Placers: PhotoGram
Location:Springville, Utah
Status: Active
You have no doubt heard of the infamous salamander letter. Well, this may go down in history as the infamous earwig letter. Somehow I just keep running into them, surprised to find them congregating in places I don't expect.
Bracken and I were busy pulling sprouted birdseed out of the planter in front of the porch. (The big drawback to bird-feeding is the mess they make and the fact that the scattered seed grows.) I noticed the fallen plastic squirrel, picked it up and tossed it on to the porch. Six or eight earwigs were jolted out of their siestas by the impact and quickly scattered in every direction.
Wow!!! Bracken's attention and my curiosity had both been aroused. I picked up the squirrel and brought it down firmly on the cement and again approximately the same number of insects were dispersed. I repeated the procedure possibly ten times more similar but progressively dwindling results until no more came out. So quickly did those bugs head for cover that there were none visible within seconds after that last slam. We were left with only our amazement so we spent the next few minutes re-telling the tale and sharing it with one another.
Yesterday morning I was watering the lawn with the extension hose Dan bought this Spring. It consists of a sprinkler, about 10 feet of hose and another sprinkler. You attach it to the hose and it is much like a s
prinkler system. After placing it where I wanted it in the parkway, I turned the water on and watched the hose bulge and contort. It struggled, writhing like a snake in pain. I had inadvertently put the sprinkler heads face down. After much twisting and hissing, the hose up-righted them on its own releasing the pent-up water from the first sprinkler, but not the end one. I made two or three feeble attempts to get it working with no luck at all. Finally I took it off and hit it hard against the sidewalk releasing three dead earwigs, one severed in two. Looking inside I could see a clump of bodies jammed against and into the sprayer opening. The force of the water had pushed them as far as they could go and then crushed them. (If such a story were on the news, we'd cringe at the tragedy of it. fortunately, for my conscience sake, it was an accident.) I did spend the next 45 minutes extracting the corpses with a tweezer,piece by partial piece, and did manage to save the sprinkler head.
Since then, I seem to find them everywhere, inside and outside. The other night when Dan jumped out of bed saying something was in bed with us and tried to bite him, I immediately thought of an earwig. We never did find out what it was.
All this trauma within a week, not to mention all the many more casual encounters, has left me with several questions about the make-up and habits of these tiny versions of out-of-this world monster-movie-creatures. So I looked them up.
Did you know that there are only 1100 species of ear
wigs (dermaptera) world wide? And only 20 of those species are found in North America. Now that ought to be a relief to folks like my sister, Lela, who genuinely loathes the little Creepies. She thinks they are sneaky and, you know, she may be right. They hide during the day under debris or in dark spaces (Imagine that?) emerging at night to feed on plants, organic wastes and smaller insects.
Dermoptera means "skinwings", referring to the leather-like fore wings that some earwigs have. Yet many species are wingless and few earwigs fly. I think I'm glad they don't fly.
The name Earwig comes from an old and totally unfounded superstition that they crawl into people’s ears at night and bite them (Now we already know they would be more likely to do that during the day when they are looking for a place to hide don't we?) According to the book earwigs are completely harmless. The worst thing they do is occasionally damage flower blossoms. Knowing this, however, is no great comfort to me. I prefer they stay out of my ears.
Reading on ... I find that earwigs inhabit gardens, fields and also sometimes indoors. I'm not exactly sure of how many times is a sometimes but I'll bet it is pretty darned often judging from my own experience. They feed on aphids and other small insects, plants and ground litter, and perhaps on foodstuffs found in homes and grain warehouses. Perhaps?
The book doesn't have a picture of the "Common earwig" so I'm not sure if that is what they were or if they were Ring legged earwigs whose picture does look like what I saw. I think. The descriptions confuse me. Here they are.
Ring-legged Earwig; 3/8 to 1 inch long. Brown to black.
brown spots at tip of pronotum and
brown rings on yellow femora anci tibiae
Antennae have 15 to 1~ segments and
are black with white ring near tip
of each segment. Adults are
wingless
Common Earwig; Brownish and shiny. 3/8 to 5/8 inch
long, antenae 12 to 15 segments
long. adults have wings but
seldom fly. The Cerce or
pincers at the end of the abdomen
are curved strongly on the male,
while the female's are straight and
almost parallel.
What an absolute wreck I am! How can I know what I saw when I didn't notice how long they were plus I forgot to count the segments on the antanae. Fact is I don't even know if there were wings and I was digging them out with a tweezer. I sure couldn't be counted on to make a positive identification if I had to could I? Hope I never witness a crime.
Well, to continue with what I know about these little Wigglies I can't even identify; they defend themselves in two ways. They use their pincers and they also emit a liquid that smells like creosote when they are disturbed. I didn't know that! Now if I only knew what creosote smells like.
Earwigs do have two redeeming- qualities I discovered.
- Their metamorphosis is simple and discreet ... discernible changes being increased number of and size of wings. Isn't that nice to know.?
- The females are especially maternal. They protect eggs laid in burrows on the ground, rush to collect them if they are dispersed, and feed the nymphs until they are strong enough to fend for themselves. They remain with their eggs till their hatched. Now isn't that even nicer to know?
Yesterday I removed a rock from one of my houseplants and discovered a bunch of eggs of some kind. There was no earwig mother there so I guess I can count them out as earwig eggs. Wonder what they were.?
I now have my glasses cleaned and the magnifying glass is handy. You can be sure that from now on I will look closer when I see an earwig so I will know exactly what is. I'm much more interested in them than I was.
Clues
Go to the Church at 970 North 400 East, Springville, Utah. Park on the North side of the North Parking lot. There is a long row of Lilac bushes growing along a retaining wall where an evergreen shrubs overlaps the top of the wall . Start at the first bush on the west.
1. After 10 there is a runt. Don't you always feel a bit sorry for the runt? I do.
2. From there - step on 6 yellow lines going in the direction of the setting sun. Stop on the 6th and look toward Salt Lake.
4. The box is in back of a __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __, on top of the __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ - __ __ __ __ and underneath an __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ - __ __ __ __ __ . All of the blanks are thing I things have been previously mentioned above.
Good Luck & ENJOY! (You may want to cover your ears.)
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