Cryptocephalus hunting again

 

Have continued to be bored to the point of serious mental illness. Went to the Santa Fe Dam soft chaparral a few times again to see if I could bag anything because collecting bugs is my unhealthy coping mechanism apparently.

Now, the thing about the soft chaparral here is that whenever the summer dry season hits and the bushes "die" (aestivate) the already low insect density drops even further (the hard chaparral and sclerophyll oak forest stay active a bit longer into the season because they are by nature less arid habitats). It's our version of winter; it's when life drains out of the world; it's the end-scene of HG Wells' Time Machine with the quiet beach and the endless night and the red-overripe sun waiting to burst. It's kind of sad that extremophiles (for all their tenacity) are still so helpless against natural extremes. Why can there be only a few snow crane flies, a single Antarctic midge? Why must serpentine flora be forced into stunted growth? Why does Mono Lake lack a second brineshrimp?

Nevertheless, life still goes on, albeit not very vigorously. The cacti here do not turn brown, of course, because they are cacti (Narnia and Chelindea continue to suck on their fruits all summer but the few cactus genera here don't seem to host much more than that at any time of year, unlike in, say, parts of Arizona, so I will not be mentioning them further), and Malosma plus the lemonadeberries stay almost as alive, but they seem to support even fewer local insect taxa than the cacti this time of year so will not be mentioned further either. This leaves us left, for the most part, with the summer-specialist dandelion guild: Lepidospartum squamatum (scalebroom), Ericameria pinifolia (pine goldenbush), Lessingia glandulifera (vinegar tarweed), Heterotheca grandiflora (telegraphweed). I'm tired and not in the mood to talk fluidly any more right now so suffice it to say:

- the above pic is one of the lushest microhabitats left right now (not pictured: miles of brown desolation)
- summer-specialist insect guild largely gone from soft chaparral, the occasional Eleodes acuticauda notwithstanding; many of the other spp. emerge and die earlier in the summer when the growing season is ending but not ended for the summer-dormant shrubs; no Elicinae seen
- Cryptocephalus spurcus is still in season as it eats goldenbushes and scalebrooms, which are both blooming and lush
- yesterday I caught a mating female of Cryptocephalus spurcus
- it seems to be slightly (but only slightly) less behaviorally problematic than C. sanguinicollis but "slightly" can make a big difference; after some initial struggling I've successfully gotten it out of "too scared to eat and rest" mode and so far it has not resumed panicking/flying as sanguinicollis has always done in my care (hoping I don't jinx it)
- to my unsurprise I am still exactly as bored and mentally ill as before

Update 7/31: caught a second one. First one has made exactly one egg capsule so far, it has the cool helical ridges typical of this genus (which is formed, if you weren't aware, by the female turning the egg spirally as it defecates, which I assume is the simplest way to coat a round object without missing any spots).

What is it like to be a leafhopper?: a speculative essay

Imagine that you live on a tower of pipes so tall it extends beyond view.

Imagine that it is filled with juice, and that you are thirsty; you bite into its soft side, and it takes a while before you can get at the juice, but you do manage.

And it tastes good. It tastes so good. You never want to stop. You drink for hours and time speeds up and the outside world fades away. You don't even notice you are asleep by the time the sun has set, and the next day you hardly realize you are awake.

You are rudely returned to full consciousness by a dry sensation in your mouth. Evidently your tower only has so much juice to give. How? You were only there for a few moments (you had not moved from the spot in two weeks) it was hardly enough (it was more enough than you could ever remember) you do not feel well-rested at all (you were designed to never know peace).

Fortunately, there is another pipetower to the north, and the journey there is not too arduous. When you arrive you will find it to be as juicy as the first one used to be, but it will not feel satisfying either because when you are satisfied you will not feel.

yeah it molted

My suspicions were correct, it was Penestragania ivanpah

putting this thing on the strawberry clover with the Tiaja

Penestragania?

 Creeping around suspiciously at Plymouth Elementary's so-called native garden when I saw this thing on a palo verde, figured it's polyphagous enough that I could rear it to adult for ID to kill two birds with one clover (two clovers with one stone? Okay the metaphor is breaking down pretend I said nothing). Gonna release it after that probably.

2 Tiaja left

But thank God for Trifolium fragiferum.

Tiaja squeeze campaign

 With the last Xerophloea dead (a juvenile brown widow murdered it, even though I checked for brown widows a few days before that and found none) all I have left are the four Tiaja, which I've still not managed to get any eggs out of. Apparently white clovers freak out when taken indoors and gradually die from dehydration even when well watered, some quirk of the angiosperm root physiology I think.

