Another boring update with surprise vacation (also boring)

Unfortunately I accidentally flattened the Graphocephala cythura female a few months ago while trying to release it during a host shortage (cause of that thing where Croton californicus seems prone to very slowly dropping leaves from dehydration indoors despite having damp soil and strong lighting), haha another thing to feel guilty about haha,,,

I also released the Micrutalis (aside from 1 unmated specimen) and moved the Xerophloea (I currently have 7 of the latter) to weedy mallow indoors to allow the Croton to recover. X. is particularly destructive when it feeds because it causes strong hopperburn and can distort new growth, whereas the Micrutalis seems to cause little damage even at relatively high densities, which I guess makes sense given that M. seems adapted to being relatively common on its host for much of the year without overexploiting it, but given that my copious watering seems to have boosted M. populations slightly above wild densities I was getting kind of worried anyway as the honeydew was seemingly causing premature leaf drop and also growing a lot of sooty mold. Wild Crotons here usually have perfectly clean leaves because M. and X. shoot their honeydew away and thus make it unlikely to land on foliage, but of course when there are many hoppers on a plant the leaves get dirty anyway due to infinite monkey theorem reasons. Still, the fact that I was able to increase the population density above wild levels does imply I've figured out a reason why wilderness insects are naturally low-density in my area, which I've been investigating as part of my whole "why do restoration plantings reliably fail to support non-synanthropic arthropods" thing. Also, note how the pictured X. nymphs retain the pale blues and greens of Croton even on other hosts; the body color isn't strictly genetic and can change based on environment but apparently this strain is so adapted to Croton-feeding that the various pale morphs can show up even on host species incapable of pale foliage. I've noticed some mildly interesting phenotypic plasticity in the Micrutalis too, there's a yellow with black specks nymph morph that doesn't normally appear but showed up in small numbers during the sooty mold outbreak and I swear to god it looked so much like it had mold specks on it. Kinda cool when bugs mimic their own feeding damage.

Disabled Eleodes acuticauda is doing ok, a few months back I'd found it some cardboard hides for it that it doesn't hate the smell of.

Calasterella dead from a series of mishaps, if I didn't mention it before. I have acquired new stock.

Also scooped up some fresh Helminthoglypta from an area of Santa Fe Dam threatened by development from misguided sustainability initiatives. For those of you not in the know, these are snails which spend most of their lives dormant waiting for the rain, and are commonish in my area but under high conservation risk because they have small ranges (in captivity all three local spp. just act like normal snails and seem not to need any dormancy or unusual diet, as far as I can tell, although they seem to hate the smell of coir and won't eat rose petals). Also going to the ceiling seems to be a sign of stress for them, they do it for a day if I lift their foot off the ground. If lifted together with the ground they don't do it. I'm currently working on an informal proj with the Invertebrate Club of SoCal to stop the development effort btw, if you can lend any sort of aid please let me know.

Dodder (C. subinclusa) underfed but surviving. A major problem is that hosts are expensive and another major problem is that Home Depot has shit biosecurity. Still trying to get rid of spider mites on the strawberry, fortunately I had enough foresight not to keep it too close to my more valuable flora. 

That weird polytrichaceous-looking Chinese moss is still alive and has fissioned, as is true of many of the other exotic cryptogams I have. I also am amassing various native and nonnative angiosperms for insect/dodder fodder and informal research purposes, which I will not bother to mention in detail because of a lack of noteworthy behavior. But free tip, I recently discovered firsthand that you can asexually reproduce Baccharis and Eriogonum (and probably many other natives) without rooting hormone if you bury stem fragments. I thought that was a myth but then I realized that the fragment has to be mostly defoliated and mostly buried for it to work properly, otherwise it tends to wilt to death even if there are preexisting roots on the stem because angiosperms are weird like that.

Updated Research Stash page (see below).

Went to Invertebrate Club of SoCal outreach meeting at California (Native) Botanic Garden a few months back, where I presented some live Oedemasia salicis caterpillars I found starving to death on the sidewalk and saved. I don't usually make public appearances because I'm a transhumanist and don't think my meats are aesthetically representative of me (I kept my face/body out of the recording on purpose so don't go looking for it), but I was desperate and hoping to reel in one of CalBG's juicy higher-ups. However was just asked generic amateur questions by everyone and bored to death. No offense amateurs.

