Spittlebug

It was R's birthday today - he'd rather I didn't tell you which one, obviously - and in the wake of our recent busy family times he requested that the two of us have a quiet day at home, with a kind of picnic meal in the garden. This worked pretty well in the current heatwave conditions, though it was too hot to be out in the garden for long, and we had to retreat to the house after lunch. I actually spent most of the afternoon asleep, which was a bit embarrassing, but I'm choosing to think of it as embracing the Mediterranean lifestyle.

For most of the day nothing much could be seen moving in the garden, but as dusk fell we watched the hunters came out: first a couple of Southern Hawkers, which zoomed around at a speed I've rarely seen before, mopping up small flies; and then a bat, which swooped back and forth over the top garden - and low over my head on one occasion - in a stupendous aerial display. By this time there was far too little light for me even to bother thinking about trying to capture these experiences, so we just stood and admired the predators at work.

I took this photo down in the wild garden quite early in the morning, before the sun had moved round onto it, which explains the settings I had to use. The previous image in my sequence had an ISO of 8000, but for this shot I carefully bent the dogwood stem away from the shrub, and managed to get a little more light on my subject. Why the froghopper didn't leap, I don't know - they're said to be able to jump around 70cm at a speed of 14km/h, which renders them pretty much untouchable by predators, and this one was clearly nervous of my attentions - but I have noticed that they'd rather sit tight if they can, so maybe those extraordinary springs take more out of them than they care to expend. Anyway, this was the last photo I took, and once I had it I gently replaced the stem and respectfully backed away, so the froghopper lived to jump another day.

Back when I was a country child, I remember seeing what we called "cuckoo-spit" pretty much everywhere in summer, but as with so many aspects of invertebrate life it's much rarer these days - to the point at which I got quite excited when I found some in the garden a few weeks ago. This frothy liquid is produced by the vulnerable nymphs of the common froghopper as protection and disguise, on the stems of a wide range of plants. The nymph lives inside the "spit", and feeds by piercing the plant stem with its boring mouthparts and sucking out the juices, eventually emerging as an adult bug. The nymph stages usually occur during May and June, with the first adults appearing in late June, and generally persisting into September. The adults are around 6mm in length, and though their colouring and markings are extremely variable, they're generally drab and difficult to spot.