2022 was our first full year living in western Colorado. With much work to do on our gardening and orchard establishment, we did not camp, hike, and collect as much as normal. We had three major aphid collecting outings, two of which were to New Mexico. A long-postponed geology conference was held in May near Grants, and the usual fall geology conference was based in Socorro in September. I tagged along for both, collecting aphids and hiking while Gina looked at rocks and hung out with friends.

A one sentence summary: What a difference 4 months can make!

May, 2022

Wildfire was on the minds of everyone in New Mexico after an incredibly dry winter and spring. I had made some good collections of sagebrush aphids and a few others in SW Colorado as we made our way to Grants with a few nights of camping. Among these aphids was the apparently undescribed species of Epameibaphis that has long very thin siphunculi and lives at medium elevations on Artemisia tridentata that seems to be Wyoming sage, Basin Big sage, or something in between. In the hills south of Naturita this species was very abundant on sagebrush that had been heavily browsed by elk.

As often happens in northwestern New Mexico, we struggled to find good camp sites among the oil fields. After hours of driving on the 24^th of May, we settled next to a tree and a cattle watering site on the edge of a fragment of public land amid the oil wells and their flaming natural gas vents. Collecting looked to be bleak (it was). But, on an evening hike with the dogs I found an entire forest floor of petrified trees. Some rested on the soil surface and looked like the tree had fallen and shattered into fragments. It was one of most exciting non-aphid finds of my life.

The next morning we visited the ancient ruins at Chaco Canyon. Although the unusually hot spring day presented challenges for our dogs waiting in the truck (dogs are not allowed in the ruins), we had some fun walks among and through these ancient buildings. It is surreal to touch those stone walls and imagine the humans who built them so many centuries before.

Moving south from there, we arrived in Grants, which would be our home base for a few days. The landscape was so dry, there having been hardly any rain since summer of 2021. Mina, Mani, and I spent 2 full days in the forests and deserts looking for aphids, observing the plants and animals, and feeling for the parched and worried plants. We found some interesting sites and a great view or two. Collecting was slow, but as ever, careful searching revealed some good samples of springtime aphids.

After the geology conference we left Grants for a final camp in the Zuni mountains. As we left town, we heard that, due to extreme drought and fire danger, all National Forests in New Mexico would close to public access the following day. We had that one last night to enjoy New Mexico, filled with fear that our favorite forest sites may burn in the coming days and weeks (thankfully, they didn’t).

Summer 2022 was one of gardening, building, and doing around our little ‘farm.’ Across the Southwest it was a wet summer, the monsoonal moisture plentiful for the mountains and plains. As September neared, I was getting excited by the prospects of collecting aphids in central New Mexico after a wet summer.

September, 2022

Leaving home on 23 September, we headed southeast to camp in southern Colorado before crossing the border to New Mexico. Aphid collecting was productive at nearly every stop and campsite along the way. We arrived in Socorro some days later, enjoying the hospitality of a friend in town. She provided a hint for aphid collecting: South Canyon at the base of the Magdalena Mountains. Go west on highway 60, she said, and turn on a little road marked with a sign saying, “Passenger cars not recommended.” It’ll be fine, she said (it was). It took some driving back and forth to find the road, nothing more than a two-track trail behind a rickety gate. Driving through a few cattle allotments and gates, I found the Forest Service boundary and a disused trailhead. Aphids were everywhere! This site is where I finally figured out how to use the plant identification app called PictureThis. The summer had been so wet that wildflowers were everywhere, and so many species were new to me. I learned, for example, what Viguiera looks like (it has a big leggy Illinoia on it). We hiked up the canyon that felt like black bear country, identified plants, and collected aphids. The most exciting find was an oddly apple-colored aphid living on Philadelphus microphyllus (a small-leaved shrub of canyons and rocky places). Once mounted, this aphid is similar to some Acyrthosiphon, especially the species I recently described called A. rockspirea (except with longer siphunculi than that species). What a fantastic collecting area!

The next day the dogs and I drove up Water Canyon road to the top of South Mountain. Once again, I was overwhelmed by aphids everywhere I looked. It was the perfect time of year to get heteroecious aphids arriving on their shrubby primary hosts and producing oviparae, and the monoecious aphids on their many hosts with wingless and winged females, oviparae, and males. Here, I got numerous specimens of the undescribed Illinoia that lives on Monardella in those mountains, and to my great satisfaction, I finally found a couple alates of the undescribed Wahlgreniella that lives on Fallugia (a.k.a. Apache plume). On the way back down the mountain we stopped and collected several times. Among these was a north-facing spur road, along which grew large Holodiscus plants (the large-leaf kind called ocean spray). I collected numerous big aphids with incredibly long antennae. I assumed they were the species I described in 2000 called Macrosiphum holodisci (they weren’t – they are yet another undescribed species that cannot be clearly placed in any genus). What a day of collecting!

There were too many good collections and sites in this trip to recount. After slide mounting season I’d made 200 slides from that one trip to New Mexico – about one third of the entire 2022. This trip renewed my enthusiasm for New Mexico and for studying the aphids of southwestern U.S.A., and a longing to be able to see the aphids of neighboring Mexico (if only). The 2023 trip will be southern New Mexico in September. May the summer be wet and the aphids abundant!

I spent a lot of 2021 away from Aphidtrek; it was a busy year, full of newness.

Pseudoepameibaphis

The first couple months of the year I spent diving into the taxonomy of Pseudoepameibaphis, one of my beloved genera of sagebrush aphids. This work followed years of intentional collecting of this genus everywhere I went, from roadside dog peeing stops to the tops of the highest mountains we hiked to. A decade of samples had finally set the stage for a thorough evaluation of what I had found and an attempt to align that with what was previously understood. I did much of the usual – sorting samples into what seemed like species (far more than we have published names), making measurements, thinking about host plant specificity and lack thereof, comparing to old literature, and so-on. I also drew. After 30 years of drawing my specimens the same way — camera lucida with pencil onto paper, tracing onto drafting film, touch-up and stippling with black ink – I switched to drawing directly onto paper starting with pencil and camera lucida, followed by black ink for outlines and shading with pencil to finish the look. It worked well and was much more enjoyable than stippling in black ink.

