The Wooly Alder Aphid

A few years ago I saw a bug that I had never seen before in my whole life! These cute tiny white fuzzy looking insects were floating through the air at Sandy Pines in Michigan. We would catch them in our hands. I looked through a magnifing glass at one and saw how beautiful it was. It's wings looked like little fairy wings and looked like it was wearing a little angora coat. At that time, I looked through the internet trying to find out what it was called. There were a lot of notes from people stating that they had never seen them before all over the United States. One person actually thought that we had a plague in the United States. How funny is that.

Anyway, we had some little cottonlike seeds in the yard today and it reminded me of those cute little bugs. They don't bother anyone. They suck the sap from trees. And bugs don't like to eat them because they have a sticky bad taste to them. No, I didn't test it!

Well, what I thought was very interesting is the following:

Almost every aphid you see is female. They reproduce parthenogenetically, without the need for males to fertilize them. Only under stressful conditions, such as the approach of winter, are males produced and reproduction takes place by mating between the sexes. The aphids born with wings are both males and females, and this last generation can reproduce sexually. The advantage to sexual reproduction is that it leads to genetic mixing, producing new combinations of genes that might be naturally selected for by the changing environmental conditions. This is the stuff of evolution. Under stable conditions, the parthenogenetic clones are already best adapted to their environment and need not bother with genetic mixing, for a large percentage of the offspring produced by mating will be poorly adapted to the environment and will die.

It just goes to show you that the female sex can do very well on their own. I know, I know! We're talking bugs and humans. Here's a picture of the cute little fairy bug, as I call it.