Your friend C goes to China

View from my window! The trees are that fake-looking shade of green even in real life, it's super weird.

[I'll update this post as the season progresses instead of making new posts.]

I'm in China for the rest of the spring (and a few days of summer) this year! Yeah, you read that right! I'm still not rich though, if I was I'd be all happy playing with Fancy Science Machines, I went only on other people paying for the trip (but no one's paying for any Fancy Science Machines sadly). The main target for my visit is thalloid marchantiophytes since 1. according to a Bryonet post by moss researcher Bill Buck (and several not-Bill-Buck bryologists I personally asked) there are no import restrictions on Marchantiophyta/Bryophyta entering the United States, as long as no soil is brought along with them 2. I aesthetically prefer the thalloid over leafy ones, mostly because leafy ones' leaves tend to overlap or touch each other in mildly annoying-looking ways when they branch. You know how those rosette succulents start off as paragons of mathematical stylishness but tend to get kinda misshapen when they branch because the two rosettes squish against each other? Yeah, not a fan of that. I mean, even thalloid ones can overlap each other, but because they don't have leaves to squish against each other they don't look so annoying when they do it. Also yeah yeah I know self-shading is so common in angiosperms because the ecological costs of doing so are low (and, more interestingly, because some species grow phenotypically different leaves specialized for shade, and potentially are thus able to use light the sun leaves absorb poorly) but I can't help but feel a little annoyed when a leafy marchantiophyte grows over itself instead of in neat and tidy self-avoiding fractal patterns. They don't look as good as bushes/trees when they self-shade.

Anyways, enough blabbing about aesthetics. I'm in subtropical Taicang as of this writing (it's my "home base", so to speak) and I've found lots of bugs (some of which I'm also on the fence about aesthetics-wise, so I'm going to post them all on a separate page instead of here so as to not potentially interfere with my own aesthetic. Don't judge me! I know it's kind of weird to be doing this (especially considering I'm an Uncharismatic Microfauna/flora person, although in my defense I don't consider merely drab taxa to be ugly, only mismatched ones) but I'm still having my personal little aesthetics-ontology crisis okay? With so little known about their ecology it's hard to judge whether a superficially unappealing look actually serves some sort of ingenious purpose or if it's just a flaw. And as I need to eat aesthetic decisions to live the inability to figure out what's going on's really frustrating. Wait, did I start blabbing about aesthetics again? Sigh. Anyways, aside from that, eye candy without cool ecological stories behind it bores me to death and if you're anything like me it'd bore you too, and I'd rather not clog up my blog with too much boringness. I've already posted years of mind-numbing small talk here for lack of anything better to do and I've had enough of that (but the data is still useful scientifically, which is why I bother to post it at all).

But let's not go on another digression about that. So far as of this writing (5/1) nothing particularly fun has happened yet, although what I consider "fun" seems to be pretty different from most people's so maybe you'll get a bigger kick out of it than I did. Taicang's ecology is pretty wrecked, there're lots of Big Fancy Subtropical Bugs even in the really shitty suburban areas but there's very little wilderness-in-the-sense-of-nonanthropogenic-habitat remaining. If you've interacted with me extensively you've probably heard me mention how in Greater Los Angeles (and often in general, not just LA) even highly weed-free urban/suburban anthropogenic native gardens have a pretty messed-up ecology compared to weed-infested nonanthropogenic wilderness. Some organisms just can't fly over to the urbs, and some organisms require abiotic conditions abundant in disturbed wilderness but not undisturbed artificial habitat, and no one entirely knows what those abiotics actually are (although for LA thermal/hydrational refugia appear to be a primary factor regulating aridland bug abundance, especially considering how easily a lot of the rare LA ones reproduce and survive in captivity indoors). I recognize the value and biodiversity of what ecologists these days're calling "novel ecosystems" but to not overcomplicate things let's just say that LA urban nature (while impressive) is missing immense numbers of key floral and faunal components and probably isn't the most valuable novel ecosystem, and for Taicang the line between disturbed wilderness and urban/suburban nonwilderness habitat is far blurrier than LA's but I want my thalloid Marchantiophyta and as a rule urb/suburb nonwilderness tends to be too disturbed to host many thalloid Marchantiophyta aside from the nursery weeds.

To say "anyways" again, anyways I should probably take some landscape photos of the area immediately adjacent to my residence to give you an idea of what my surroundings look like. Internet photos don't do it justice, they tend to be super photoshopped and fake-looking (not even in the pretty sort of fake-looking, the cheesy sort). My macro cam broke when it fell on the ground too many times and now it can't zoom out very far. =(
Edit: pic taken, posted above.

Okay, enough trip-report-unrelated rambling for real this time. Now it's time for trip-report-related rambling!

Log:
Pre-4/30: lots of bugs seen, not the Large Fancy Bugs but bugs nonetheless. The ground has remained pretty dry lately but it did rain lightly one day, I've read that the heaviest rains in this part of the world are during the summer monsoon (which may have something to do with there being fewer big bugs rn), and back when I was at Taicang in summer 2018 the Large Fancy Bugs were everywhere. I didn't go very far from my residence before 4/30 as I was scouting out the area for suburban Marchantiophyta (not much luck) and documenting bugs (much luck) and more importantly waiting for stuff to get fixed (among other things, part of the ceiling had mildew everywhere and the hot water wasn't immediately working).

