Creature Feature 1.0

I was eating my morning cereal last Friday, while using a laptop to listen to a pirated live stream of CNN. (We cut the cable last year.) I heard a clink or creak coming from the direction of our fireplace. The wind must be blowing pretty hard, I thought, and continued listening to a discussion about Donald Trump Jr.'s problematic meeting with Boris and Natasha.

More clinking. I looked over and could see something bobbing in the darkness behind the glass of the fireplace insert. Uggh. I figured it was a black rat snake; they get into the walls, attic or basement on occasion. One must have managed to get past the critter baffle and come down the chimney. Not a big deal. I would finish my cereal, then take the snake outside... CNN was now saying that Moose and Squirrel were also implicated in the Trump thing and that soon we would have no effective government at all.

Eventually I got a flashlight and peered into the fireplace to take the measure of the situation and met the beady eyes of a twitchy little bat. I don't know what kind of bat, there are 10 species in Maryland. I think he may have been a vente brown bat or a grande brown bat. My light frightened him, whatever species he was, and he began clambering about again, quickly disappearing into one of the many crannies in there. Fortunately, there were no nooks.

Fireplace insert and bat-collecting equipment

Hmmm. Not having dealt with a bat before, I wasn't sure how to proceed. Are they fast on the hoof, do they break easily, can they bite through metal? So, I gathered things that I thought might be useful ... a canvas insect sweep net and an old peanut butter jar. Upon reflection, this was clearly an entomological solution to a mammalogical problem (if all you have is a hammer...). I had to think more like a bat. So, I took a small cardboard box, stapled an old washcloth on the inside bottom and put the thing into the fireplace insert on end, so the washcloth made a vertical surface. I figured His Batness would eventually crawl in there, find it comfy and when I got home in the evening, he would be hanging around in the box. All I would have to do is close the flaps and take him outside... done and done. It was a plan, anyway.

Before I began my drive to the office, I decided to circumnavigate the outside of the house. I sometimes find nocturnal creatures who lack the ambition to hide again before daylight, usually slugs, daddy longlegs, spiders and moths. But today was a first. I found a leaf-rolling cricket Camptonotus carolinensis, the only species of the family Gryllacrididae in the United States. Gryllacridids are not crickets per se but are more closely related to katydids, but even this is a phylogenetic technicality. They are really off by themselves with camel crickets, wetas and some other misfit orthopterans.

C. carolinensis is about 1.3 cm long (~ .5 inch), a wingless, nocturnal predator of aphids. During the day they occupy a retreat that they constructed by chewing a flap in a leaf, folding the flap over and fastening it to the rest of the leaf with silk from their mouthparts. They have remarkably long antennae (see photo), and this individual, an adult female based on the ovipositor, had its antennae extended in opposite directions, seemingly to maximize the distance over which it could detect predators.

Leaf-rolling cricket (Camptonotus carolinensis), arrows indicate ends of antennae

A rarely considered aspect of Camptonotus biology is the incredible stickiness of their feet, probably an adaptation for walking on the smooth, waxy surfaces of leaves. If you put one on your finger, it's hard to pull it off without feeling that something is going to give ... their legs or your skin. It's a peculiar feeling when they finally let go; it seems like there there must have been a glue, but there is no glue.

When I was a graduate student in the 1980s, this business of sticky bug's feet was explained by water surface tension. Each little hair on a bug's foot has a bazillion super-microscopic projections and each projection was thought to be hydrophilic (attracted to water). Assuming that most surfaces have a thin film of water on them and that bug's feet are attracted to water, this could explain how bugs and other creatures could walk on the ceiling or a window pane. But there is also something called the van der Waals force (attraction or repulsion of atoms due to random fluctuations in their electrical charges) that some scientists thought might be a better explanation for sticky feet. Still, most folks thought that these forces were too weak to account for the phenomenon, but this was wrong. In fact, van der Waals forces are strong enough to allow even geckos to walk bipedally, talk and sell insurance... I mean, climb on vertical surfaces, even glass. The same is true for spiders. A glue-less adhesive tape has been designed based on these findings. (This is an example of why we should fund basic science, y'all!) I suspect that Camptonotus is using the same mechanism.

So, I drove to campus listening to a LibriVox audio book, The Turn of the Screw. Oooo, scary. Listening to stories makes the drive seem to go faster, although, objectively, I am still burning through the same amount of my short lifespan trapped in a box. On the bright side, this is probably good practice for later.

Every day, while walking from the parking garage to the Plant Sciences Building, I pass by the School of Public Health where, once or twice a week, I see striped, blue-tailed lizards skittering around on a retaining wall. These are juvenile five-lined skinks (Piestiodon fasciatus: Scincidae), one of six lizard species in the state according to the Maryland Biodiversity Project. However, these little guys were always too wary and quick to examine, let alone photograph. I lucked out today. There was a pair of them having some sort of lizardy tiff, and they were focusing on each other rather than on me. So, I was able to get a series of images be fore they darted into the juniper shrubbery.

A stand-off between two juvenile five-lined skinks

These lizards can autotomize (self-detach) their tails when attacked by a predator. The tail continues to wiggle, distracting the predator and allowing the business end of the lizard to escape; that is, the part with the reproductive organs. The stationary skink in the photos has apparently used this strategy in the past; it has a regenerated tail: short, stocky and not very blue. Adults look rather different; the stripes and blueness of the tail are usually less distinct and the head becomes reddish. I have never seen an adult, but clearly they must be on campus somewhere.

Eating lunch in my office (Chobani passion fruit yogurt), I began to think about His Batness and whether he had made it into the box yet.  I decided to send an email to Second Chance Wildlife Center asking if they had any advice. They responded that I should hang a towel in the fireplace insert, wait for the bat to perch on it and then fold him up in it.  I was then supposed to take this bat burrito outside, unfold the towel and hang it vertically, because bats need to take off from a vertical surface. Who knew? I reckoned that my approach was pretty close to this. After all, towels and washcloths are very close relatives on the spectrum of household items... cousins, if not siblings; they usually share a closet. I was reassured about my choice of materials.

When I arrived home, my wife, Janet, informed me that she had named the bat Petyr, after the ancient but ill-fated vampire in What We Do in the Shadows (2014), a movie I highly recommend. Petyr hadn't made it into the box yet and, in fact, he hadn't put in an appearance all day. Perhaps he got out by himself?

As evening approached, we heard scurrying in the fireplace. Amazingly, Petyr wandered into the box and climbed onto the wash cloth.  I opened the insert door, folded the flaps of the box closed and took the contraption outside.  I opened the box slowly, half expecting Petyr to fly into my hair and give me rabies, but he just sat in the corner looking pathetic. I took a couple pictures, stood the box on end again, and we left him alone.

Petyr

When we returned a little later and Petyr was gone. His little wash cloth that he had loved so much was all that we had left of him. It will be framed.  With a sense of accomplishment, we returned to the living room and closed the door to the fireplace insert, a little teary eyed. Oh, Petyr, we barely knew you. 

I sighed, sat down, opened the laptop and turned on pirated live-stream CNN to find out what Fearless Leader had tweeted today.