The little understood webspinners

Last night a flying male came in the kitchen, encountered the light over the table and fell on the table. This was a familiar event for the hot season, so I thought it would be appropriate to write about it now. When observing these insects walking on a flat surface one can notice that they are very sensitive to touch (if you touch their head end, they will run backwards at a rapid speed, several time faster as their meandering speed). This particular feature is reflected in their Latin name Embioptera that means "lively wings", although this refers to their movement rather than their flight. Only embiopteran males have wings, females and nymphs are wingless. Males get out of the galleries where they live and fly around looking for a potential mate at night. They are dark colored, almost black, reaching the size of a small house fly in length.
Their forelimbs resemble arms of Popeye the Sailor Man with the forearms conspicuously enlarged. In webspinners numerous silk glands are situated there, about 150 glands in each leg.
These are my personal observations, and if they have boosted your curiosity you may find more information using references compiled in a Wikipedia article on Embioptera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embioptera
Photo:Dave Scriven

The little wonder: Petalonyx

Petalonyx nitidus (Photo courtesy Steve Matson)

I would like to discuss the plant, Petalonyx, from the family Loasaceae.  Petalonyx exhibits a unique and unexpected characteristic in the botanical world. If you have the curiosity to look at these tiny flowers you would be in wonderment over the floral structure because the stamens appear to be outside the corolla. a  ranging from our desserts in North America down as far as Southern Andes. The diversity appeared to me to be greater in South America than it is in our dessert areas. I will discuss this family in more detail later.
In our book "Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs" I mentioned Petalonyx in dedications because of its overtly unusual flower structure. In many old and recent botany books and floras this fact is not emphasized, although today the Wikipedia articles on Petalonyx do point out this characteristic.  Even inexperienced observers of flower structure might realize that in any flower the stamens (male parts) are confined within the corolla (petals). However this one little genus has broken the rule: stamens appear to have originated outside the corolla. They actually are outside at the time of flowering, this is accomplished by five anthers pushing outward through spaces between the five petals bases during bud development and eventually elongating and becoming very conspicuous.

Begonia and Bignonia - who knows the difference between these?

How about straightening them out? Here is a real answer. Both genera were named after 2 Frenchmen and they have in been in the botanical language over 300 years. If one's interest is in the green house plants he will be very familiar with Begonias both fibrous and tuberous, some of which have flowers as big as rose buds and others are hardly thumb size. Begonias are monoecious, they have male and female flowers on the same plant. This difference is easily observed since the female flowers have 3 projecting wings, which fuse together to form the inferior ovary. Male flower is nothing like that, they are irregularly dispersed on a single inflorescence - cluster flowers. There are few other plants that are monoecious: carob, date palm, alders, and few others. The nearest relative of begonias is the cucumber family - Cucurbitaceae. Close internal scrutiny of the curcurbit flower parts would reveal that relationship.
Looking at Bignonia in its broadest sense shows that they include well-known flowering woody and some herbaceous plants throughout the world. Probably all their flowers are bilaterally symmetrical and most frequently have bivalve fruits. For example Jacaranda, trumpet vines, catalpa, snap dragons, monkey flowers, and many more.