4/30: went to 金仓 Lake Park. The dirt was that sort of awful-looking dried mud that I've come to associate with really wrecked soil in California (e.g. Debs/Griffith/Elysian Park). It is of note that despite having only somewhat more invasive plant biomass (and in some areas significantly less invasive plant biomass) than places like the woods around NASA Jet Propulsion Lab the lab woods are significantly more biodiverse and normal-looking than anywhere in Debs/Griffith/Elysian if you ask me. The poor Targionia populations in Griffith are just barely hanging on. Anyways, I found no thalloid Marchantiophyta but in a forest of identical-looking trees-in-rows ("liminal space" vibes) some petroleum company apparently created as "ecological restoration" there were some epiphytic leafy ones, to my mild(ly pleased) surprise.

Eventually I realized the petrol forest wasn't the main entrance to the park and went into the main entrance, which was pretty and colorful (there seem to be no imgs of the colorful entrance online, maybe it's new enough that no one's posted to Google/Baidu yet, but don't worry you're not missing out on much it's an aesthetic you've probably seen before) and had some generic ornamental landscaping flowers, which led to the eponymous lake (no flowers there, just a dry-looking lawn). Inexplicably the leafy Marchantiophyta were not around the trees at the entrance and lake despite them seemingly being the same species as the petrol forest ones, maybe because the petrol forest was densely planted and thus allowed the bark to stay wet longer after rains. Anyways, here's a pic from some random internet stranger of what the lake and surrounding lawn area looked like. This internet photo does do the scene justice, which is to say that it was not particularly impressive. I figured that considering how fancy the entrance looked there might've been something cool on the other side of the lake, but it was a large lake to walk the entire perimeter of and golf cart* rides to the other side were absurdly expensive so I decided not to chance it.
*I don't think it was for golf, but it was more or less the same type of vehicle as a golf cart.
Then I went back to my "home base" to do some research on iNaturalist to see which angiosperms in Taicang and neighboring areas were associated with true wilderness.

5/1: did more research on iNat for much of the day (and wrote this blog post), I feel like I've a reasonable understanding of the bioindicators now (directly searching for which ones were bioindicators on Google/Baidu is unhelpful, which is why I looked at iNat to do original research and why it took me so long. Wouldn't have gone to 金仓 if it weren't so timeconsuming to find wilderness areas or bioindicators of such. Scanned several thousand plant spp. and counting). 5/1 is Labor Day ofc so I didn't go out much to avoid the traffic jams. Oh, and I realized the landscaping around my residence has a single very small patch of thalloids:

Suspect Reboulia. Uninterested in taking Reboulia captive (not dioicous, so no way to avoid sperm production, and sporophytes presumably have to be removed periodically before they ripen). That paper about Calasterella/Asterella californica males ballistically ejaculating, plus horror stories of marine semelparous algae fouling the water when they turn into gametes, well, I've decided I don't like cryptogam sperm very much. Maybe Marchantiophyta have enough antimicrobials in their sperm to not foul their container when the sperm decomposes, but I'm not willing to find out the hard way. And maybe some far-future you who has samples descended from my collected stock is hating on me for my biased plant collecting making it hard to do male-related research, in which case I'm sorry, I genuinely really am please forgive me.

5/2: page added for images of the less notable bugs. IDs appreciated. To be fair, even most of the pretty ones count as "less notable" here, because it's not like I can take any of them home alive can I? Nor do I want to take them home, they'd bore me if I did. Minor edits made to add additional commentary for previous parts of this post. God my picture backlog's huge.

5/3: Unfortunately, additional complications (involving the great distance of any true wildernesses (even degraded true wildernesses) from my location, and the resulting expensiveness of taxi trips, and also me somewhat misjudging for several days what exactly Delphinium anthriscifolium presence bioindicates) have wasted a lot of my time so not much got done recently. Long story short, D. anthriscifolium appears to greatly prefer true wilderness but appears to occasionally persist as rare relict populations in heavily suburbanized areas sometimes, and due to the lack of easily accessible info on the plant I didn't realize the "occasionally tolerates development" thing for quite some time. I've found more suitable bioindicator taxa today, but let's put talk of wildernesses and bioindicators aside.

Moth time!

April 29, Taicang, asleep during the day, on suburban ornamental landscaping surrounding my residence

This is some sort of magpie moth I found (unfortunately a lot of Abraxas look nearly the same and I can't be bothered to spend time IDing it, all I know it's not "the" magpie (A. grossulariata), and there is an unlikely chance that my specimen isn't Abraxas at all but some other sort of magpie (I haven't bothered to rule out other genera but highly doubt the genus is wrong). Not to get all philosophical on you again, but when I complain about bugs having mismatched-colored/textured body parts what I'm really complaining about is my financial inability to understand their ecology deeply enough to evaluate whether having a mismatched appearance is a fitting graphic design for them or not, and when that happens I default to the heuristic of "internally cohesive graphic design = good, mismatched body parts = bad" out of frustration and not knowing what else to do.

