There are several species of Ground Cherries, genus
Physalis, growing at Blue Jay Barrens.
I’ve been watching a few specimens with plans of photographing each when
it reached its prime. All are very
similar, with most differences being associated with leaf shape and the degree
of hairiness. Yellow, bell like flowers
are typical of all.
The fruit develops inside a thin walled pod. It’s not uncommon to have flowers and nearly
mature fruit on the same plant and that’s the condition I’ve been watching for.
My latest check showed flowers and developing fruit, but
most of the leaves and some of the flower buds had disappeared. This wasn’t the scene I had been hoping for.
It wasn’t hard to discover the cause of the leaf loss. Beetle larvae were hard at work eating
everything except the stout stem. The
larva is that of a leaf beetle and looks very much like that of a Three-lined
Potato Beetle. Several species have
larvae of similar appearance, so it’s hard to be positive at this stage. The interesting thing about this guy is the
bit of protective camouflage it carries on its back.
A chain created from the larva’s feces runs up the back and
almost to the head of the tiny creature.
The mass of feces definitely makes the larva less visible and may even
make the larva less palatable. It’s also
possible that a grabbing type predator may come away with a bunch of feces
instead of a larva. However it works,
there must be some survival advantage for this behavior to have developed.
The size of the feces mass varies between individual
larvae. It seems that the feces could be
easily dislodged, but there is some type of projection in the center of the
back that appears to act as an anchorage for the feces chain. The larvae made for an interesting diversion,
but all of those feces nuggets were once the leaves I was hoping to
photograph. I guess I’ll have to look
around for some more plants.