Some of the larvae have turned into adults by now and were released. In an effort to fight the weird habit of entomologists of falsely accusing bugs of being aphagous I tried to feed the adults, but could not get them to do so even with the forced proboscis unroll trick people use to feed hawkmoths. But they do have a tiny (albeit functional-looking) proboscis so I can't prove aphagy. I mean I've seen Estigmene drinking with a similarly small tongue so size alone is not indication of vestigiality and I know there are notodontids that do adult-feed.


I also went to Joshua Tree for a few days (where I saw creosote and an Eleodes armata in person for the first time ever) and was bored to death the whole time because there wasn't much to do besides look at eye candy. But when you're offered a free trip to the high desert and you have nothing better to do, well, you don't refuse do you?

C's Enormous Research Literature Stash™

Xerophloea peltata, Micrutalis sp.

Here's another filler image for decoration. The Xerophloea, Micrutalis, and singular Graphocephala female have all been doing well now that I seem to be getting a hang of the invisible mystery forces that increase and decrease host palatability over time, although I'm still trying to find a shelter object for the disabled Eleodes acuticauda female that it won't either reject the smell of or get its senile legs caught on. Finding the teneb a piece of bark that doesn't smell like mold is a weirdly difficult task in this part of the country.





But without further ado, here's some research papers/books that I've found fun and/or useful. Useful ones that are not fun are clustered together, for your convenience. I expect to periodically update this every now and then (last update: 12/14/2025).

An insect-induced novel plant phenotype for sustaining social life in a closed system
(aphids bioengineering trippy gall-sanitation systems)

How aphids lose their marbles

(more cool gall sanitation)

Love spots

Arthropod eye multitasking. See also: gyrinid split vision.

Hidden in plain orange: aposematic coloration is cryptic to a colorblind insect predator

Learning ability and longevity: a symmetrical evolutionary trade-off in Drosophila

Controlled iris radiance in a diurnal fish looking at prey
(no not bioluminescence, it's cooler than that)

Lethal trap created by adaptive evolutionary response to an exotic resource

Glassfrogs conceal blood in their liver to maintain transparency

Behavioral sabotage of plant defenses by insect herbivores

Method of handling affects post-capture encounter probabilities in male Hypolimnas bolina (L.) (Nymphalidae)

Fungus and fruit consumption by harvestmen and spiders (Opiliones, Araneae): the vegetarian side of two predominantly predaceous arachnid groups

Conservation Biology of Cryptocephalus species and Other Threatened UK Beetles
Mostly just worth reading about for the whole "needs successional mosaic habitat" thing. Also since my local climate is more arid than the paper's I believe cryptocephalines in my area are probably population-limited in part by excessive insolation/drought, not a lack of it.

Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America
Free book!

Screenshots section:

Ethics reasons aside, freezing also takes forever for big or endothermic insects and does not kill taxa able to withstand it through antifreeze secretions

But let's put the complaining aside for a moment

 

As a filler image here's a red-beige Micrutalis female I raised (it's not teneral). I didn't know this particular Micrutalis species even had a morph like this, I've never seen any adults with red in the field (only ones with varying amounts of black and beige). I've long known other members of the genus had red morphs, though.






Anyways, here is a neat study about something I've long been curious about: how pollen-nonfeeding close relatives of Heliconius die of old age. According to previous papers Heliconius's close relative the julia (Dryas iulia) gradually suffers malnutrition as a result of the nectar-based* diet being poor in certain nutrients, and soon dies from this no matter how well fed it is; Heliconius reportedly avoids this fate by having evolved pollen feeding and is thus relatively longlived (a number of other longlived-adult lep taxa have been known to achieve their lifespans via adult consumption of fermenting fruit, which contains important microbial nutrients and presumably functions as an analogue of pollen feeding. Note that Danaus plexippus isn't exactly a fruitrot drinker and doesn't consume pollen either; I assume it achieves long adult life via some mechanism unrelated to adult diet).
*Julia is known to drink from puddles and teardrops in the wild. Tears of some if not all animals are protein-rich. I'm still under the overall impression that the diet seems to be mostly nectar tho. Also, some nectars have been reported richer in amino acids than previously believed, although whether amino acids derived solely from nectaring or teardrinking can be nutritionally complete is not known to me.