But here's a cool story. "The" magpie is assumed to be an aposematic creature, and I don't disagree with that. This magpie isn't "the" magpie, of course. It is instead patterned in a way that looks somewhat fecal, and naturally, my first instinct as an entomologist was to think "oh yeah! It's a bird dropping mimic!" but if experience has taught me anything it's that human pareidolia is an insidious thing. So naturally my second instinct was to think "hmmm it doesn't look that much like a bird dropping, there's too much white and not enough brown, maybe the resemblance is only superficial and it's actually supposed to be a fungus or something instead?" But then I looked at the animal's surroundings and there were several actual bird droppings on the leaves next to it, and moreover they had the same graphic design as the moth itself. The white nitrogenous part of the dropping was splatted all over the leaf, making it significantly larger in surface area than the brown part. I think we can rule out pareidolia and safely call this animal a fecal mimic. (Of course, for highest rigor one'd do a formalized study, but my entomology intuition doesn't think there's any alternate possibilities, even though I haven't done any UV tests to see if, say, the moth looks like a dropping even in bird color vision.)

Even the animal's incongruously orange spotted abdomen (while conspicuous up close) was pretty similarly colored to the brown parts from a distance, the incongruity making it look like a piece of digested debris. Maybe it still serves an aposematic function up close but not from afar though, as a balancing act between staying hidden from toxin-tolerating birds willing to eat it and dissuading toxin-intolerating birds that habitually eat fecal mimics? I've heard* it said that Tetraopes species feeding on less toxic milkweeds have smaller patches of red aposematic pigment on their bodies (but are still aposematic) and are more easily frightened in comparison to the spp. adapted to highly toxic milkweeds. Do adult magpies curl up to display their abdomens when annoyed, like some other tiger moths do? And in Abraxas leucostola, which seems to be polymorphic for abdomen coloration, are the white-abdomen morphs more edible than the orange-abdomened ones (or do the orange-abdomened leucostolas merely mimic feces with more brownish-orange stuff in them)? All questions I don't have enough money to answer. In any case I no longer "hate" its mismatched patterning the way I did before I saw it in person.
*Page 559 of this paper

If you're perceptive, you may note the caption on the animal says Apr. 29. What's that doing on a 5/3 post? Well, it involves Problepsis.

Like the magpie, it was also found on landscaping plants around my residence

Let's rewind to 4/27, when I saw this Problepsis on a tree. Well, again I can't be bothered to ID it for sure, but I assume it's that genus. This was before I saw the magpie and had the revelation about magpie fecal mimicry of course. Anyways, it was on the trunk, somewhat more than 6 ft up in the air, blatantly obvious against the dark wood, and naturally I went through the same thought processes I did as when I saw the magpie ("wow I wonder why it looks like that, its spots have that fecal-mimic-insect style pattern, but is that just pareidolia? It doesn't look much like feces") and, well, lacking an explanation for why it was that color, I mentally shrugged and moved on. It saw me too (lots of nocturnal moths seem to have very good vision during the day), but it only ran a few centimeters away from me and then stopped again. Why run a few centimeters? Why not take flight in a violent panic, or at least keep perfectly still in order to not give away that it was a living organism and attract further attention? Reminds me of how aphids frequently choose not to drop away when predators walk up to them because the risk of overheating to death on the ground is greater than being eaten. Although this still doesn't explain why I've sometimes seen aphids passively allowing themselves to be eaten even on cool days, or even unsuspectingly climb on the backs of their equally unsuspecting predators out of sheer curiosity (these weren't the soldiers of eusocial aphids, they were just regular aphids). Insect psychology is weird.

Anyways, lots of adult/larval insects that're definitely fully palatable and unquestionably camouflage-colored will sometimes voluntarily sit on backgrounds not matching their own body coloration (as opposed to the involuntary sort of uncamouflaged sitting that happens when an insect is attracted to a lamp and becomes so disoriented that it is unable to leave the lamp's vicinity and eventually goes to sleep on the wall) for no apparent reason*. This is despite the fact that some insects (including moths) have been confirmed to actively seek out backgrounds matching their own body color. I don't understand this and seemingly no other person alive or dead does either; I mean, why lack a background-matching instinct if other members of your taxonomic order possess them? And the weirdest part is that they often get away with it somehow; even while sitting on unmatching backgrounds they frequently go hours or even days without being eaten by predators. I don't understand this either (and, again, I don't believe anyone else in entomology has much of an explanation). I'm going to very tentatively assume this Problepsis specimen was doing that.
*Sometimes insects take risks for gain, but sometimes I see bark-colored moths happily perch on unmatching-colored surfaces that offer no detectable gain to them.

...And then the magpie revelation happened, and considering that some ringless-winged Problepsis spp. look very much like bird droppings I'm left wondering if this ringed Problepsis was in fact mimicking some unusual sort of feces after all. Maybe the sort that's initially a filled circle but then the center of the dropping dries out and falls off, leaving a ring-shaped stain? But why would that be on a white background, I don't think the sort of bird dropping that's mostly white can ever be the same sort that leaves a ring-shaped stain?