Roger Blackman, Macrosiphum

About the time that I was setting my Pseudoepameibaphis work aside, intending one more year of field research before preparing a publication, I was asked to submit a manuscript in honor of a colleague, Roger Blackman, marking his 80^th birthday. Having shelved Pseudoepameibaphis for a year, I decided to quickly write up one of my undescribed Macrosiphum. But which one? I chose one that I’d made a lot of progress on while living in southern Oregon: a species with unusual tarsi, living on extremely sticky plants called Silene (a.k.a. catchfly). I had recently found several new sampling sites near Lakeview, had numerous specimens of a very similar species that I wanted to cover in conjunction with it, so I figured a paper was possible by the deadline in late spring. So, a quick shift in my aphid work to another new species!

Packing up, Moving out

In March, we got the news: our long-awaited opportunity to relocate to western Colorado had finally come. Moving for a new job (Gina’s), we immediately had to act: plan a trip to look for houses, put our house on the market, finish up our projects or put them into dormancy. I quickly decided to finish my new Macrosiphum paper before moving; it would take every spare moment while making plans for our relocation – a project we would undertake alone, from packing and cleaning to loading and driving. Everything came together. Just as I finished the manuscript and sent it to colleagues for peer review, we had to start the physical work of moving. Our soon-to-be new home would be a house with three irrigated acres in a warm desert valley. It will be our new place to connect with, to nurture, to plant shrubs and trees that we hope will far outlive us. Through this process of hard physical work most days for 2 months, I learned that my middle-aged joints and muscles could still accomplish much and benefit from the physical demands. After getting moved in, we learned that we could dig 57 post holes and build more than 100 meters of post-and-pole fence. It felt good to be done, and the dogs appreciate having their own clearly defined space.

Before moving, I transplanted plum and cherry seedlings from our greenhouse into a large pot. We moved these babies to Colorado. In October, these became the first row of trees planted on our new place, the first batch of many food-producing plants we’ll have here.

The Mother Ship of North American Aphidology

My aphid studies began in 1988, landing a summer job for Gary Reed, who gave me aphids, aphid traps, and a copy of Miriam Palmer’s “Aphids of the Rocky Mountain Region,” asking me to try identifying aphids we found in eastern Oregon. At the time, this book was by far the best resource we had in all of North America. So for me, the Rocky Mountain Region has been like the mother ship of aphids throughout all my research and exploration, everything I find being somehow tied back to what my aphidology ancestors (Gillette, Hottes, Knowlton, Smith, and especially Palmer) had found in Colorado and neighboring states. I had traveled through the region a number of times over the years and had a vague sense of it – what it must have been like to collect those samples from the 1880s onward. I imagined Gillette and Palmer on collecting trips, driving rickety cars on terrible roads, carrying multiple spare tires and tools for the frequent carburetor adjustments that would have been necessary as they rolled up and down the mountains. Now, our new place is among the sampling sites in Palmer’s book – just one example is the type locality of Macrosiphum yagasogae (=M. insularis): Mesa, Colorado, which is visible from our new garden.

Hypotheses

Almost daily walks in the deserts and forests near home lead me to make hypotheses about aphid biology; I suspect that aphids of deserts and seasonally dry shrub-steppe habitats may be different from aphids of forests and other damp places. For example, what’s the interaction of aphids and the local Artemisia bigelovii? Like other sagebrushes, this plant is extremely drought tolerant. However, it seems to be specially adapted to the common pattern of seasonal drought in the Southwest: dry much of the winter and spring, with monsoonal moisture in mid-summer. This contrasts with sagebrushes in the lowlands of the Northwest, where rain falls almost exclusively during winter and sagebrush must endure a summer drought. So, A. bigelovii is not well-prepared to support aphids in spring and early summer. Does it support aphids at all? My hypothesis is that yes, it does: in the fall and very early spring. And, this is what I observed in 2021: Obtusicauda and Epameibaphis widely colonizing A. bigelovii in September and October. You might wonder, then, where the aphids go during later spring and early summer. My hypothesis is that they migrate up in elevation to colonize sagebrushes that benefit from winter snowfall and enjoy a strong spring and summer growing season. These include mountain sage, Artemisia tridentata vaseyana, low sage, Artemisia arbuscula, and silver sage, Artemisia cana. I have similar hypotheses about other desert-inhabiting aphids in this part of the world. It will be fun doing the field research to accumulate evidence and examples.

Place

Connecting to the places I live has always been important. And by “place” I mean the biology and geology all around me, whether the spiders running through my garden plots, the Geocoris big-eyed bugs hunting through the grass like tigers of the insect world, to sweeping and complex ecosystems of canyon, desert, and forest. This place, western Colorado, is my Place now, where I plan to live and study the rest of my active life. Learning a place never ends, and that’s the joy of it. Starting big with learning the landscape, then learning the occupants of the landscape and its history, to uncovering layer after layer of complexity and interactions, thinking about forces that brought it here, and where it will go in the future. Curiosity cannot be extinguished, it just delves deeper into layers of complexity, noticing detail after detail. Each day brings a sense of anticipation – what new details will be noticed for the first time today?

The webs of a Place

When I think of a place and what it means to me, it feels like a web of micro-places inhabited by a web of beings. All of these are interacting. Not all possible interactions are happening all the time. An aphid can find a plant and live there for a time before moving on. An owl lives in a draw this winter, eating the local rodents, fertilizing its home trees with pellets and manure. Ravens gather to socialize among the boulders and junipers of a shallow canyon, bringing the sounds of their voices, the whooshing of their wings, and changing the behavior of all the vertebrates in the area. The elk gather for a time on a plateau among the canyons, leaving a layer of manure marbles. Junipers reach into the web, blooming in billowing clouds of pollen, later in puddles of waxy blue berries to be washed down the arroyos, eaten by coyotes. The webs connecting all the beings and micro-places are effectively infinite and pulling them up and peering into them is the lifelong process of getting to know and connecting to Place.

2021 was a lot of work, and we brought many life changes into it. Now, the Solstice has passed, the sun is returning, I feel a simmering hiss of life all around me, waiting to vibrantly boil over when spring comes.

Pretty much everybody on the planet has had an unusual year this 2020.  For us here in Oregon’s Outback, life has been close to normal except that our pattern of paid work has changed and I no longer have a busy travel schedule. Limitations on tourist travel also affected our camping and collecting year. But overall, living on the outskirts of a tiny town have allowed us to keep up a normal habit of outdoor activities and explorations, albeit closer to home than normal.

