leaves of the oak tree in my back yard. However, after a rain, fog and cold weather, I was unable to find much to take pictures of as I was raking leaves today. Even two or three weeks ago, there were several different kinds of galls to see. Fortunately, I have a friend who already has a complete set of photographs on the web. About seven miles (11 kilometers) from my house is the Kaweah Oaks Nature Preserve. My friend Irene Lindsey has spent several years developing an excellent web collection of photographs an text describing the plants and animals of the Kaweah Oaks Preserve. The main page can be found at http://kaweahoaks.com/
The site has many interesting pages, but pictures of the oaks galls can be found directly at
http://kaweahoaks.com/html/galls_ofthe_voaks.html

Another link on Irene’s site describes the spiders that live in our area, and at Kaweah Oaks Nature Preserve. I gave Irene a little help with that section, and another friend of mine, Dr. Marjorie Moody, gave her a lot of help. The spider section begins at http://kaweahoaks.com/html/spiders.html Go to the "Spider Checklist" for the part I worked on.

The other insect that Bruce had in the greenhouse to show me was the lac insect, which produces the waxy threads that these are hiding inside of. The bodies can also be processed to produce a red die that can be used in things like lipstick. They are most famous for producing lac, which can be used for making lacquer or for the coverings of pharmaceutical capsules, or many other uses. I don't know how interesting the rest of you find this, but it was very high on the list of things I wanted to see in Yunnan. I thought I would have to go farther south to see them, but it turns out that in the area around Simao, where they are grown commercially, the season is in April, so the best place to see them in August was in this greenhouse in Kunming.

These are Chinese gall-nuts from the collection that Bruce keeps in a green house. These galls grow on several kinds of trees, and begin when a wasp injures the tissues of the tree to lay an egg. The egg developes inside the gall as the gall grows. The gall also produces valuable chemicals that can be processed out of it. One of these days, I will take a picture of an oak tree in my back yard, here in California, and several different kinds of wasp galls that grow on it. We don't do anything with our galls that I know of.