But today (by "today" I mean 5/3 even though I'm writing this on 5/4), I saw another similar-looking Problepsis and it was not as obvious as the one on the tree:

Well, it's obviously easy to see in this closeup photo, but when I was walking past it from a distance (as a bird might do) its white body looked remarkably like a certain sort of marcescent leaf that's so sunbleached it becomes papery and whitish, or alternatively one where the papery whitishness was caused by leafminers. So, one wonders: is this sort of ring-winged Problepsis mimicking a ring-shaped dropping stain on a papery dead leaf? But it's not as convincing-looking of either a dropping or a dead leaf as the magpie moth was to the magpie-moth-patterned droppings. Could it be an imperfect mimic designed to look vaguely like a dropping and vaguely like a dead leaf and but not like anything in particular, so that birds not paying close attention dismiss it as some sort of "generic unimportant bad-tasting object"? Or to indulge a more fanciful idea: is its mimicry perfect, and its failure to exactly resemble a dropping or a leaf or the eyes of a predator (yet sharing characteristics of all three) a way of inducing the uncanny valley effect and/or confusion in a bird, buying the moth more time to escape? Another question I have no ability to answer, but it's mildly fun to speculate.

One is also reminded of those Papilio caterpillars that have false eyes despite being dropping mimics, although in the case of Papilio there may be developmental constraints involved (perhaps it is too difficult for a Papilio to evolve early instars that're dropping mimics and later instars that are greenbodied eye mimics unless the early instars have small, inconspicuous false eyes that predators don't notice until the animal molts to green phase, and perhaps the Papilio in which all instars are fecal mimics retained the false eyes in all instars because they descend from ones with a greenbodied eye mimic instar, but had false eyes so inconspicuous in their fecal mimic stage that they were retained as evolutionary vestiges not selected against strongly enough to be eliminated? Although I suppose it's possible that even in Papilio the false eyes on a dropping-mimic instar could scare off a bird used to eating dropping mimics through the sheer uncanny-valley-ness of seeing eyes on something as not known for having eyes as a bird dropping [assume that in this latter scenario the false eyes are inconspicuous so that birds don't see the eyes from far away, and thus don't learn to systematically identify eyed droppings as caterpillars, but are still scared off upon suddenly noticing the eyes during short-distance close inspection of the "dropping"].

...All this speculation's got me thinking. Perhaps, given the magpie revelation, I should stop doing that thing where I refrain from posting bugs/plants with graphic designs that make me uncomfortable. From the beginning it's always struck me as a bit of a silly thing to do, especially considering that I keep showing Calasterella pictures but not dodder pictures even though both of them do the same "back end perpetually dying" thing I found displeasing (my reason for posting the one and not the other was that I figured I had more of a chance at figuring out why the cryptogam did it than the parasite). Still not going to post pictures of my face online, though, as I am a transhumanist* and I'd rather you think of me as a disembodied name and icon on the internet and I have concrete reasons not to like the look of my face/body (they're not the usual reasons that "regular people" or indeed even many transhumanists hate their faces for), not a motive as vague and tentative as my dislike of mismatchy-colored insects.
*I'm a really weird sort of transhumanist and I'm not stupid. The singularity isn't coming any time soon and techbros make the rest of us look bad.

I hope I'm not giving those of you who're unfamiliar with my vibes the wrong impression of me, by the way; I feel like all these rants about aesthetics are kinda giving a misleading picture of my personality and making me seem weirdly petty and/or annoying and/or immature (I mean, sometimes I do decide to be petty/annoying when I feel like it, but not in this way. I'm a really cool person I swear!), especially considering that I've rarely displayed much of my personality on my blog in the past, what with being too busy mentally starving from lack of interesting complex dynamics (and also too reluctant to talk about my more personal matters outside of private messages) to be able to express myself much on here. Also, this entry's been rather long-winded, hasn't it? Time for a short one:

5/4: not much happened. Even the taxi drivers who are locals tell me "there's not much fun to be had in Taicang". I would've been out of Taicang and into a more ecologically unaltered part of China long ago, but a bunch of personal complications I shall not bother to discuss here* (nor would they be interesting complications to talk about) ensure that I'm stuck here for several more days. Yay!
*Except to note that they aren't the bioindicator complications discussed above, since my new and more reliable bioindicators have not betrayed me. Or at least not betrayed me yet.

Did find (and am trying to figure out host of) this massive-headed caterpillar near my residence after a rain tho. It refuses to eat the thing it was found on.

Note that it's not one of those caterpillars that habitually leaves its front legs in midair posing motionless for long periods. This picture was taken while it was waving its front around actively.

...Its head is even bigger in dorsal view:

5/5: "But C," you say, "why is its head stupidly large?" Well, today I found out. Because it eats camphor.

You can see the leaf pulp inside it making it green!

Have you ever seen a camphor? It's like a plastic plant but alive.

See what I mean?

It's one of those godawful sclerophyllous nonnatives (along with privet, cheesewood, you name it) that sits around nonnatively failing to support insect biomass in those suburban California street plantings. But wait! Isn't that wretched tree native to China? And guess where I am right now. Yeah.

...It's honestly kind of soothing to see the vinyl-leaved plants of my Los Angeles life in their native ranges actually supporting things able to chew through their rigid foliage. I have many depressing childhood memories of seeing soulless-looking LA privets and camphors and lawngrasses decorating equally soulless-looking rows of houses and feeling like I'm in some sort of nightmare, not the sort where your heart is racing nor one where monsters chase you but the sort where the grass is too green and the sky is too blue and the houses too endless and you feel like the desolation is not just a feeling but instead a tangible physical thing that's simultaneously realer and less real than you are, a thing that could flood your lungs and gently drown you in its loneliness.