Long story short, this study disputes that classic story to some extent; some notable bits I found interesting:
- Dryas iulia fed a sugar solution with pollen in it exhibited a normal adult lifespan, but there were subtle behavioral changes
- D. iulia adult exhibits signs of DNA damage and weakened antioxidant activity with age, in other words its short adult lifespan appears to be in part or in whole due to "classical aging" as opposed to malnutrition death
- It was offhandedly mentioned that butterflies (paper was unclear about whether this happened to Dryas, Heliconius, or both) "were spotted flying vigorously around the cages just hours before being found dead"; this is in contrast to many insects, which tend to become listless and/or flightless a day or three before senescence-related death








But a different study I'm too tired to link said somewhere that putting pollen into sugar solution isn't "enough" or something like that (despite claims to the contrary), and that because of this Heliconius has proteases in its saliva. And the study I did link to didn't give the pollen in the sugar solution any fancy special treatment (nor did they test how much of the pollen-derived nutrients were actually being absorbed by the adult julias), so it's possible that D. iulia may have lacked the digestive enzymes to absorb most of what was in the pollen (although the subtle behavioral changes suggest that the D. iulia absorbed at least some pollen substance).



With that being said, though, given that D. iulia exhibits physiological signs consistent with "classical aging", even if some researcher made some magic pollen formula that was concretely proven to be absorbable by julias and other pollen nonfeeding butterflies I'm pretty sure they'd not live much longer than they normally do. Note that I am not implying nectar-only diet is nutritionally complete, only that it's hypothetically possible old age kills them before malnutrition. Adults of various butterflies (and of various nectar-feeding parasitoid wasps) that are outside the scope of this article have been documented to continuously lose weight over their adult lives by the way (if my memory is trustable, this is not just oviposition making them lighter) so in any case their body condition definitely deteriorates over time.

Somewhat relatedly, the jawed moth Micropterix calthella appears naturally shortlived despite being able to consume pollen (paywalled paper; relevant text reproduced below).

entropy wins another round

 Due to a certain incident involving the police (no not ICE), a significant portion of my plant and bug collection has been destroyed (mostly the plants). Gemma-making iridescent probablyfern dead. Dictyssa eggs dead. Native gastropods dead. Probably all my ungerminated seeds dead. Preserved insects and vertebrates... well, they can't get any deader, but they're gone now. The police didn't actually do any of it by the way. Despite never even showing up to bother me, they indirectly helped cause the incident in a way that is banal but which I will not describe here because it would indirectly cause a small leak in my personal privacy.

List of survivors:
- Nongemmiferous probably-fern gametophyte (if I haven't told you, I realized that despite my previous comments it does seem to iridesce after all, or if not at least develops a metallic sheen)
- Chinese cryptogams, adventive hothouse cryptogams, at least some dried lichen samples, Calasterella
- The one Cryptocephalus sanguinicollis larva that still hasn't pupated
- Millipedes that might be Cylindrodesmus
- All the sucking hoppers besides the Dictyssa eggs
- Cuscuta subinclusa (C. californica is possibly dead of unrelated mental illness related neglect)
- That disabled Eleodes acuticauda I keep making offhand references to
- The big Salix lasiolepis (small willows died of unrelated causes remember?) and both Croton californicus
- Weird mystery angiosperm I will probably offhandedly mention a few years later

I have so little control over the trajectory of my own life. Being intelligent and persevering just doesn't work sometimes.

Minor note

 Xerophloea nymphs! Photo kind of blurry so I'm posting it as blue text.

Also Micrutalis have not re-complained when I brought their host back indoors and the single Graphocephala cythura female is contentedly feeding on the same Croton too. Perhaps it was my better lighting. Perhaps the now more well-established root system is making the host more well hydrated and thus easier to drink from. God knows.

I wish I had more interesting complex dynamics in my life

nymphs are dimorphic

As there is no light visible at the end of the tunnel, however, here are the latest boring updates on my specimens:

- Micrutalis nymphs and adults are still doing well. The ones that aren't being eaten, I mean. At night little spiders sometimes show up and bite them, apparently whatever they sequester from their host isn't enough to protect them from Generic Generalist Predators. It seems that bringing their host indoors causes subtle phytochemical changes that may(?) make them freak out and die which is why I've been leaving them outdoors. The ones in the pic seem to be last instar btw.

