By Tom Walker
witsendmagazine
It sounds like a 1950s “creature feature” horror movie. Giant bugs crawling down from the treetops. Even bigger bugs crawling out of the ground to go for a drink in swimming pools. And big wasps with paralyzing stings searching for a place to lay their eggs.
Welcome to Tucson in
the summer.
It’s the time of year
when the desert springs all kinds of surprises on you. Even though I’m a native
Arizonan, I was completely unaware of the existence of mesquite bugs until my
friend Doug Kreutz wrote about them in an Arizona Daily Star article.
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| Mesquite bug |
The “beautiful gentle giants,” as a University of Arizona
entomologist described them, live in the canopies of mesquite trees. There, they
feed off the trees, mate and lay eggs in late summer that will hatch in the
spring. They are completely harmless, to mesquite trees or to people.
But when the heat gets really brutal like it has been in
Tucson — the high yesterday was 111, the latest in a long string of 100-plus
days — the mesquite bugs move down to the base of the tree where it’s maybe a
few degrees cooler. It’s the same way Tucsonans head north to the higher
elevations of Flagstaff or Pinetop.
Man, I wish I were there now.
But like many others in this desert city, I must content myself with the knowledge that
restaurants are less crowded since everyone flew off; or that my house and cars
are air conditioned; and that the monsoon must surely come.
That North American Monsoon is always a welcome break from
the oppressive summer heat. Moisture flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico brings
wonderful afternoon and evening thunderstorms. There are damaging winds
sometimes, lightning-set fires, and flooding in which stranded motorists have
to be rescued from the roofs of their cars.
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| Palo verde beetle |
Yes, monsoon, please come soon.
The music of hot weather before the monsoons, of course, is
the screeching of cicadas. Then, once the rains begin, we will have the annual
migration of the palo verde beetle.
This lovely insect lives most of its life underground, as a
grub that feeds on the roots of trees — preferably, the palo verde. It can do a
lot of damage down there, but then, in the summer it finds its life purpose: to
mate, lay eggs and die.
To do that, the adult beetles come out of the ground looking
like some kind of armored fighting machine — nearly 4 inches long, with waving
antennae, wings, and a pair of impressive pincers. Despite all that formidable equipment, these bugs seem to mostly end up drowned in swimming pools.
Guess big pincers don’t necessarily mean big brains. (Fill in joke about our president here.)
One bug you don’t want to tangle with, though, is the
tarantula hawk. This guy is scary looking, about 2 inches long with blue-black
bodies and rust-colored wings. In flight, they make a loud fluttery kind of
sound like an old prop plane that’s missing
on a couple of cylinders.
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| Tarantula hawk |
Mostly though, the tarantula hawk isn’t looking for trouble.
It’s just looking for a tarantula that it can hire as a baby sitter.
The female tarantula hawk stings a tarantula with a
paralyzing venom. She then drags her prey to a brooding nest — often times, the
tarantula’s own burrow. Then the hawk lays a single egg on the spider’s abdomen
and covers up the burrow’s entrance.
When the wasp larva hatches, it digs a small hole in the
belly of the paralyzed tarantula, which is still alive. Then the larva feeds on
the spider, avoiding vital organs to keep the spider alive as long as possible.
Finally, the wasp emerges from the spider’s belly as an adult, ready to hunt
for another tarantula.
Ain’t nature wonderful?
1 comment:
And all this doesn't even include fun creatures such as the scorpion, the centipede and the rattlesnake, which also are active during the monsoon. Nevertheless, please come, monsoon. Come soon.
(I feel like some old-time revivalist preacher. Come, Jesus! Come soon!
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