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Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autumn. Show all posts

Saturday, 11 January 2025

Mystery Webs

 


You may find substantial, dense webs on fungi in autumn. These look quite like the tent-webs of some moth and sawfly larvae, but differ in occurring later in the year; enclosing a fungus instead of a food-plant; not being full of specks of caterpillar dung; you also rarely see any living (or dead) creatures, eggs or pupae in them.

The cleanness of the webs and the way they are restricted to a particular fungus might make you think you are looking at a grey, fuzzy mould.


To find out what was making these, I took a piece home and kept it in a vivarium. Checking on the vivarium in the middle of the night I spotted a small mealworm-like creature moving through the web, leaving a slime trail behind it. I caught it and put it in an empty enclosure where it soon started fervently weaving by bobbing its head back and forth at an impressive rate, extruding silk from spinnerets on its snout. In the morning, the new enclosure was full of webs, and the larva resting in the middle.



I believe these larvae are fungus gnats of the family Mycetophilidae - a large family of small, rather plain flies with thousands of described species, most of which lay their eggs on fungi. I haven't found much witten about the function of the webs: maintaining a humid atmosphere; excluding other small creatures; catching spores for consumption have all been mooted. The larvae also seem to be able to move smoothly and rapidly through their silk network.







Wednesday, 23 October 2024

Keeping It Green

 Fencepost of the Week #230



Tuesday, 6 August 2024

Tis the Season

 Fencepost of the Week #222

Seasonal sixteen-legged sexy-times!


Saddleback Harvestman - Mitopus morio

Well... fourteen-legged, but nobody's perfect. ^_^

Sunday, 27 November 2022

Sunday, 11 November 2018

Autumn Advancing...

Fencepost of the Week #173


Autumn advancing in the background. #FencepostOfTheWeek

Saturday, 19 December 2015

Forest Sunset


Friston Forest, Sussex, UK.

Saturday, 5 December 2015

Sunday, 22 November 2015

Thursday, 12 November 2015

Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Autumn Colour

Tree-fetish Tuesday #43

Just a little autumn colour...



Sunday, 14 October 2012

Willingdon Downs

Scenic Sundays #34


The south downs escarpment on a fresh autumn evening.

Sunday, 30 September 2012

Well on the Way to Autumn

Scenic Sundays #33


Another summer has gone and winter is just round the bend...