            Collecting disruptions started early, however, because I had planned to spend a couple weeks of April in the hills near the ocean in SW Oregon.  Then lockdowns interfered and the entire trip was canceled.  Oddly, 2020 also brought a very poor year for my beloved aphids in SE Oregon.  Many species that are normally common almost everywhere I go were rare or impossible to find this year.  In fact, sagebrush produced almost no aphids this year until September. Instead, sagebrush was beset by psyllids, leafhoppers, and mirids. I’ve seen this shift away from aphid domination of sagebrush before. We need another graduate student to figure out the ecology behind this phenomenon!

            Slow collecting and no work travel left me with more time to work on a major manuscript that I’d been planning for this year – the aphids of Holodiscus. This paper includes information I’ve been gathering since the early 1990s. I’ll have to try to share more details once it is published.

            Despite the roadblocks, I made some good progress on several field research efforts this year.

Apparently undescribed species of Aphis.

            In our local forests I have been pursuing a handful of Aphis species that seem to be heretofore unknown. One of them lives on various Umbelliferae from our valley floors (about 1200 m elevation) to our mountain streams and peaks above 2000 meters. It has been hard to capture photos of this species because of its very active habit.  But, 2020 gave me a good photo op.

            Another Aphis I’ve been after lives on Hackelia (Boraginaceae) at mid to high elevations. It is all black and closely resembles one of the Aphis found on Veratrum (Liliaceae) and one of the species on Valeriana. In life these black Aphis make me think of the group of species that live on Senecio and relatives, but less so when mounted on slides.

            I also had the good luck to find truly massive colonies of the undescribed Aphis species that feeds on Potentilla gracilis. The more I look at this species, with its strange body shape and long apical rostral segment, I wonder if it is related to the subgenus Zyxaphis that feeds on sagebrushes and rabbit brushes.

Important Macrosiphum finds

            Early in the season (June) I took a day off from work and collected in our nearby Fremont National Forest.  Near the end of the day I found the long-elusive fundatrix of my recently described species Macrosiphum glawatz on Potentilla gracilis. It was living on a nice green plant that was actually rooted in a disused roadway. As with several of my favorite species in this genus, the fundatrix of M. glawatz is almost indistinguishable morphologically from regular early season viviparae. On that same trip I was able to find the fundatrix of the undescribed species that lives on Lonicera cauriana.

            In early July we found a lovely camping site high up in the Ochoco National Forest, near the summit of Spanish Peak. There, I was lucky to find many good specimens of the undescribed Macrosiphum that lives on the sticky forest-inhabiting Silene that grows on certain soil types from the Cascade Mountains east and south. Most important was a presence of the fundatrix stage.

            Later in the year, in conjunction with a trip to northern Idaho to visit a good friend, I was lucky to find the bizarre purple Macrosiphum that lives on Trautvetteria. That trip also started a string of finds of the undescribed species that lives on grouse whortleberry (Vaccinium scoparium).

Pseudoepameibaphis – my second favorite genus (for the moment)

            Having finished one big paper this year, I am considering making my next one a thorough coverage of what is known about a sagebrush-inhabiting genus called Pseudoepameibaphis. I’ve got lots of new information, hypotheses about host-specificity, and at least two new species.  The most exciting new species is one that looks much like a little beetle – it is black and its dorsum is hard and sometimes brittle like a beetle. It seems to live almost exclusively at or near the top of mountain peaks on the category of Artemisia tridentata called mountain sage, and sometimes shares plants with a more typical pale member of Pseudoepameibaphis. On that special day in June I was able to retrace my steps from a couple years before and find this aphid living adjacent to a particular burned and fallen tree on Winter Rim. Many other plants in the area sampled, and only on this plant did this aphid species live.  Later in the season I found it on a few plants along a high elevation stream in the Warner Mountains.

A new tent!

            I could list a few more exciting finds from 2020, but instead, I’ll finish with the big news of our new bigger tent!  It’s great because even a tall stick-figure human like me can stand up in it, and it has a vestibule for shelter in wind and rain. 

            From here on in 2020 and early 2021 it will be finishing slide mounting and then doing some careful curation and species identification, sorting un-identifiable material, and of course making plans for next year’s collecting.

I had a very productive collecting year in 2019, adding almost 900 slides to the collection and pushing forward several long-term research goals.  The highlight of the year, arguably, was our final long trip of 2019, driving to Clayton, New Mexico and back in late September/early October via Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. There were some cold camping nights, beautiful places, and amazing sunsets.

There were many good aphid finds on this trip, but the best were several samples collected on Holodiscus (Rosaceae). I have been studying the aphids that live on this genus of plants since the early 1990s, including publishing one new species and a couple host plant alternations back in 2000.  I have much new information since then, and plan to write a major manuscript during 2020 reporting on my findings.  Among other finds during this trip was a pair of collections that conclusively show that one of the fern-feeding species I study, Macrosiphum walkeri,  uses Holodiscus as primary host in the Southwest (I previously showed it was anholocyclic in the warmer parts of the Northwest). In one site near Taos, New Mexico I was able to collect many alate viviparae, alate males, and oviparae on Holodiscus. Nearby, I gathered some of the same species on a small woodland fern on a steep streambank, showing that migration between fern and Holodiscus was underway that week! In other sites I was able to get the apterous males and oviparae of the mysterious species of Illinoia that uses Holodiscus, and in Colorado near Denver I gathered good samples of the undescribed Acyrthosiphon.

Clayton was not the best aphid collecting area due to the time of year and the type of habitats, but at least I was able to collect some unusual Pseudoepameibaphis on Artemisia filifolia, find the largest dragonfly I’ve ever seen, plus my first wild tarantula. The return trip was slow for aphid collecting but offered some excellent camping and views.

Now, as 2020 begins, I am preparing for a lovely opportunity I’ve been granted – a 2-week residency at Playa on Summer Lake during which I’ll be drafting the manuscript on the aphids of Holodiscus. It should be a great time to work in seclusion and meet some interesting artists and possibly other scientists from across the country.

I might as well continue the tradition of doing a spring aphid research update!  This winter was yet another intense affair, with copious snow and rain, most of it coming late.  After nearly unheard-of warmth in January, there has now been four months of cool and wet weather, including much snow and upwards of 3 meters of snow on some of my favorite collecting areas in the hills. Even today, 26 May, there is a layer of new snow on the hills surrounding our valley.  Our growing season is always late here, but the cool and wet has made it even later, with the lilacs just now in bloom around town, and camas lily opening in the valley.