Anyways, considering that insect head enlargement is known to be associated with durophagy because more room for chewing apparatus (see: Scarites, Pogonomyrmex), as soon as I saw the camphor being bitten into, well, mystery solved. I figure I might as well keep the caterpillar as a travelling companion now that I've taken it in, maybe rear it to adulthood for ease of ID. I suspect it's Krananda latimarginaria now that I know the host.
It makes for terrible company, though; just chews a notch in the leaf every few hours, finds a petiole to camouflage against and spins an invisible silk holdfast for its front legs to secure themselves to, and then goes back to sleep. Despite what I said above about the sclerophyll herbivory being kind of soothing the animal is definitely too boring to be giving me any mental health. I still hate those "forest bathing is guaranteed to be good for your psyche" research articles! Hattttttttttttttttttttttttte!!!!

5/7: I've determined the larva's circadian rhythm more fully, it seems to make 1 notch every 12-24 hours (feeding both day and night), which is apparently enough of a meal to fill most of its body cavity but takes only like 5 or so minutes, and then it goes to a petiole or branch (seemingly petiole preferentially) to sleep the rest of the time (it defecates mostly while asleep, or at least while in some sort of motionless resting phase outwardly indistinguishable from its sleeping). I suppose that means it's awake for less than 1 hour every day/night. Wow.

Also, I'm no longer sure the large head is because of its sclerophyll diet, it hasn't molted but over the course of several days it's gradually swelled up so much from eating leaves that its head no longer is disproportionate to its body (no photo because I don't feel like it). Some nonwrinkly insects like crickets and milkweed bugs can nonmoltingly expand like that too, but there's an obscure research publication somewhere mentioning that caterpillars are wrinkly to make nonmolting-related size increases easier, they gradually unfold like accordions. One does wonder why scarab grubs and poduromorphs tend to be perpetually wrinkly even when well fed, though.

Anyways, had a feeling I shouldn't have made this hasty of an assumption about its head size but (for some reason I don't understand) I assumed anyway. I've known about the caterpillar accordion thing for years but didn't expect the animal to nonmoltingly expand enough to lose its unusual proportions. But then again, it was on the wrong host when I found it, so I'm not surprised it's grown this much. Oh well, whatever. But to do good science one has to be gracious in defeat, no? I'm not afraid to admit I was wrong. I mean, chances are its head is still proportionally sliiightly bigger than that of a caterpillar eating primarily flowers or soft leaves, but durophagy clearly didn't have as much of an effect on the evolution of its head size as I had thought.
In any case, lepidopteran larval head size undoubtedly does vary interspecifically for diet-related reasons, which (may) explain the huge heads of grass skipper larvae because of the tough silica in grasses or whatever. And there's a paper somewhere about a certain polyphagous pest caterpillar species actually phenotypic-plasticity-growing slightly different head sizes when fed on different hosts, so looks like the variation's intraspecific at least sometimes, too.

Enough of caterpillar small talk. More importantly, the travel complications are gradually resolving themselves! I'm in Shanghai (horrible city btw) in transit to Yunnan tomorrow! Well, probably. We'll see. =)

5/9: I'm in Yunnan. The worm has apparently swelled up so much it is now in premolt:

Fortunately when I took it out after getting to the hotel it could still walk, so it isn't deep enough into premolt that disturbing it would interfere with the molt, I would assume. Also the trip took quite a while and it's already night so I have to go to sleep right after.

Additionally, the page for non-notable bugs has been updated. Despite what I said about insect body positivity above I'm not moving the ones on that page over here because 1. I've had no personally-valuable interactions with them due to the brevity of the encounter, so even the ones I like the graphic design of are not worth posting about 2. don't wanna clog my main post with photodumps.

5/10: It finished molting when I woke up this morning. Also obtained various leafy Marchantiophyta from semiurbanized trees. Oh, and have I complained on here about secondhand smoke yet by the way? If not, well now's as good a time as any. Shanghai, Taicang, Yunnan, it's all full of tobacco aerosols (even the fancy "no smoking" hotels make no move to eject smokers when they see them puffing in the lobby). Do you ever get the urge to, y'know, slap a cigarette out of someone's mouth and stab out their eyes with toothpicks and murder them by pouring hot ash into their lungs?

Anyways, Yunnan is more humid than Taicang so there's angiosperms (sometimes even wild orchids*) and ferns epiphyting on the street trees, for some reason the ferns tend to have long unbranched leaves. Also some of the street trees are jackfruits, I can't stop thinking about one of those spikeballs falling off and killing me on the head.
*(Yes you read that right, pollution-tolerating Orchidaceae.)

Not a street tree but you get the idea.

Here's one of the aforementioned leafys I sampled:

...In my life I can never seem to catch a break. Yes, I got myself shipped to the tropics, but the misery never ends. Didn't get to go to any designated wilderness areas today due to assorted Irritating Complications, and (as with my experiences in Taicang) there was very little suitable habitat for soil-dwelling marchantiophytes in the area because of the horrible-looking soil.

Ewww!

