Comments on: Elderberry Borer

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:34:22 +0000

Elderberries have a stem that is not truly hollow, but filled with soft pith which presumably the beetles could easily chew a tunnel.

There are at least two species of elderberries, though the taxonomy is confusing. As best I can tell, red-berried elderbery (S. racimosa or S. pubens) is circumboreal.

By: K T Cat

K T Cat — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:24:55 +0000

Anything to help! You’ve inspired me to pursue my own intellectual passions more fully.

By: Tim Eisele

Tim Eisele — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:17:43 +0000

Hm, well, that looks interesting. Thanks!

By: K T Cat

K T Cat — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:44:00 +0000

There are free, online photo retouching sites that do many of the same things photoshop does. I did a quick search and found this one:

http://www.lunapic.com/editor/

By: Tim Eisele

Tim Eisele — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:30:40 +0000

I don’t know about these in particular, but most wood-boring beetles can’t digest cellulose, or only digest it poorly. The insects that can digest cellulose generally do it using symbiotic microorganisms in their guts, and it’s hard to do that without the ability to get the organisms passed down to you from either your parents or your nestmates (which is how termites do it). Wood-boring beetle larvae don’t really have access to these sources of microorganisms, so they have to make do with chewing up the woody material to break up the cells and release the starches, sugars, and proteins that they contain.

I probably should just start putting scale bars onto my pictures. I don’t have Photoshop, so I’d probably not do the semi-transparent grid thing.

By: K T Cat

K T Cat — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:14:24 +0000

Given their rudimentary digestive systems, are they feeding on the liquids in the roots or are they really breaking down the roots’ cellulose for food?

For the photos, you could add the grid as an after effect in Photoshop. Just register your camera with some reference points on a rough surface and you could get a sizing grid in the photo very nicely. Make the grid lines semi-transparent and you could even zoom in on portions and get very fine measurements of body parts.