Aphids-wise things are of course also slow. Perhaps more than some years the slow spring has highlighted which aphids are really early-season opportunists, and which might be less worried about an early start.

I have collected some shoots of important woody host plants and attempted to root cuttings in the greenhouse.  The aim is to establish these plants on our property to make in-person study of their aphids easier and more thorough. These plants were the Ribes hosts of Aphis (Bursaphis) —Ribes aureum, Ribes cereum, and Ribes velutinum — the Salix host of one of my Macrosiphum species, and the small-leafed Holodiscus from rocky slopes near here (often called Holodiscus dumosus). The Salix were the most cooperative, producing vigorous roots, and they are already growing in the soil next to the goldfish pond.  All the others are less likely to root and survive, but hope remains after well over a month.

Early season collecting has once again focused on Aphis (Bursaphis) in our local area.  Last weekend I found a good group maturing to alates on the developing fruits of Ribes cereum on the slopes above Abert Lake.  This is interesting for two reasons.  First, many of my previous samples on R. cereum were either collected from curled fresh leaves on new shoots deep in the plant canopy or were collected with my beating tray and therefore were from unknown plant microhabitats. Second, this aphid was obviously the one with short URS and long cauda that I’ve hypothesized migrates to Epilobium paniculatum.  I know there are a few species of Aphis (Bursaphis) using R. cereum in one way or another, but this collection was my first concrete lead on possible niche partitioning within the host plant.  Subsequently, I potted three small E. paniculatum plants and started a host transfer experiment in the greenhouse.  After 5 days, the aphids are happy and healthy on the Epilobium. Time will tell, however, as aphids and plants grow.

A major planned research push for this year is resolving some of the biological questions about aphids of Holodiscus. To that end I was able to pick up some Aphis holodisci on H. discolor a few hours drive north of here and establish a host transfer experiment in the field near home onto our local Veratrum. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m almost certain that most of the Aphis on Veratrum in the Northwest are Aphis holodisci. I was also lucky enough to get the early-season morphs of one of the Illinoia species on Holodiscus ‘dumosus’ on the steep slope above Abert Lake.

Finally, spring is perhaps the most important time to make headway on my studies of aphids on sagebrushes. The taxonomy of aphids on these plants is plagued, I think, by morphological variations induced by the extreme environments they are exposed to (i.e. snow, cold, heat, drought, extreme soil types).  For example, summer dwarfism is a serious problem in taxonomy, and so are seasonal variations in cuticular pigmentation. I think taxonomy of these groups will rely on “apples-to-apples” comparisons, which in this context means specimens collected at the same time of year, in the same locations, during the same year.  Ideally, I’d like a cross section of my Epameibaphis and Pseudoepameibaphis species from May, June, July, August, and September, and across many collection sites.  I hope to accomplish this in time, allowing comparisons that can separate the species-related morphological variation from the variation induced by season, host plant, location, etc.

**I’ll come back to aphids a little bit toward the end, I promise.  Meanwhile, since this is my website I’m going to write what I want to.**

Three things came together this past week that prompt this essay. First, I am reading the book A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, second, I watched a crushing, tears inducing, documentary called Generation Wealth by Lauren Greenfield, and third, I was pointedly reminded of a major failing of my own from about a decade ago.

As human beings we mostly want to feel like we are good, and that what we do or support is done for good reasons, is right, or just. Arguably, there are psychopaths who differ from most of us, but I’m putting them aside. Throughout U.S. history, as documented in Zinn’s book, horrible things have been done by those in power including the displacement and genocide of the native peoples of North America, the capture, commodification, and torture of African slaves, the subjugation of poor white immigrants, the severe repression and disrespect of women, the abuse of children in factories, the invasion of Mexico and theft of its land, the destruction of the natural systems across the whole continent, genocide and war in SE Asia and almost every other corner of the globe, etc.

Many justifications have been put forward over the centuries, explaining why atrocities like these are good things. Concepts such as human advancement, or “progress,” having a higher value in the long run than the human suffering it causes along the way.  Or, that killing and mis-treating Native Americans, Africans, or Mexicans, is fine because they are not equal to white people, or that they are not in fact human (an idea being promulgated even today by Donald Trump, calling Central American refugees ‘animals’). Subjugating women was justified because they were deemed weak and generally less capable, and that the positions and opportunities they were granted by the men in power were the most they could really handle. The U.S. throughout its history has justified invasion of other countries by framing invasion as good for the local population, that the U.S. will bring civilization, freedom, prosperity, or ‘democracy,’ or that invasion is necessary in order to advance human progress.  The destruction of the environment is justified in the name of economic growth, which is taken by most people in rich parts of the world as necessary for human survival. It’s all about the way the story is told. If we tell the story to ourselves and each other in the right way, all sorts of terrible things feel less terrible.

The same trend exists in our personal lives and the choices we make day to day, month to month, about how to live. Although “Generation Wealth” is about a lot more than personal choices, it’s that aspect of the film I want to write about.  The film documents parts of the lives of several people with different stories.  One is a banker who put accumulation of wealth above family, friends, humanity in general.  Another is a business executive who put work above all other goals in life until it was almost too late. There were stories about people who subjugated themselves through prostitution and pornography in their attempt to get ahead, to gain wealth and power over others. There was a 6-year-old beauty pageant winner who was in it for the money, who already viewed her goal in life as money accumulation.

Two stories in the film hit me the hardest. One was the film-maker herself, who had grown up with divorced parents who put their careers first, and who then herself had become very career focused, choosing work over family in a number of ways.  In one segment, she discussed a choice she made about leaving home for a work assignment just weeks after giving birth to a son. Her husband encouraged the trip and was there to look after the family, but still it was an important decision. She decided to go. She interviewed her sons for the film, and a heart-wrenching scene was when her teenage son said that from his perspective, she was gone a lot throughout his childhood.  He said something about realizing that “damage was done.” This was a teenager talking to his mother, saying that she had made poor decisions about being gone so much.  He said these things, swallowed hard, then looked with compassion at the camera and asked her if she was OK.  I bet she was crying. I would have been.  I’ve been in her shoes, choosing between family time and work time.  I chose work very often.  The justification I think many people like me articulate is that “the kids will be OK.” And, we tell ourselves, the money, social advancement, and perceived stability will benefit the kids down the road enough to counter-balance the short-term damage.  We want those things, money, social status, and stability, and justify our aggressive pursuit of them by framing it as good for the kids.  Would the kids be better off if we made decisions to be involved rather than away? Very likely. But instead, we make the decision, tell ourselves that they’ll be OK, and that OK is good enough.

