List of posts that aren't just small talk, boring (albeit occasionally useful) data entry, or complaining

This is a dynamic list I hope I will remember to update. I deliberately excluded a few posts because I didn't feel like it. A bunch of those are cryptogam fails but not in an interesting way, merely because I ran out of resources or was depressed.

Also some of these posts are from a while back when I was somewhat more socially awkward, so.

Lichens are invertebrates too (lichen culture with no petri dish; see also interesting indoor lichen offhandedly mentioned here)
How to catch really large protists (slime mold ecology)
2019 desperate spring tipulid-chase (I discover crane flies apparently use their legs as antennae in flight, sorry I think the post formatting broke somehow)
The ventral surface of (Cal)asterella can iridesce
At long last, a Coniontis recording 
Orbweaver consumes fruit
The lepidopteran malnutrition post
C's Enormous Research Literature Stash™

I can't be bothered to link the "transplant flightless and weakflying insects for habitat restoration" project commentary but suffice it to say that I've not sighted the offspring of any of them, aside from the hemipteran hoppers I've kept as free-range outdoors specimens sometimes. Well I say free-range but they hardly move at all. Cause of failure with Trirhabda seems related to hosts not being lush and wellwatered enough, no idea whether the NHMLA/Peck megadarklings/diabolicals have died off or are just secretive, and a bunch of the sunflower bush transplants at Plymouth Elementary were destroyed by their sunflower bush dying from the school improperly caring for its plants.














I also feel like mentioning the current status (last update:1/26/26) of my main personal sciprojects, I know this post is supposed to be a list of posts and not a status update but I don't care.

- Culture weedy lichens without special equipment: hypothesis formulated and ready for testing. Currently too depressed to test it, and also I can't get my hands on the lichens I most want. Hoping to resume experimentation eventually.

- Investigate ecological function of iridescence and basal senescence in Marchantiophyta and fern gametophytes: stalled from lack of resources. I do have a live Calasterella specimen right now. Hoping to resume experimentation eventually.

- Transplanting poor-dispersing invertebrates: see above. The success of my outdoor hoppers seems to be due to their being in a position where they can't fatally overheat and my watering their hosts more often than is natural, as many hoppers are known to require their hosts be lush; discovering that counts as useful experimental progress, as similar rules seem to be in effect for many non-Hemiptera here. Hoping to conduct/test additional transplants soon, perhaps with Elater lecontei if my click beetle lays any eggs. Maybe I'll make a fake tree hollow someday with damp logs in a box and put it outdoors.

- Coniontis courtship vibration project: deliberately abandoned. After having watched many non-coni bugs with complex courtship behavior, I've come to the conclusion that complex courtship behavior in bugs tends not to be complex enough to be interesting to me. I saw some Phaneroptera mate and it was boring, but don't get me wrong I'm sure that there's plenty of cool insect courtship and sexual-conflict stuff to be studying despite its relative rarity. Most of the coolest ones need expensive equipment to study though...

- Entomological outreach public campaign: deliberately abandoned, I've come to the conclusion that trying to convince the general public not to be afraid of bugs through reason is too hard because irrational people are generally unable to be convinced by valid arguments, and through emotional appeal is backfiring dangerously (via "give a man a fish without teaching him to fish" logic) despite the latter being a strategy of choice for museums and sci outreach experts. I've decided for now to only talk about bug outreach on a small scale and to people who're receptive to reason-based arguments. Also worth looking into: how the UK seems to have a weirdly healthy ento subculture (which I still don't fully understand).

- Nonflight functions of wings in Elicini: hoping to investigate this once my current hoppers reach adulthood.

- Stop Santa Fe Dam scrublands from being mulched to death by irresponsible conservationists: stalled due to irresponsible conservationists being too powerful (they're county-backed). I have, however, gotten the Invertebrate Club of Southern California on the case, although it seems not to be making any progress either. Message me if you want "blackmail" material btw.

wow

 Had insomnia, checked up on my click beetle at 4 AM. Asleep. I swear to God, as long as there's food ad libitum that thing's awake for, like, what, less than a fourth of each night? Still haven't seen it awake on its own terms yet.

