…and That Has Taken Me on a Surprising Journey
What made that hole? I wondered. There in the lily pad leaf was a quarter-sized hole. To satisfy my curiosity, I lifted an edge of the lily pad.
Did I ever get more than I bargained for! I didn’t get a big scary surprise like coming face-to-face with a water snake. Rather, that hole started me on a surprisingly long and fascinating journey that keeps getting bigger and more complicated. You see, when I turned up the lily pad, I spotted the missing leaf piece fastened on the underside against the stem.
Hmm, I pondered, An underwater leaf shelter like what caterpillars construct to hide from birds and wasps. The thing is, this leaf shelter is under the water! What critter did this, and what is it hiding from? Why yes, of course, it is hiding from fish, turtles, dragonfly nymphs, etc. What about the critter that made the leaf shelter from the lily pad hole?
Well, I pulled off the leaf shelter, and under it there was only a hole in the stem. Of course, I had to tear open the stem to see what was inside. What I discovered was a caterpillar that was living and obviously feeding inside the water lily stem. “Now I have to know what kind of moth it turns into and any other interesting things I can learn about the caterpillar’s life story.”
I did some research to find out about water lily stem borers, and, although I found out about a couple of different species that do that, none of their descriptions exactly matched what I had seen. So, I went off exploring other water lily patches. I did spot some of those other species, but have yet to find the answers that I’m looking for. Nonetheless, it sure has been a lot of fun visiting various ponds and lakes, enjoying the blooming water lilies and seeing all kinds of other aquatic habitat dwellers. That hole in a lily pad leaf started me on this quest.
One day I stopped at another lake to see if I could find “my” lily pad stem-boring caterpillars. When I came to a stump sticking up out in the lake a bit, I jumped out to it, sat down, and started observing the lily pads around me. Soon I spotted a lily pad with a hole in it, so I reached down and turned it over. No leaf shelter and no caterpillar. Disappointedly, I laid the lily pad back down, and just like that, a wasp came flying in and started scrambling around on the leaf. Now, I’ve watched many parasitic wasps as they scramble around waving their antennae and flitting their wings while they hunt their prey. That’s what this lily pad wasp was doing. It was hunting! Hunting what? Water, or something else? I wondered.
Then, zoommm, it was gone. SO, now I was not only looking for water lily stem borers, but also for wasps hunting on the lily pads. In short order, like ten minutes, I saw six different species of parasitic wasps hunting on the lily pads.
As soon as I got home I looked in my reference book on aquatic life and, of all things, there was a whole chapter on aquatic hymenoptera. Sure enough, I added hunting for aquatic wasps that hunt their prey under the water to my original quest of finding out about the life story of the lily pad stem-boring caterpillar.
One of the aquatic hymenoptera that I read about is a species of wasp that hunts fishing spiders. So, yes, off I went to a small lily-pad-filled lake where I had seen lots of fishing spiders, and, of all things, I was hunting for fishing spiders and their wasps. See that? Now my quest to find more about the water lily stem borer and then aquatic wasps was just broadened to include hunting for fishing spiders. That has got to top the list because I don’t like spiders! When I look at a whole spider, they look creepy. But I must say, when I look them right in the eyes, they really look rather neat.
My hunt for fishing spiders and the wasps hunting them is ongoing, because, unfortunately, I didn’t get to see a wasp get its prey. For that matter, I haven’t seen any aquatic wasps diving into the water for their prey. Nor have I found out much more about the life story of the lily pad stem borers. So it seems my quest started by a hole in a lily pad has only begun. May I suggest you look around a pond (or even your yard) for a hole in a leaf and ask, “What made that hole?” That might take you on a surprising journey. We might even run into each other while on some quest somewhere.
By the way, have you ever seen a cross section of a water lily leaf?