Another core aspect of the film is the idea that accumulation of wealth or achievement of social status leads to happiness, that having what popular culture pushes us to have is the recipe.  Some people are obsessed with money and possessions as that path to happiness.  Others focus on looking and acting the part. One story in the film was of a person who chose cosmetic surgery, and having the right body and face, as the path to happiness.  This came with great sacrifice in terms of surgeries and financial burden that she could not afford. It made for stress in her single-parent-of-two-children household. This belief in looking a certain way as being necessary for happiness was all-consuming for her, and (it was implied) became so for her teenage daughter. This storyline ended with the woman bankrupt, still obsessed with her physical appearance, and with her teenager dead (from suicide).

At last we are coming back to the third prompt to writing this essay: my choices made when my sons were teens, about a decade ago. The reminder of those days came to me last week via a share of an old Facebook post from a friend of one of my sons about the dangerous self-destructive behavior they engaged in as teens.

The driving force behind the most troubling of my choices might have been similar to the woman I just mentioned: a sense that if only I can succeed at being happy, my happiness will benefit my children (I was also a full time single parent). It’s akin to trickle-down economics.  Make myself rich with happiness and my children will reap the benefits.  The woman above sought happiness in cosmetic surgery and the pursuit of physical appearance.  My pursuit was not unrelated: romantic love and a happiness-inducing relationship and/or marriage with a woman.  By pursuing happiness for myself in an intimate relationship, the argument went, I would achieve a happiness that would benefit me and my whole family enough to outweigh the negatives.  What were those costly negative choices I made?  Mainly, to spend a lot of time away from home, leaving young people to fend for themselves and without parental supervision, involvement, and guidance. Were they likely to be OK through it all?  I suppose. At least that’s what I chose to believe.  Was I, in fact, achieving a happiness that was great enough to overcome the negatives of my absences?  Absolutely not.  It was an intensely stressful time, trying to maintain a warm and exciting romantic life while maintaining a more-than-full-time job, a house, property, a pack of dogs, and being a good single parent to two teens.

A key thing in the film, which I know would apply to me, were I interviewed about this story I just old, is the facial expressions of people telling their stories, of why they did what they did. They would explain their rationale for their choices, often with energy and a smile. Then, after they spoke their final sentence, they’d settle just a bit and their face said it all – “I know what I did was wrong, and I knew it at the time.” This applied to the mother of the filmmaker, asked about whether she knew that her choices as a parent hurt her children.  She said she didn’t know this, but the look on her face said something completely different. The cosmetic surgery woman was the same – even when she was making the choices she did, she knew they were wrong at some level, but used a lie to herself to justify them.  Like them, I lied to myself and everyone I talked to about those times. I said that I was leaving home in pursuit of a happiness-inducing romantic life for the benefit of the children and everyone else in my life.  No, that was a lie and a part of me knew it from the start.

While I was away from home, ostensibly pursuing my trickle-down happiness, much unhealthy and self-destructive behavior was going on at home. Dangerous things. Through those things, I could have ended up like the woman in the film, with a dead child.  Luckily, death did not ensue, but death-no death is not a very useful metric.  What would have, could have, been the outcome if every weekend or week I spent away from home, leaving teenagers to fend for themselves and party with friends, I had instead stayed at home? Cooked. Involved them in projects. Taken them hiking in my quests for aphids. Read more books with them. Heck, played more video games with them.

My sons are now OK, but only after suffering the most heart-wrenching and at times life-threatening periods in their early 20s. Could those hard times have been avoided or ameliorated if I had made other choices?  Quite likely. Do I know that my decisions in many situations were wrong? Yes.  Was I fully honest with myself and those around me at the time about my feelings and my justifications for my choices? No.

Sometimes I get going on a rant and then rhetorically ask, “Why did I start talking about this?” This is one of those times.

Two final things before I finish here.  First, regrets. Second, happiness. 

I’ve occasionally talked with one friend or another about the ways in which I let my sons down as a father.  They caution me about needlessly punishing myself for things long in the past.  Another friend once said something to the effect of, the only thing we’ll have left on our deathbeds is our regrets. I disagree with the latter, and the former needn’t worry.  I strongly believe that looking at and recognizing one’s failures is a good thing and does not lead to sadness or deathbed regrets. There is much in my life I could have done better from various perspectives (myself, my brother, sisters, parents, wives, children, etc.), but I know very deeply that I tried as hard as I could at the time. Trying hard was what I could do.  I shouldn’t feel anger or sadness with my past self, but just acknowledge that I’ve learned since then and that I have grown as a result of my mistakes.

Finally, happiness.  Ultimately, Generation Wealth is about people trying to achieve happiness.  They are all conditioned to pursue happiness through acquisition, accumulation, and power.  That fact is not their faults.  It’s a fallacy almost all of us first-world, lacking-for-nothing people cling to dearly. The film was about seeking money, fame, power, and property as means to happiness. But I want to emphasize another common fallacy not dealt with by the film — acquisition of humans, of relationships, as pathways to happiness.  Happiness never results from acquisition of or owning anything. Happiness cannot be given to, or made for, another person.  Happiness comes from choosing. Each of us is responsible for our own happiness.  It can be right here, right now, if we choose.  The trick? How to effect that choice.  Therein lies the real mystery. The place to look for effecting that choice is inside, to grasping our true identity, to understanding our unity with everything.

For a couple other ideas on happiness see the following:

Outdoors the snow is flying and winter is stamping its authority after an unsettlingly warm January.  The mountains are being energized with deep layers of snow. It’s the fourth consecutive year that our little corner of the world has had a respite from the ravages of climate change and winterless winters.  My little world of aphid research has been productive since the first flakes flew in November, with one Macrosiphum manuscript finished and in press for publication in the first quarter of 2019, another Macrosiphum manuscript drafted and almost ready for submission, specimens sent to collaborators in Poland and Georgia for the beginning of a new project on Macrosiphoniella, specimens of Euceraphis measured and ready to send to England for a possible new species description, and all my major collection curation work done.