Previous checkups at midnight and 2 AM also revealed no activity. It does not move during the daylight hours unless disturbed.

phew

Are my post titles just going to be various noises now?

Anyways, one thing I've noticed with the Dictyssa and Xerophloea is that different individuals don't always have the same food preferences or same tolerances to bad food. I wouldn't exactly call this a "personality" since sucking hoppers don't ever seem to locomote or do any other behavior besides feeding as long as they're unstressed and in no need for reproductive behavior, but it's not particularly surprising since personalities are known to exist in many insect species, including well studied model organisms like Drosophila (see: rover-sitter polymorphism).

Some of my Dictyssa nymphs were getting stressy and feeding only restlessly on the dodder I provided (others fed very well and even molted repeatedly), so I moved the cranky individuals to a ventilated cage with some white sage (Salvia leucophylla or one of the hybrids/cultivars that look like it; not S. apiana) cuttings I took from Plymouth Elementary's not-actually-locally-native native plants garden, and they started feeding contentedly. Moving them was a huge chore tho since they kept jumping everywhere (and they don't know how to move towards food, so if they don't walk onto the plant they could starve to death) but I moved them all with no casualties.


I'm down to 1 Xerophloea again unfortunately, due to the feeding-related polymorphisms killing off specimens less tolerant of uprooted weedy Malva in water jars and because I took them away from Croton (which they seem to slightly prefer over Malva) to give the Croton time to rest and heal from previous feeding damage. Apparently Malva begins verrrrry slowly dying of dehydration if even a few centimeters of the upper root aren't fully immersed in water (a fate which evaporation rapidly encourages to happen), and Xerophloea hate that (especially the adults; nymphs are more tolerant because they're flightless and thus dispersal is more risky for non-adults in the wild) so the less tolerant individuals jump around restlessly until they starve to death (they eventually attempt to feed again if starving, but, again, they seem to have no ability to detect and move towards their food, so frequently starve to death once off the plant due to their inability to relocate it except by accident). I feel less bad about getting them killed than with other bugs because since they inject eggs into plant tissue (and every individual lays countless eggs) there's no realistic way of controlling their population ethically anyway. Still, though, this is not good, since among other things I've gotten all the males killed (males obviously laying no eggs and thus being more ethically relevant). I've kinda gotten into the habit of compulsively acquiring new bugs in the name of habitat restoration in a fruitless attempt to compensate for being chronically without interesting things to do in my life, and I'm self-aware enough to have known all along this sorta thing would happen. Don't judge me ok? Sometimes one succumbs to the overcollecting temptation despite one's best efforts.
Anyways, the last remaining X. is a fertilized female and it has already laid plenty of eggs on my plants.

Also gonna be releasing the Coelocnemis magna, which have inexplicably started running around in a stressed looking manner and refusing to hide in their cardboard tubes any longer. I knew they wouldn't die tho and that they would be prone to the stressy-looking running, I acquired them only as an experiment to see if I could make them stop doing it somehow. Too tired to keep experimenting, I'm going to give them a few extra snacks and then put them into the big Santa Fe nature center log that I know the wild ones breed in occasionally.

The diabolical and Elater lecontei are both doing ok. Latter is somewhat plumper, hopefully with eggs? I've never seen the Elater ever stop sleeping but I'm reasonably sure it's doing well because when I miss a feeding the creature flies(?) to the cage ceiling and I haven't missed any feedings lately. It's not running around stressily either, because I have it in solitary confinement in a little open-top cage inside a big closed cage in a way that if it were running around stressily while I was asleep it'd fall out of the little cage and not be able to get back in there without my assistance.




