Spittlebugs

 When I was a teenager, the act of spitting was a golly or gollying, and just lately, North Head has been taking a bombardment of gollies, going on appearances. Bushes all over the headland are garlanded like this, with festoons of foam, as though some grubby louts have just passed through.

The 'gollies' are made by small bugs called spittlebugs, and when I say "bugs", I am using entomologist-speak, so my bugs are Hemiptera, insects with piercing mouthparts, like the cicadas, aphids and bird-of-paradise flies (which I will get around to describing one day).

These insects feed on plant sap, and make a sticky foam that seems to keep predators away. Working as a volunteer in a sanctuary, I was asked last Tuesday to prune back some trees that get a bit exuberant. We don't like doing this, but it reduces the fire hazard, so we do it with care. One Monotoca was home to many spittlebugs, and as one of the pockets in my work trousers always has a supply of jars, I snipped away a few of them, and by the time I got home, they had emerged from their foam to see what was going on. So out came the macro lens and the microscope.

First, here we have a juvenile and an adult (some people call them froghoppers): they were both in a Petri dish, which is the curve you can see.

But how big are they? One reason for using a Petri dish is that you cam slip a millimetre scale beneath it: if you let insects loose on a scale, they always seem to run away.

Now let's look at the juveniles:

There's more to say about these beasties, but as I'm flat out (as usual), here's a useful link. I will be playing with these for a few weeks, and this week, I was showing some to Stage 1 kids at Manly Vale, so here are some better shots:

If you want more stuff like this, you could do worse than look into my The Nature of North Head.  The price can be as low as $3 for non-dead-tree versions, $20 for monochrome, but the one in bookshops is colour and dead tree at $50.