Each year my first ceremonial step in preparation for the coming collecting season is cleaning and fillings my vials and applying new labels to them.  I’ve been using the same vials since 1988. And, I still remember the day that my mentor and boss Gary Reed stomped down the stairs to my lair at the research station in about 1989 and gave me the rolls of labels I still use today.  He said he got them from a librarian, that they were high quality label stickers, and that the two rolls ought to last me the rest of my life.  He was right.  I’ve been slicing and applying those labels to slides and vials (and containers of leftovers in the freezer) for almost 30 years now.

As I contemplate another growing season and a headlong rush through another season of pursuing my aphid research, I’ve struggled with a shadow (or more) of despair about the future of humanity and the ecology of Earth. It seems inevitable that massive destruction of the Earth’s natural systems will continue for generations until it is stopped by cataclysm or alien invasion.  Although each of our lives is arguably meaningless under any circumstances, this steam engine of inevitability makes it harder to convince myself of meaning or value in what I do.  This winter even aphid research, my one lifelong refuge, has lost some of its ability to give me direction.

As I hike or pedal my bicycle through forests and valleys, I ponder what might help me live life with some sense of peace while accepting the inevitabilities of human-wrought climate change and ecological devastation. I’ve been blessed this winter with a few glimmers of hope for answers or at least helping hands and, with the sense of irony fully in mind, all have come to me through modern contrivances such as iPhones, Facebook, and YouTube.

Music

A couple months ago Gina heard from a friend on Facebook about a musical group from Northern Europe called Heilung (= “healing” in German) and insisted that I give them a listen.  One listen on YouTube and their work connected with me in a visceral, primal way that nothing before has done. As they describe their work, “Heilung tries to connect the listener to the time before Christianity and its political offspring, that tortured and burned itself into the European mentality and culture of today. Heilung links.  It links the listener to an ancient mind-set and it links people.”  As a human only a few generations separated from Northern Europe, the amplified history of Heilung gives me a way to think about my ancestors beyond the faith in science to solve all human-caused problems, beyond the violence and conquest wrought by Europeans all around the world, and beyond the influence of Christianity and the idea of human supremacy that it spawned. It’s a depressing thing to look back on the past thousand years of European history and realize that it has been a story of losing touch with the natural world and a cleaving to ideas of human supremacy and the need to control everything and everyone within our influence. I think Heilung touches many of its fans because it connects us suddenly and viscerally to a past that our culture has cut itself off from.  As their opening ritual says:

“Remember, that we all are brothers
All people, beasts, trees and stone and wind
We all descend from the one great being
That was always there
Before people lived and named it
Before the first seed sprouted.”

Essays

For many years I have been receiving Science magazine.  I go through spells when I read it with dedication, and long periods when I just don’t muster the motivation.  This week I dedicated myself to a new effort at reading it, by making it a weekly recurring item on my digital to-do list.  The first issue I picked up was from 14 December 2018.  In it, I was blown over the essay from Eileen Crist entitled, “Reimagining the human” (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1242) in which she covers the “trends of more” in terms of “(i) human population, (ii) consumption of food, water, energy, and materials, and (iii) infrastructural incursions into the natural world.” She discusses these in terms of the cultural construct she calls “human supremacy” but that might also be called anthropocentrism.  She finished by saying, “The present historical time invites opening our imagination toward a new vision of humanity no longer obstructed by the worldview of human supremacy. Learning to inhabit Earth with care, grace, and proper measure promises material and spiritual abundance for all.” It’s an excellent piece; go read it.

After sharing Dr. Crist’s piece with friends and Facebook friends, the excellent 2012 essay in Orion Magazine by Paul Kingsnorth was sent to me via iMessage from thousands of miles away. Entitled Dark Ecology (https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/), the piece bowled me over even more than Dr. Crist’s essay.  In it, Kingsnorth covers several issues, including an interesting and new-to-me description and critique of what he called “neo-environmentalism.” Too much to summarize here, I urge you to go read his essay.  Most important for me personally, Kingsnorth closed the essay with some admissions that I think are important: “What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history.”  And, he offers 5 ideas for what to DO in the face of this recognition; what to DO, what direction to take, has been the central conundrum of my life for a couple years now. His 5 ideas, with my favorite of his pithy sentences behind each:

1. Withdraw. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind.
2. Preserve nonhuman life. How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t us a chance to survive our appetites?
3. Get your hands dirty. Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing.
4. Insist that nature has a value beyond utility. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it.
5. Build refuges. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?

I like this list. Although I think hope is illusory and I don’t like using the word, Kingsnorth’s list gives a little hope – hope that I can find a way to better balance between despair and living this amazing life I’ve been given. I have been in withdrawal for some time. The other four items on his list are seeds for me to think about what I already do and think and how to frame those in a way that helps me move ahead positively. They also give me directions to focus my excess energy, or from which to derive energy when despair encroaches.

Gratefully accepting the ideas and vibes of Heilung, Crist, Kingsnorth, and friends with whom I discuss these things, I feel unexpectedly ready for another spring, summer, and autumn of connecting to nature through the study of aphids and the important little lives they lead.

I want to point out that in the following paper I am given credit for “confirming the identification of aphid species studied.”  This is a false statement.  I was never offered an opportunity to provide identifications for this paper.  Table 1 contains many spelling errors which should cast doubt on the credibility of everyone involved.  I herewith declare that I had nothing to do with this paper, and today, 14 December 2018 was the first time I set eyes on it. 

Klein, M.L., S.I. Rondon, D.L. Walenta, Q. Zeb, and A.F. Murphy. 2017. Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Aphids (Hemiptera: Aphididae) in the Columbia Basin and Northeastern Oregon. Journal of Economic Entomology 110: 1899–1910.

[Remember, to see full size versions of the photos, just click on them!]

I try to be cheerful about my aphid research and field work.  I really do.  Sometimes, however, a person has to speak out about injustice and exploitation.  Since my special interest in life is the natural environment around us, I herewith speak out about injustice wrought by our federal government on land owned by we the people. Folks who live in or frequent the forests, sagebrush steppe, and grasslands of the western U.S.A. will know something about the ways in which public lands are exploited by private companies at little to no cost.  However, many U.S. residents and others around the world will have no idea what I’m writing about below.