- On the other hand Xerophloea peltata are both still alive and enjoying the great indoors. I saw the green one oviposit last night.

- I've been calling my non-gemmiferous Mysterious Fern-Type Gametophyte Thing the "noniridescent gametophyte" but recently noted it does apparently iridesce under certain conditions? Will post photo later cause I'm unmotivated but I got a photo of it doing that. The fact that the first two ferns I've grown have been doing that suggest that iridescence is a widespread and undernoticed phenomenon in fern gametophytes in general.

- That one Cryptocephalus larva still hasn't pupated like its brethren. It's been in its drought dormancy mode for the past weeks, I've been slacking on its care from depression. It doesn't seem to mind too much fortunately, I'd feel bad if it did.

- The nearly legless Eleodes has been refusing to hide under its cardboard these past months for some reason. I've repeatedly tried changing its substrate, changing its hides, nothing seems to work. This is not a problem for which caresheets offer any help. I nevertheless have a feeling I'm about to be figuring things out.

- Cylindrodesmus-type millipedes continue to breed, eat cereal, etc.

- Calasterella recovering from a watering mistake I made but otherwise isn't doing anything. Some of the chinese and other exotic cryptogams are still alive.

- Dodders and other angiosperms not doing anything worth my time to mention.

blahblah

 Dictyssa female expired from natural causes. Presumed male escaped, I have not refound it in 2 days so it's probably doomed. I want to stop rearing insects, I really do, they're so boring and it's not worth the risk and effort and isn't that conservationally beneficial anyway but I've seen the way even synanthropic Neoscona keep deflating and dying compared to only a handful of yrs ago and D. obliqua is seemingly a summer phenology specialist (the most drought prone time of year!) and with the rapidity of anthropogenic precipitation decr- forget it you've heard my complaining a million times. My life's a garbage fire and not just for ento-related reasons. There're mold spores in my hair right now and large parts of my personality are missing.

A few Micrutalis matured.

Micrutalis nymphs hatched

Their host is in even worse shape than before but the nymphs inexplicably seem content and aren't restless. Sometimes they don't move even when poked.

My blood pressure goes up for the 99999th time

 

 

The willow worm is done ripening! Looks like we've an Iridopsis on our hands. Few moths seem to behave normally in enclosures smaller than room size so I'm gonna release it in the nearby suburbs tonight or something (unlike the hoppers it came from the suburbs so it'll survive there).

Dictyssa and Xerophloea are still doing ok but I should probably release the latter as I'm having trouble keeping them in an environment that's comfy for both them and their host, the host drops leaves indoors and I'm afraid the hopper will overheat outdoors.

The Graphocephala's preferred willow has also mysteriously dried up seemingly from rot (which is weird if you consider the big willow is still doing fine in microbe-infested swamp sludge), and now it's stressed and I'm stressed and because of inconvenient personal-life problems going on right now I can't go to the woods right now and release it. The dicty eggs were on that small willow too so I scraped them off and am vaguely hoping they don't die on me.

I'm also pretty miserable for the usual insect-unrelated reasons.

Hopper updates

One of the Dictyssa was female as I suspected! Caught it sticking eggs into willow leaves (strangely not in the midrib, in the sides) tonight. Also note that the egg is external (as opposed to being invisible embedded in the plant tissue):

Xerophloea have been moved to a locally nonnative malvaceous plant cutting, which they accepted. Willow and dodder were on the other hand not considered suitable hosts. No signs of oviposition from either yet.

White hopper turned out to be Graphocephala cythura

 

it's blue when teneral

Native here, but an obscure record mentions it having invaded Hawaii, which is concerning. While some invasive taxa are certainly under threat in their native ranges and G. cythura appears more or less unable to survive in the suburbs here (well, either that or occurs in low enough densities that I've never seen it) I don't think it's in much conservational danger.



Also let me vomit some generic photos of the aforementioned Xerophloea duo (note their close textural/color resemblance to Croton) because I've nothing better to do. I'm so bored, photography is so dull.

They're a pretty widespread species too but I'm keeping them around because it costs me nothing and cause I suspect they might be locally (if not globally) in danger.

Update: after hardening the blue has mostly gone away, it's green now.