As we were eating some strawberries, a ferocious creature crawled out of the bowl, it’s wickedly fanged head moving back and forth as its spiny body moved forward. Luckily, it’s a very small ferocious creature or I’d have been its lunch. The creature, an aphid lion, is the larval form of a lacewing, a fairylike insect that flutters around at night. The aphid lion was relocated to some aphid-infested columbine, so everything ended well. And no aphids on my strawberries!
As I was photographing the aphid lion, I realized what a savage world it is in my back yard. One of the aphids in the photo was in the process of being devoured by a larval syrphid fly. The others clustered together, looking like they realized their demise is imminent.
I moved on to another part of the garden to see if any native bees were about. They were, but as I was shooting I found another creature right out of a sci-fi thriller: an assassin bug. These guys, unlike the aphid lion and syrphid flies, get large enough to be noticeable – although this species looks like it stays smaller. When they find a prey animal they plunge their sharp proboscis into its body and suck it out from the inside. Grisly!
The next flower held a tiny praying mantis, who traps her prey in barbed talons and devours it. Nearby, a spider (I think it’s a brown lynx) sat on a yarrow flower awaiting its next meal.
All of these insects and spiders are considered beneficial, since they eat other arthropods, most of which are things that eat your flowers. What I’d really consider beneficial would be some bug that would devour crabgrass, leaving everything else alone. However, I think we’re starting to get a rather interesting population of arthropods, an important part of a functioning sustainable garden.
Looks like the “inject enzymes and suck out liquified dinner” feeding method went over big in the arthropod world. The assassin bug, aphid lions and spiders all use this feeding technique, so it must have something going for it. At least, if you’re a predatory insect. The mantis prefers to chew her food – perhaps they’re the gourmets of the insect world.
Glad we humans eat the way we do. Imagine that we’d gone the arthropod route, and we all had large, hollow fangs that we could jab into things just like most of these arthropods. Imagine what restaurants would be like. Watermelons would never seem the same.
Maybe somewhere, far out in space, parsecs from here, there is some sharp-fanged shaggy beast blogging about some alien, disgusting species that grinds up its food bit by bit with hard flat things and does all its digesting internally. Maybe someone will make a sci-fi film where the aliens really eat like aliens, sucking up liquefied giant alien aphid flesh while gathered around the family feeding bin. Hopefully, they’re free-range, organic meta-aphids raised without growth stimulants or antibiotics.