Earth Almanac: January/February 2008

Meet the Beetles

If you know children or adults who are squeamish about bugs, there’s no better time for treatment than the middle of the winter and no better medicine than patent-leather beetles. There are two common species in the United States—one in Florida and one that lives throughout the East. Look for these inch-and-a-quarter-long, shiny black insects under dead wood. In the northern part of their range they may be hibernating, probably protected with glycerin anti-freeze they’ve pumped into their cellular water. The patent-leather beetle is among the few species in the order Cole-

optera that has a social structure and one of the few insects of any order in which adult males care for young, commu-

nicating to them with squeaks and preparing their food by chewing decaying wood and mixing in salivary secretions that aid digestion. Although these beetles can eat their way through oak, they are unlikely to bite. Pick one up and, if it isn’t hibernating, it may emit alarm cries that sound like someone chewing on a deflated balloon. After the demonstration there’s another teachable moment: Carefully replace the wood you’ve turned over, thereby preserving an insect–microbe community.

Bitter Harvest

Nature has a way of making wildlife staples with the longest shelf lives slightly less palatable so there will be something for animals to fall back on once the perishables get eaten. So it is with the scarlet, quarter-inch fruit of the chokeberry, now brightening the woods from the eastern seaboard as far west as Texas and Oklahoma and in settled areas of the West, where it has been transplanted. In the wane of February’s Hunger Moon these berries, scorned earlier in the season by such woodland denizens as bobwhites, ruffed grouse, pheas-

ants, and cedar waxwings, start tasting better and better. The namechokeberry derives from the fruit’s extreme bitterness. While humans have to muster great will power to eat it raw, it is superb when sweetened with sugar and cooked into jam, juice, wine, or flavoring for soft drinks.