Later I dropped by a freeway rest stop which didn't have horrific cracked mud but saw no marchantiophytes there and especially not land Riccia which I'm looking for in specific (partly because it's a genus with a lot of weird fancy shapes in it, partly because Riccia is disproportionately understudied in China even compared to other Marchantiophyta). There was bare soil there, which Riccia tend to like (it's a genus of disturbed habitats but many of the disturbed-habitat spp. are not synanthropes), but inexplicably, no Riccia. Just mosses. I don't know why but Bryophyta seems to have a much wider ecological amplitude than Marchantiophyta. Maybe it's because of how there are more moss species so there's more chances that a given habitat will be acceptable to some sort of moss? Or maybe it's the other way round and the lack of adaptability compared to mosses has allowed mosses to speciate more often?

I stopped by a restaurant for sad dinner (like a regular dinner, but sad) but behind the restaurant was a small hill whose human-accessible side was a small cliff. It was pretty disturbed-looking, there were bunches of invasive-looking weeds, but remember, this is China and a lot of notorious invaders are native here. It is very strange how California-native invasive plants (see: Eschscholzia, Amsinckia, Heterotheca) are almost invariably absent from the Los Angeles suburbs and urbs but China-native invasive flora/insects seem quite common in vegetated disturbed parts of chinese cities. So I don't know whether the disturbance was a good thing or not, after all cryptic invasions are a thing and some genotypes of a species are endangering more well-behaved conspecific genotypes, but to put the subject aside for a moment the hill was oddly healthy-looking. At first it seemed to be all hyperaggressive invader weeds, but then I looked closer and saw a bunch of ferns, and then I looked even closer and saw soil that was surprisingly well-held-together, and something clicked in my head. Here's an important digression; I digress a lot and talk in low-sentence-fluidity sentences a lot but it's on purpose. In Los Angeles County, one major microhabitat Calasterella/Asterella californica occupies is a certain sort of shaded cliffside "oasis" where the soil sticks to itself tightly enough that it doesn't erode (and thus make a plant as loosely attached to its substrate as Calasterella fall to its death) and doesn't have enough leaflitter to smother cryptogams and is dry enough that angiosperms can't become ecologically vigorous in the area (but damp enough that after a good rain it slowly dries out over several days/weeks, as opposed to near-instantly, and Calasterella suffers tissue damage and/or death if it dries out in about a day or less), one can spot these from some distance away because they stand out from their surroundings: resurrection ferns and Dudleya are unusually dominant and (perhaps most importantly) the ground texture looks different. Imagine you're walking in a semiarid oak-and-chaparral forest when at the side of the trail you suddenly see this:

Yeah.

I couldn't get a picture of the restaurant hill cliff (no battery except for my macro cam), but the aesthetic of the place was so similar to this type of Calasterella oasis (even though none of the plants looked similar) that I swore to hell there had to be some soil-dwelling Marchantiophyta there. I was right.

Was surprised to note a complete lack of "asterelloid worts", instead this thing occupied that niche and it seemed to be the only marchantiophyte there (unlike the LA "asterelloids" it doesn't seem able to survive after being fully dried out). I also found a single individual of what may have been one of the Lejeuneaceae but maybe it was just a stretched out one of these. Can't find that single individual now, I lost it among the others.

Additionally, there were some angiosperms there that looked like they enjoyed disturbance but weren't synanthropic. The type of plant that's not exactly a weed, and dies out when a place gets converted into city, and doesn't cause economic harm. Gonna post them somewhere eventually.

I still didn't catch my break because searching for worts and collecting them is exciting but not exactly fun. But it was a neat find.

5/11: Help time passes too fast how did it take me like half the night to write the 5/10 entry I went to the Hot Sea Scenic Area (geothermal springs and adjacent forest; Tengchong, Yunnan; not even vaguely sea-like, unlike the Dead Sea) today and the forest was apparently nonanthropogenic wilderness but I could not do anything productive there because almost 0 marchantiophytes for some reason. The microhabitat looked very right so I can't explain the absence.

More on the Hot Sea later. It feels vaguely fitting to end for now with this millipede there that died from getting its head stuck in a window screen.

(I presume this is Helicorthomorpha holstii)

5/15: I feel very awful for multiple reasons, including having gotten the caterpillar killed via preventable causes several days ago and not being able to do anything very interesting/worthwhile abroad*. Also right now I'm no longer in the "rainforest belt" of Yunnan, I'm still in Yunnan but a part where the surrounding mountains are semiarid, I don't know the name for that ecosystem type but the soil is rust-colored (ferrous compounds?) and the vegetation is like steppe-ish montane scrubland (with lots of normal-sized conifers, not exactly a forest but not exactly not a forest either). Not that the urbanized areas are scrubby, of course.

*Due to sociocultural rot there's not much to do in much of China besides various forms of sensory hedonism I find boring, although to be fair there's apparently rarely much to do anywhere in the world in this day and age besides said hedonisms; I've realized many so-called "higher pursuits in life" are just that sort of hedonism in disguise. Still, though, the rot goes deeper here than in Greater Los Angeles.

Will write retroactively about the Hot Sea and whatever later. I don't want to write posts right now. I want to cry.

jfkdls;gjfdslk;jdslf

 Datura wrightii seed x1 covertly planted into LA Library Edendale Branch. Too depressed to write more. But nothing fun happened (the Ultraviolet Grasslands stuff stopped due to friends being busy) so there's not much to write about anyway.