Long story short, things are doing relatively good despite Xerophloea dieoff. I'm also gradually albeit unreliably getting less mentally ill for various reasons.

ow

early instar

Gradually catching additional C. magna for use in saproxylic program, plus diabolicals, Dictyssa-type nymphs, and also a (hopefully female) Elater lecontei I found wedged into a piece of wood. The European E. ferrugineus is described as being easy to rear under artificial conditions but also painfully slow-growing (2-7 years for larval maturation, but apparently able to mature without carnivory and tolerates poor hygiene well) and under severe conservation danger due to its need for large-diameter rotten wood, and while American Elater are apparently poorly studied I found mine in an enormous stump so it's probably of conservation value too. Gonna be a useful asset for my "make habitat for saproxylic insects and then put the insects in them" project, especially because E. ferrugineus is said to be so dispersal-limited that it affects genetic structure.



Interestingly the stump in question is that big burnt oak(?) at Santa Fe Dam Nature Center, presumably planted as an ornamental, and oaks are not locally native to that habitat (they avoid the soft chaparral due to its drier nature, they're more of a hard chaparral [although I have seen drier hard chaparrals with no oaks] and arid sclerophyll forest thing here if you ask me), so I'm a bit concerned my specimen may have anthropogenically microevolved in a problematic direction, but the long generation times of lecontei, general absence of large human-sourced deadwood in soft chaparrals here (thus less ability for microevo to happen), and the fact that I could probably water down the unwanted genes with sclerophyll forest genotypes should I ever find a second individual means I've decided I'm going to keep this specimen for now.

Also shaking my head at a few papers that're like "E. ferrugineus adult doesn't feed!" even though it's pretty well documented to fly to fermented sweet baits (my own Elater was likewise happy to drink sugar and chew fruit). Geez, when will people stop slapping "aphagous" arbitrarily on random bugs?

Finally some wilderness action

Now that the recent heavy rains have rained themselves I'm finally seeing the Santa Fe Dam soft chaparral spring back to life. Detectable insect biomass is still pretty sparse and rare right now but the upright-winged hoppers have started hatching, I've bagged 3 early instars so far (1-2 per hour, which is the usual encounter rate for upright-winged hoppers and most other soft chaparral bugs on a good day's hunting). They were feeding on Salvia mellifera and Artemisia californica but I've moved them to pieces of Cuscuta subinclusa since dodders (by virtue of being fast-growing and parasitic) are highly nutritious.

Gonna tag them as Dictyssa obliqua for now because based on locational context from last summer's adults that's probably what they are, even though they're probably physically unidentifiable till adulthood.

blugh

 Vomited the shoulderbands back into their (at risk of being renovated) rock pile due to my poor mental health making it too hard to care for them (they're too hungry and their feces are way more prone to gross bacteria than a lot of other saproxylic bugs', but letting them go dormant carries mortality risk). Dumped a generic yellow slime mold I never posted about back to its habitat too, as it was cowardly and bad at foraging and would end up having its bag filled with rotting food half the time.

Replaced them with a Coelocnemis magna specimen I scooped up off the side of the Santa Fe Dam nature trail. It went under a tube and fell asleep for three days. See? Low maintenance.

I should probably make a post about all the posts where I actually say stuff instead of complaining about my life

 yeah

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: 1/9/2026).

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.
**To my knowledge, Heliconius does not swallow any portion of the pollen that isn't liquid/liquefied. I'm assuming jawed moths (see below) can chew and swallow the solid portions of pollen.

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
- Heliconius of both sexes gradually lost weight over the course of their lives just like Dryas even when pollen was abundantly available; it is unclear whether this occurs in the wild, since the laboratory Heliconius colony could copulate ad libitum, which the authors speculated may possibly be causing weight loss. It would be interesting to see if weight loss occurs or not in H. completely prevented from mating.






But a different study I'm too tired to link said somewhere that putting pollen into sugar solution isn't "enough" and that the nutrients remain trapped and digestionally inaccessible within the pollen or something like that (despite claims to the contrary), and that because of this Heliconius has proteases in its saliva (also despite claims to the contrary). 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. I have, however, seen reports of certain migratory noctuids gaining fat by drinking nectar; I should look into that, although I will note that fat gain is not incompatible with gradual malnutrition if the fat noctuids are gaining fat but gradually depleting a finite stock of certain nonfat substances (nitrogen I bet) during adulthood.

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.