They stay frightened for longer after handling than the Xerophloea did, sometimes freezing and then not feeding for a whole 12 hours after being moved, and since like many hoppers they don't actually know how to walk directionally towards their food it's been a headache (after the freezing wears off they tend to walk off the plant even if they were sitting on it).

Bought some more plants as potential food while I was exhibiting milkweed bugs at CalBG for their milkweed festival thingy. The hoppers didn't seem to like their new hosts much, I'm going to try feeding them an attached dodder now (previous dodder being fed was detached branches, which are more convenient to supply but cannot live long enough for eggs to hatch).

Released all adult beetles several days back

The rotten wood is doing that thing again where it gets all moldy and gross and it was stressing them out to the point they weren't sleeping, and I didn't have the energy to deal with it. Based on my observations I'm pretty sure the Megapenthes would've been pretty stressed during its waking hours even in a clean enclosure though, as even after I moved it to a clean container full of garden soil (which itself it kept spreading its elytra like it wanted to fly (but never flew; perhaps room temps too cold to flap wings)?

Anyways, guess I'll have to concentrate on sucking hoppers and plants for now. I still have 1 vial of rotten wood that never went bad and still smells nice though and I'm hoping that I can make more of whatever saproxylic microbes are responsible for the smell and mold suppression so I can inoculate other rotten-wood-making containers with them.

Well actually some of the E. lecontei larva vials are also clean-smelling, I lied.

I ignored Easter to catch beetles and emit depression

https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2526641
https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2526642

Caught these two, will attempt to breed. Of note is that Megapenthes contains at least one species of conservation concern in Europe.

Update: Stenochidus is being difficult, it's panicking and behaving abnormally because it's in an enclosed space, will probably release once I have the time. I figured this would happen given that it seems to happen to a lot of small flying plant-dwelling beetles but wanted to test. Put it on a potted plant in the meantime to soothe it (by making it think it's not on the ground).

Elater lecontei has reproduced

Found a wireworm in its enclosure today. I was starting to worry it hadn't mated.

Also, I got to see it naturally active again. Came out around midnight, fed on blueberry until sated, walked around for like a minute or two (I suspect it was seeking damper conditions as I hadn't misted in a while) and then went back under its potsherd to sleep. Apparently it's one of those bugs that's awake only when necessary.

The grayish brown nymph I caught did turn out to be Tiaja

Molted to adulthood last night (above; probably slightly teneral in pic). I neglected to post it here when it was still a juvenile but it looked like this.

The Deukmejian hoppers turned out to be a mix of Dictyobia (seemingly the regular semivitrea-looking sort, though perhaps a different cryptic species I suspect) and Dyctidea (apparently D. intermedia, though my specimen is weirdly brown so maybe not) by the way. Getting to and from Deuk is kind of a drive but I'll probably release them soon too.

I'm definitely planning to try my hand at dictys and dyctys again next year tho. Maybe even this summer, if my plants can lush up fast enough when Dictyssa adults make their summer appearance.


Down to one Xerophloea nymph after a Malva I was feeding them mysteriously wilted to death only 2-3 days while still immersed in water and thus subsequently set off a series of incidents indirectly leading to the other xerophloes dying. Not sure what happened, it had a really long taproot and all of it was wet so what the hell?

Released Dictyobia

Running short on dodder biomass, also my CalBG sunflower bushes were getting insufficiently lush and freaking the Dictyobia out. Apparently just like Croton if you don't water them enough they get droughtstressed even if the soil remains damp? I hate angiosperms sometimes.

I did get a look at their courtship behavior before the release though. Apparently when the male makes physical contact with an unmated female there's no fanfare, they just connect their genitalia. At a distance though there was some (audible! albeit faintly) singing which sounded like a zipper being zipped back and forth a few times, also when not singing the male sometimes moved its wings in a way that I can only describe as "trying to open a padlocked gate by pushing it repeatedly instead of unlocking it". Nothing too interesting happened though and the females didn't seem to react much if at all to whatever the male was doing. Honestly things like this are why I don't care about Coniontis any more. Insect courtship dances just seem kind of disappointing in general.

Also while catching more Tiaja I semiaccidentally caught and reared this thing to adulthood, since it looked like a Tiaja nymph (turns out was the same subfamily). Released it after.