Spring pachy triage commences

Okay I'm still extremely depressed but I'm playing a game of Ultraviolet Grasslands with my friends and the cool art and worldbuilding we've been making have been good for my mental health. Sometimes I even feel like a real person.

Anyways, I found Pachybrachis hepaticus in the swimming pool on Valentine's, which is pretty weird, as they're not normally known to emerge so early (only 2 record on iNat, both from Mexico, and none on Bugguide). Happened straight after the unusually bad CA drought was ended by abrupt rains too.

Threw it in a bag with some lettuce, which it did eat, but every time I allowed it to bask in even mild sun it got restless (it seemed to be male and was presumably mateseeking) so I released it. Was always calm in the shade though, maybe it's like those butterflies/wasps that crave direct sunlight and go inert on overcast days. Haven't seen any other Cryptocephalinae emerge this year yet, they seem to only really get going in mid to late spring (have I told you I'm on a cryptocephaline conservation investigation? I'm too tired/depressed to reread my old posts), but the fact that even a widespread taxon like hepat seems like it might be getting phenology shifts from climate change weather is concerning. I keep seeing research papers talking about how widespreadness and synanthropy don't necessarily protect insect species from conservational danger in this day and age, and they weren't just talking about that one extinct locust either.

I can't be bothered to give my usual round of generic updates because they're boring as shit anyways but the gist is that everything is going as usual for most of my specimens and that the Sphaerocarpos died again. In other news I've continuing to grow tentacles everywhere into the local native plant and gardening and ento and museum-institution groups, largely in hope of gaining backdoor access to maybe a fancy science machine to finally investigate those super cool complex ecological dynamics I've been craving. No luck on the complex dynamics there yet, though I did persuade one of the gardening collectives to leave some unmulched spots for the burrowing bees and the more mulch-hating sorts of native flora.

Also, going to post a short story I wrote later. I'm too tired to do it right now.

please save me I don't want to die

Today's round of boring updates:
- I rehydrated a Xanthoria parietina specimen I had in dry storage. It was dead, because it did not become greenish after hydration. That was my last one.

- I did recently take a sample from the unidentified sunburst lichen pictured above, it was from my own city so it presumably doesn't need salt spray like X. parietina does. The unidentified was growing on painted wood, so it can probably grow on other unnatural nutrientless substrates too, like plastic. To decrease the risk that a heterospecific lichen would grow in my culture and make it easier to peel off the wood, I only took the part that was already loose and hanging in the air.

- Cuscuta subinclusa doing well. Nothing interesting has happened.

- Shortly after I posted my last post all the sealed Cryptocephalus sanguinicollis unsealed their cases when I misted them heavily by accident (light misting did nothing). This did not appear to harm them, and now all 4 are eating petals again. I should also mention C. sanguinicollis larvae are prone to destroying (likely eating) each other's cases, seemingly mistaking them for food. This seems to be why the 7 larvae I had went down to 5; the missing larvae left behind cases with big holes in them, and holes in cryptocephaline cases interfere with proper moisture homeostasis and can kill larvae that way. I should note that 2 of the 4 recently had massive holes made in their cases but then managed to successfully fix them without dying; this is because at the 4-5 millimeter stage larvae are relatively hardy compared to newly hatched ones, and because I kept them all lightly damp after noticing the holes so they wouldn't desiccate while trying to patch them. Weirdly enough the holes are not patched immediately, instead they wait a few days before doing so. Also, behavioral notes: larvae kept dry with water-containing food e.g. petals or larvae kept lightly damp well ventilated are lethargic, which seems to be a sign of health. Larvae that are too wet run around energetically a lot and try to circle/climb walls.

- I don't know if I mentioned it before, but the round-leaved Huntington wort died from mold and depression-induced plant neglect. A few ramets of the unknown pincerwort survived and have grown well on wood-rich soil. Evidently this is a case of the fundamental niche being wider than the realized niche, because in the Huntington the pincerworts only lived high up on trees, with various tropical-looking mosses monopolizing the ground.

- More telegraphweed/Datura seeds added to NHMLA. I also brought and planted some Datura seeds at the Junior High native garden.

title text

 A while back I saved a wild E. acuticauda female that had only one and a half intact legs left, unlike young healthy members of the species it spends much of its time sleeping and doesn't do the unpleasant-looking "pace around in circles and/or back/forth in a corner" thingy, it utilizes the entire cage. Anyways, it laid some eggs, I hatched the eggs and reared the worms to medium size, threw all 30+ worms in NHMLA yesterday, fingers crossed yeah. E. carbonaria did start doing the pacing thing, I'm going to release the latter back into its habitat.

Also threw some locally wild collected telegraphweed and devil's trumpets in there too, NHMLA has only small amounts of Datura and no preexisting Heterotheca as far as I know.




Down to 4 C. sanguinicollis larvae. For a long time I had 5 but recently I sent the fifth one flying by accident and lost it (I do not expect to refind it). 2 still feeding last time I checked, other 2 are sealed. During their summer dormancy they all simply plugged the cases with their heads, but this time the sealed ones have actually cemented the cases shut with excrement. It should be noted that the sealing coincided with a sudden drop in weather from 80-something fahrenheits to 70-somethings, it seems that chronic exposure to artificial light at night doesn't affect their dormancy circadian rhythms too badly.

