Small

Small things are amazing. Megafauna like vultures or bison are charismatic but not enlightening. Creatures in nature are used for careers, industries or distractions, but they can also just be small lessons. Lessons about ourselves. Things round us are not objects that represent other things, yet they are things that represent the essential human condition.

In the rains that began after the official start to the monsoon season in Corrales, the night-time ground erupted on the bajada to the west of the river. Out of holes there came these cute little frogs with large eyes; Couch's spadefoot. The painter Renoir contrasted the impressionist early career style with the classic strict style of his dry period. This frog, showing a calm, warm milieu also models the hidden drives of a desperate struggle to survive and breed both as an individual and a species behind a warm and soft expression of calm.

This leafhopper (Texananus lathrami) is a strange creature that lives on the widely available but nutrient poor diet of plant sap. Renoir showed the world how to represent shadows and texture not as a matt color, but as an impression. These insects have been using impressionistic themes to blend into their background and process plant juice in peace for literal eons. They take the dilute liquid and process though a filter chamber to concentrate the material, essentially using a kidney before the digestion. They pee out the sugary liquid and then use specialized bacteria to predigest and build the essential amino acids from the raw materials in the slurry. There are many species of these amazing insects, the diversity comes because they need to develop niches to reduce competition in a food poor environment were most of their time is taken up with producing food.

Magritte said a pipe is not a pipe. It was a bold statement. This picture also contains something that is not what it seems. This wasp is a velvet ant that is actually a wasp, but not the kind most people know. Genus Odontophotopsis. There are 100,000 species of wasps and many more not known. The vast majority are parasitoids and don't chase children around picnic tables in the summer. These wasps have unique projections on their jaws and chest plates that fit like a lock and key to allow copulation, allowing very specific identification to the few who can read them.

Magritte, the surrealist, was fond of painting leaf birds to explore "elective affinities" the connection between things. This is the greater purple hairstreak butterfly (Atlides halesus). The hairstreak has a neat trick; the butterfly uses to put two fake antennae on the end of the wings. In studies, these appendages fool 100% of jumping spider attacks into attacking the hindquarters. The butterfly even wiggles these after landing to entice a jumping spider to stalk to the rear of the butterfly instead of the vunerable head.

Phoratoxins in the mistletoe help the butterfly inchworms thrive. This plant is the exclusive food for greater hairstreak caterpillars. While the plant is a poor choice over all, the lack of competition means the symbiosis is as locked in as milkweed is for monarchs. During Magritte's "Renoir" period the painted a bouquet of flowers weirdly growing from the ground like a tree. This is a great way to describe the Haustoria that mistletoe uses to grow into the tree's xylem and Phloem transport system.

The geometer moths break all the rules. Most moths have soft and fuzzy fringes and muted colors but these have bright contrasts and lines marking them. Renoir fought against this rigid style in the Parisian art scene his whole life, claiming sharp lines were unnatural, before reversing his opinion in the severe period after a trip to Italy and its examples of Renaissance abstraction.

Magritte wrote his aim was to "make the most everyday objects shriek aloud". And while this Physella acuta is a very common place, ordinary thing. There is an unusual feature. The coiling is left handed. This is odd as almost every other snail species spirals the opposite way. The term is chirality and in some circumstances this gives the species an advantage.

The jumping spiders seem to become much more active once the weather increases. Webs are actually pretty uncommon, but these spiders do make silk as a safety tether for when jumps go wrong. While those two big eyes grab the attention, there are actually another set of smaller eyes to the side like indicator lights. There are then another set behind and another two at the back and to the side.

This looks like a typical bee grubbing around the flowers. But as Magritte always tried to do, an observer should look closer. But this is a Digging wasp (Dielis pilipes). The females hunt beetle grubs to paralyze and lay egg in. The males need flower nectar to buzz over the ground to try to be the first to intercept a virgin female as they dig out in the early summer. 

While this looks like just a fly, there are several features worth remarking on. The most obvious is the size, this fly is huge. The eyes are almost a single visor, showing it is a male (Tabanus atratus). This is good news because the females have scissor like jaws with which they lap blood from mammals. The Malpighian tubules work in tandem with the hindgut to pull this massive rush of water out of the hemolymph (insect blood) and dump it out, leaving the midgut packed purely with a dense, highly concentrated paste of red blood cells and protein.

The adult antlion (Brachynemurus signatus)is often seen in late spring. They are quite poor fliers and look nothing like their juvenile phase, which has huge jaws and ambush tactics in the loose soil.

It can be quite breathtaking to see the size of some of the carpenter ants found in Corrales. The enlarged thorax suggest this is a new queen, looking to establish a colony. The winged drones can be found outside as well but only for a short while. Renoir went through several stage of his life that seemed very different, from the impressionist, to the dry period to the hybrid and eventually his senescent red period. Similarly the ant queen goes from a Pharate, to an Alate, to a Foundress with nanitics, and then a mature queen Claustra. This last stage processes vitellogenin protein that can halt cellular aging, allowing her to live over 25 years.

Asters are a diverse group of plants developed to be adaptable for conditions found near wetlands. Their big open flower faces attract all pollinators, and also human gardeners. This species; Spiny Chloracanthas is monophyletic and unique. It adapts to dry conditions by shedding its leaves quickly, prroducing chlorophyll in the stem to reduce leave water loss. The lateral branches are modified into thorns that allow the stems to grow tall into dense thickets that deter grazing animals. A dicot learning the evolutionary tricks of an opuntia (cactus), truely not a pipe as Magritte could have commented.

This is Idaea gemmata, another geometer moth like the one above. Except this one is much more fuzzy and subdued, blending in perfectly with light stucco. That edges of the wings are fringed, breaking up the body edges but also absorbing and reflecting bat echolocation signals. These moths have a discal spot on their wings in a contrasting orange, red hue that disappears as they age. The older Renoir used vibrant cochineal red pigments in his late paintings. These pigments have also faded out over the years to muted browns and oranges.

Bumblebees come with a lot of myths. They are not anatomically impossible flying marvels but they do use a different form of lift than modern planes. They also pollinate differently than honeybees, using vibrations and static electricity very precisely. In desert willow/Catalpa hybrids they have another trick of biting a hole in the base of the bloom to bypass the throat and pollen collecting stamens. This hole is often then exploited by hoverflies and honeybees.

Nature is wonderful and an amazing restorative to the weary soul. It allows us to observe and take away from the encounter just what we need. The beauty is that nature also never reaches an end, there will forever be more to be seen. The endlessness of it is what many painters such as Renoir and Matisse sought to express in their studies. Renoir sought to express light and shadow in color, while Matisse looked at the nature of reality itself in specific detail. Both sought to express the medium of colors as a sensation or experience. An abstract experience all of us could probably do well to emulate, if we start small.