As a natural historian in the western U.S.A., a major challenge in my work is finding examples of plant communities and ecosystems that have not been severely damaged by one of three things: mining, logging, and livestock grazing.  I’ll cover the latter in this post.

The history, extent, ecology, and politics of grazing on public lands in the U.S.A. is a book-length subject.  In fact, many books have been written on the subject during the past several decades (a quick internet search will show them to you).  There are also many interesting and/or aggravating videos on YouTube.  Have a look.

A very nice primer on the subject was published by The Center for Biological Diversity.  One of the key points made in their report (which you can see by clicking on the image) is that it costs the federal government far more to support grazing than it receives in payments from ranching companies.  In other words, grazing on public lands is a subsidy to the meat industry.

I cannot begin to cover here all the aspects of this issue that interest me.  For this rant, therefore, I will highlight my feelings and observations from one recent trip we did to the Pine Forest Range of Humboldt County, Nevada.

Why is the Pine Forest Range interesting to an aphid biologist?

Image from Google Earth.

The Pine Forest Range is mostly federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a branch of the Department of the Interior.  The name is a misnomer of epic proportions because the mountain range is in an otherwise desert environment and has actual forest only at the highest elevations and on steep slopes with seasonal water or snowpack.  The lower slopes of the range are at about 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) elevation, while the high peaks range from about 7,000 feet (2,134 meters) to the highest, Duffer Peak at 9,400 feet (2,865 meters).  The land one might consider forest is varied, with highest peaks clothed in mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus ledifolius) in some areas, and whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) in others.  Some of the lower steep-slope forest patches are a mixture of trees, including whitebark pine, two or three willows (Salix spp.), and aspen (Populus tremuloides).  The unforested ground is composed of various kinds of shrub-dominated systems, meadows, marshes, and grasslands.  Ecologically, places like this are very interesting to me because the plant diversity from bottom to top of the mountains is great, ecological zones varied, and aphid diversity fascinating.  In a single mountain range like this I can find aphids of wetlands, forest, desert, alpine habitats, and specialized habitats such as scree slopes, boulder fields, and mountain-top rock outcrops.  This contrasts with more uniform habitats such as the moist forest slopes of the Cascade Mountains or the Coast Range of Oregon wherein the forest communities are much more dominant and uniform.  One of my dream aphid research projects is to document all species present in a small but diverse site such as the Pine Forest Range.

The Pine Forest Range is also interesting because of the many springs that erupt from mountain sides and create year-round streams of clear fresh water.  This contrast of year-round water in an otherwise desert-like environment can make for fantastic diversity.  In a healthy riparian situation the stream will be surrounded by trees and shrubs, with a dense understory of herbs.  There will be a steep gradient in habitat from stream edge with shade- and moisture-loving plants, through a narrow shoreline forest with plants that are adapted to moderately dry conditions, to the sagebrush and other plants of dry high-elevation desert.  Along with this gradient in plant community, there is a gradient in aphids.  I might find a species of Hyperomyzus (Neonasonovia) on Ribes deep in the shade and overhanging the stream, and it would be the same species as I find in a wet dense forest of western Oregon or the Cascade Mountains.  As few as 10 or 20 meters away from this H. (Neonasonovia) will be Obtusicauda on the sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) or maybe Aphis (Bursaphis) on the Epilobium paniculatum.

On a personal and spiritual level, places like the Pine Forest Range offer the promise of immersion in a quiet, remote, natural setting that appeals to our primordial bonds to mixed landscapes of trees and plains (see “Biophilia” by E.O. Wilson).

The reality of the Pine Forest Range is almost unrelated to its promise.
Our camp site is in one of the most interesting parts of the range, with several springs erupting from the hillside, patches of aspen, seasonal wetlands, and it is within an easy walk of a large patch of mixed forest on a steep slope.

Our camping area. Image from Google Earth.

Some of the springs have associated wetlands, others erupt from rocky substrates and immediately form small streams.  The result is a complex network of wet and dry ground, springs and streams, all leading down slope to the eventual creek that drains that portion of the mountains.  All these habitat types, however, are severely damaged by cattle.  The springs and ensuing streams are almost completely without riparian vegetation, the channels are down-cut with limited meander leading to drainage and drying of nearby former wetland.  All these streams are large enough to be fish-bearing, but no fish are evident.  Similarly, the landscape is essentially without amphibians that would otherwise live there.

The view of a decimated spring and riparian zone, with Duffer Peak in the far distance.

The bogs and wetlands of the springs are severely grazed and trampled by cows.  The open meadows are grazed and trampled to an extremely short stubble height.  From the road, the aspen stands and sagebrush land look inviting, but closer examination on foot reveals that almost no herbs or grasses are left between the trees and shrubs, and that large swaths of the sagebrush have been severely trampled, leaving most plants in tatters scattered across the ground.  The visible hillslopes, far up toward the highest peaks, are badly marred by on-contour trails, with cows traversing the steepest slopes and gathering in the wetlands as far as we could see.

The remains of a wetland fed by a nearby spring. The deep cow footprints in the mud are called “pugs.”

During our day-hike to investigate the area, we explored a dense forest slope south of camp.  Once again, although it looked inviting and fascinating from a distance, upon entering the forest we found that the understory had been almost completely trampled and grazed by cattle, resulting in a depauperate community and a soil surface that was churned to powder.

Several species of plants exist in this area only nestled within the protective stems of willow thickets like these.

As for aphid collecting, many of the plants I was interested in were present, but most had been grazed and trampled to such an extent that the only evidence of their presence was tiny basal leaves or dry stalks that had somehow dodged the cows.  Other species were present but had been driven back to protected sites among the stems of the willow thickets.

Bottom line is that this area is NOT a natural place.  It is a ranch and it is managed for the purpose of raising cattle.  While on paper these public lands are meant for multiple uses by the public, only one use dominates: grazing.  Other uses, such as communing with nature and our spiritual self, studying natural history, and even hunting and fishing, are severely limited by the cows and their impacts.

Our camping area: beautiful landscape in the background, camping area in the middle, and destroyed habitat in the foreground. Aphids don’t stand a chance here.

Additional thoughts

As I walked through the landscape near our camp in the Pine Forest Range one thing that came to mind is how the local Native Americans might feel. Before colonization surely the area where we camped was a fabulously useful site for fishing, hunting, and gathering.  It was likely considered sacred.  How might a person transported through time from year 1500 feel, standing at the site of our camp and witnessing the destruction of such a place?

