Plant eats Crescent!

Patrick Foley patfoley at csus.edu
Sun Jun 24 20:40:08 EDT 2001


Actually, in order to identify the badly damaged butterfly, I removed it
from the Drosera rotundifolia (Sundew) leaf that had firmly nabbed it. A
female Phyciodes somebody, perhaps melitta.. It was badly damaged. But
after my examination, it flew off, up the bog/meadow near Sagehen Creek
in the northern Sierra Nevada.

And I must also note that despite the ill smelling infloresecences of
Polygonum bistortoides (known as lady's thumb and also dirty socks),
flowers that you might expect only a fly would favor, I saw a Pyrgus and
an Hesperia and no flies sucking.

I tested out Glassberg's  Butterflies through Binoculars: the West. It
is a beautiful and useful book with many fine features such as the
consolidation of text, map and figures on facing pages. But rather than
gush about the beauty of the thing, let me be the first to note that J.
G. does coin the word 'genuses' where even dead Romans know it to be
'genera', and there is some unnecesary vagueness about external
morphology including sexual morphology, perhaps due to the avoidance of
line drawings. Host plants are also a little vague, and not given their
Latin names upfront (there is an appendix). Ralph Buchsbaum once tried
to delatinize the technical vocabulary of invertebrates in his otherwise
wonderful 'Animals without Backbones'. Algas and funguses flourished.
Happily, no one cared or even gave it much notice. I guess an author
gets to have his little joke.

I recommend the new Glassberg book for allies and enemies alike! Not
only is it fun to look through, but you can't attack it effectively till
you have pored over it. Everybody wins!

Patrick Foley
patfoley at csus.edu


 
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