November 13th, 2013

While with grade 9 students in mid-October, we arrived at the pond under a beautiful, bright, blue sky. As we were about to begin our analysis of the ecosystem I noticed what appeared to be a tiny rain storm within a small, leafless Balsam Poplar. We were all quite amazed by the volume of liquid falling to the ground. It was actually not rain… they were droplets of poop! On the branches of the tree were a couple hundred small insects called leafhoppers. And each would poop every 2-5 seconds!  Below is a photo of one of the clusters, and below that, a video of what it looked like.  At the end of the video I tried to show the saturated soil under the tree, on the otherwise very dry ground.  The plants underneath were covered so heavily that most of them had withered and died.

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I then looked around to find other Balsam Poplars… perhaps this was happening on this species only. There was a larger tree just behind me and it too was ‘raining’.  You can see many more droplets falling just out of focus, in the background.

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I brought my camera back later that evening and took some close-up photos of what was happening.  Here you can clearly see the mouthpart stuck into the branch.  It is continuously sucking out the sap.

And lastly, after some processing of the sap, the leafhopper ejects (with some force and speed) the waste out its back end.