Large winter stoneflies

Winter survival for “large winter stoneflies” (Taeniopterygidae) means clinging to stream bottoms as juveniles, with flattened, wingless bodies seemingly unrelated to the insect in my picture. But within each integument or “skin,” a winged adult develops and by late February is set to hatch, substituting a breathing system that extracts oxygen from the air for the gills it used underwater.

Thousands of winter stoneflies accomplished this transformation in Honesdale last week, flying weakly from the Lackawaxan River to wind up on nearby sidewalks and trees, or clinging to bridge railings and storefronts on Main Street.

What such awkward creatures gain by hatching in late winter is a relatively clean slate, with very few insect competitors and predators, and a floodplain devoid of frogs and insect-eating birds.

It’s conjectured that the distant, probably wingless ancestors of stoneflies inhabited primeval forests of the coal age. And surprisingly, the rock fragments on which the subject of my picture rests may have a similar antiquity.

They are part of a boulder in a small plot at Park and Main Streets in Honesdale that holds a plaque commemorating a trial run of the historic Stourbridge Lion steam engine. The white quartz fragments were transported to the region by swift mountain streams from an ancient mountain range that lay to the east. And that the transport was swift and relatively brief is affirmed by the angular nature of the quartz, which hasn’t been abraded and rounded into pebbles.

But what councilman measured the boulder and selected it to be a monument, decades ago, or what coal miner spied it, or gandy dancer unearthed it in a railroad cut, is as opaque to me as the ancestry of the insects that flutter up there from the river.