Public land grazing represents a public subsidy of the meat industry.  Meat, milk, and egg production as a category is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.  As noted in a recent article in The Guardian, “Raising livestock for meat, eggs and milk generates 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the second highest source of emissions and greater than all transportation combined. It also uses about 70% of agricultural land, and is one of the leading causes of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and water pollution.”  Our public funds that support grazing subsidize meat production (contributing to low meat prices and encouraging meat consumption), support all the inhuman cruelty that comes with large-scale meat production, and directly contribute to climate change.  Is this how we want our public lands and public funds used?

Mina did her duty for the weekend, protecting a little piece of public land from the cows.

(Remember to click on the photos for the full-size versions!)

I’m an avid bicyclist, and have been since 1983.  I pedal my bikes a combined total of about 7,000 km per year, down from my younger years of far beyond 10,000 km per year.

Biking in Idaho, 2013.

Each block of spare time, therefore, is a choice between major hobbies: cycling, or aphids? Aphids or cycling?  On April 11, cycling got the nod.  On my way out of the neighborhood, I glanced behind me at the wrong time and collided with a little rock in the road.  Little, yes.  But, big enough to bring me down hard on my left shoulder and elbow, resulting in a cracked clavicle, cracked humerus, severely sprained forearm, and third degree AC separation.  Today is June 10 and my arm is still only about 20% functional.  Instead of being 100% despondent, I decided to focus all my now-free-time on aphid field research, and what a spring it has been already!  (Resulting in only 80% despondency!)

Field season actually started with 3 weeks in Germany (May 1-24) vacationing and of course collecting aphids every chance I got.

A fabulous beech tree near Dresden.

Mostly, those collections were expected and fairly easily guessed based on host plant, location, and time of year.  But, I think I got a few good samples of Macrosiphum on things like Rubus, Fillipendula, and Rosa, plus some other oddball species I didn’t recognize on Rosa and Malus.  Tragically, I did not find the early spring forms of Macrosiphum melampyri and Macrosiphum prenanthidis, which I had really hoped to find.

Getting back home on May 25, field season started immediately.  So did travel season for my paid employment (see http://www.nwpotatoresearch.com/).

As you may guess, I have many possible field work goals bobbing around in my head at any given time.  Given my busted arm, I decided to pursue every one that I could possibly pursue.  The results are as follows as of today:

Macrosiphum ‘californicum’ on Salix (willows): I have pursued the Macrosiphum on Salix for about 27 years.  The dogma is that there is one species, M. californicum, across all of North America that feeds all year on Salix.  Based on all my samples across the U.S. and Canada I am confident that there are at least two Macrosiphum species on Salix. Yet, I had never seen the early spring generation (fundatrix) and only twice the ovipara (egg-laying female) and male of any of them.  The Macrosiphum on Salix seemed like so many other aphids – appearing out of nowhere mid-season, a sort of spontaneous generation.

Macrosiphum fundatrix on willow, Warner Mts., June 2018.

Last fall I collected the fall forms of one of these species in Colorado, and then nearly identical specimens in our local Warner Mountains (Fremont National Forest, Oregon).  Yesterday, I finally collected the fundatrix at that same site.  Halleluiah! Maybe in another 20 years I’ll understand the other species on Salix!

Aphis on Veratrum (cornhusk lily): in about 2010 we were walking through the forest near Hayden, Idaho when I had the realization that perhaps the Aphis that appeared out of nowhere every spring on Veratrum was one of the species that overwinters on Holodiscus (oceansprays, Rosaceae).  Since that time I have been building a set of specimens from both plants that support the idea.  Yesterday, I was finally able to collect some material from Holodiscus at Can Spring in the Warner Mountains and initiate a bagged host plant transfer.  This will almost certainly confirm my hypothesis of host plant alternation.  One of the difficulties of this field work is that the spring forms of this Aphis occur on Holodiscus on high elevation rocky outcrops that get warm far earlier than surrounding terrain, resulting in very difficult spring collecting due to snow-pack on roads.  Luckily, I knew of this particular outcrop that is easily accessible and likely infested.

Aphis on Holodiscus, transferred to Veratrum.

Aphthargelia migrating to Polygonum bistortoides (bistort): I noted in a post last year that I had discovered a new host plant alternation biology in Aphthargelia.  My goal this year was to conduct a host plant transfer to confirm the hypothesis of heteroecy.  Sure enough, with all my extra field time I found a patch of primary host, Symphoricarpos oreophilus (?) infested with Aphthargelia ‘symphoricarpi’ and initiated a host plant transfer in my house on a potted Polygonum bistortoides and in the field yesterday on a P. bistortoides in the shade of an aspen in the Warner Mountains.

Aphis (Bursaphis) on Epilobium paniculatum: Ten years ago, I thought there was a single undescribed species of Aphis (Bursaphis) on the fine willow herb known as Epilobium paniculatum in western N. America  Since moving to Lake County, Oregon, I’ve become convinced that there are in fact two species: one that lives all year on E. paniculatum and one that migrate from Ribes.  On Saturday, on my way home from an Oregon Potato Commission meeting, I finally found a site where Aphis (Bursaphis) were settling on E. paniculatum surrounded by Ribes cereum covered with Aphis (Bursaphis) in the process of emigrating.  I suspect I’ve figured out yet another complex biological/ecological/taxonomic situation!

Macrosiphum on Oplopanax horridum (devil’s club): In 2011 I collected for the first time a Macrosiphum species living among the fruits of a specialized forest plant called Oplopanax horridum – devil’s club.  This plant lives in shady and wet forests of the Cascade Mountains, producing a single tall (i.e. 2 -3 meters) woody prickly perennial stem with large deciduous leaves and red berries each growing season.

Macrosiphum fundatrix on Oplopanax near Imnaha, Oregon.

The Macrosiphum that I’ve found on it is very similar morphologically to Macrosiphum euphorbiae (potato aphid), but anyone seeing this species in life would be sure, like I am, that it is distinct.  This month, I had to travel to Portland for a meeting dealing with potatoes and my paid employment, taking the opportunity to stop in the mountains between Sisters and Salem to look for aphids.  In the deepest darkest habitat of O. horridum, I finally found the early spring generations of this aphid, the fundatrix and the winged and wingless viviparae.

In the end, I salute cyclist’s disease!

Oplopanax and Lysichitum americanum.