This week in the woods, we’re at a seasonal tipping point, when there’s still snow blanketing many areas, but on sunny, south-facing slopes, the first wildflowers are blooming.
We found fuzzy-coated blunt-lobed hepatica in a stand of white ash trees. The photo grid this week shows the wildflower in both its bud and fully open stages. Blunt-lobed and sharp-lobed hepatica both grow in our region, and you often find them in the same rich soils as spring ephemerals. In contrast to spring ephemerals, however, hepatica species bear leaves year-round. The tattered, reddish-purple leaves that emerge from the snow begin photosynthesizing quickly and give hepatica an early season energy boost. Once the flowers bloom, these leaves fall off, and the year’s new leaves emerge.
We also found our first spring beauty of the season, blooming under the shelter of a rock overhang. One of the special traits of these little flowers is their intensely Barbie-pink pollen. An early season bee, the spring beauty miner bee, relies almost exclusively on this pollen to complete its lifestyle. The female bees dig larval chambers, one for each egg, and gift each with its own pink pollen “cake.” (The male bees don’t do much – basically, they spend their lives hanging around on the dead leaves near the flowers, looking for a date.) You can see an illustrated image of the bee at this link from our archive.
Bees and flowers have their place, but in our view, nothing says spring like a predacious diving beetle larva trundling across the melting snow in search of mud in which to pupate. We found this specimen next to a forest pool, where it presumably had spent the winter – both adults and larvae endure the season under the ice. Also called “water tigers,” the larvae used their hooked mandibles to catch aquatic insects, including each other, as well as fairy shrimp, tadpoles, leaches, and other small aquatic organisms, which they then inject with liquefying enzymes and drink. Yum. Here’s an Outside Story article by Kenrick Vezina focused on the adaptations of adult diving beetles.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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