Also, acquaintance gave me a piece of my Cuscuta subinclusa clone back, it's curled 4 stems around some strawberry plants but is a little confused because it thinks it's tightly wrapped around its victim (in actuality part of it is touching the strawberry hairs but not the stem the hairs are growing out of). It'll likely succeed in penetrating the host anyways, given that during the penetration process the dodder inflates like one of those blood pressure cuffs they give you for medical checkups.

No noteworthy Asterella californica news, I only have 2 apical notches and both of them are getting etiolated (although not pale) and growing upward instead of touching the sand. They do that when air humidity is sufficiently high.



Sudden wild orbweaver dieoff this year. To reduce the chances of this being a statistically insignificant phenomenon, I corresponded with some relatively trusted acquaintances, who noted the same. Pretty sure due to starvation, because there's anomalously low flying insect density around my house (even invasive flying insects are usually sparse). One Neoscona crucifera I've been feeding with false widows and drowned swimming pool insects has remained plump, although it's run away somewhere to where I can't find it a few days ago (I may have upset it during a certain unsuccessful feeding session attempt) and might therefore starve like the rest of them. It deflated severely whenever I didn't feed it.

I should also note that ground-dwelling urban detritivores have not suffered the same fate as the frequent fliers; for one, Gryllodes sigillatus still comes out in droves every night the way it usually does. Also, while insect density in my area seems often naturally low (especially in arid wilderness), the orbweaver/flier dieoff seems unusually severe.



Anyways that's all for today's soporific updates, have fun I guess.

blugh

 Using the last of my mental health to note that I brought the pot beetle grubs out of their dormancy a week or so ago by spraying them and then partially closing the lid for several days (thus ensuring their cup was lightly damp for the duration of those days). They are now ravenously eating petals again.

Apparently merely spraying the animals is insufficient for them to exit dormancy, even if the spraying is very intense, because it seems that dormancy only ceases when there is a prolonged exposure to humidity.

Also, no detectable "long COVID" symptoms so far. Yay?

I have been mistreated by the hospital

 Not posting details here, sorry! I will however note that it is a pretty big-name hospital.

I am home now. Was actually getting sicker as a direct result of the hospital's actions impeding my recovery.

I have COVID-19 now

 I don't want to reveal too many personal details in public, but long story short, I was absolutely fastidious about sanitation protocols, I wore masks long after everyone else stopped, I frequently didn't leave my house for weeks at a time. But no amount of caution can save you if you're being forced to eat off poorly washed plates (with rice grains and sauce still on them) at shitty restaurants just not to starve [note that this sentence is potentially misleading but is factually true - I eat well, for lack of a better phrase.]

I don't live in a bloody slum. So why do I live like I'm in one when I'm in one of the most well-off cities in the nation?

Apparently C. sanguinicollis larvae have a summer dormancy

 

Which makes sense, considering that it's when all the sage scrub plants dry up in the heat.

Abnormal photoperiods from indoors lighting and abnormally generous moisture regimes also did not break the dormancy, misting causes them to walk around in annoyance but eventually they retract and stop moving again. With that being said, the grubs do consume small amounts of food despite the dormancy.

Some have voluntarily refused both food and water for as long as 5 days, possibly even longer.

Got a cool video

 

Nooooooooo!

 I have recently had to, umm, let's euphemistically call it a forced vacation. Had to temporarily give my bugs to an aforementioned entomological acquaintance. Cryptocephalus sanguinicollis was unharmed afterwards (indeed, the grubs more than doubled in size in the two weeks I was away and are now very roughly a third of the size of an adult specimen), but the probable Haplodesmidae and Macrosternodesmidae suffered heavy mortality, and now the only live millipedes I have left are a few of the haplodesmid-shaped ones. I think he overwatered them to death despite my warnings, cause when I came back the dirt was all soggy and glistening (my impression is that they probably died of humidity-related causes instead of drowning). He also reports that his Pachybrachis bivittatus all died from excess sun exposure, with no surviving eggs. Additionally, the Huntington worts (which I also left to him) are significantly moldier than before, though still bright green. It's possible the mold's only growing on the dead parts of the worts, I'm not sure. I'm not exactly mad at him, cause everyone makes mistakes, he has a busy schedule, and I'm a pretty forgiving person, but, well, ouch.

Asterella was unharmed because I left it completely dried out for the duration of my absence, and since it can do the poikilohydric resurrection plant thingy it was fine afterwards. Other plants I didn't mention are all fine, and the Eleodes carbonaria is doing fine too.



In other news, my current dodder is Cuscuta californica var. californica, according to the key. Also confirmed the one that died is indeed the subinclusa I provisionally thought it was, but the only surviving fragment is at that acquaintance's house.

I also scooped up some ostracods (maybe they're tiny conchostracans; probably not but I can't tell the difference) from an ornamental waterfall fountain that various birds visit. Looks like that implausible-sounding adage about birds dispersing fish eggs and crustaceans via wet feathers/legs is true, after all. I have no inherent interest in ostracod husbandry but they might be useful for some sort of restoration project later on in some unforeseen future.