Oh, and by the way, the willow worm's big now.

 

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 Black Micrutalis dead. I noticed it was suffering from whatever ailment makes hoppers "starve" to death surrounded by food but I couldn't get it back to its habitat in time. I really tried so hard to but [reasons I cannot mention without compromising privacy]. I fare disproportionately poorly in no-win situations and tend to make a mess of myself. In any case, the beige one has been released successfully, apparently in part because it wasn't overexerting itself to death like the black one. 

If Santa Fe Dam weren't being destroyed by idiot restorationists I wouldn't even have to deal with hopper rearing! Not that that'd do much good anyway, considering my inability to get them to stop or to even assess which hoppers are higher conservation priority*, and the rate at which shortlived insects evolve to lose adaptions to the wild when cultured, but it's marginally better than nothing, right? Right?

I'm sick of seeing insects die. Considering that all my "slots" are full or unusable I think I'm just going to stop acquiring more arthropod species for the foreseeable future, lest I create any bigger a mess.





*Commonness isn't a reliable indicator.




Xerophloea and Dictyssa are still doing okay, besides that one and only one dicty is getting restless (oviposition urges?)

Going to have to get rid of Scolops and the weevil

 Former still seems to be suffering from drought-legacy phytochemical effects as it abandoned both willow and Croton (and this despite the willow currently being sopping wet), latter flags petioles and pedicels (not eating the actual leaves/flowers, which die from the flagging) and my Croton specimen simply isn't large enough to tolerate this form of wasteful chewing.

Annoyingly, whatever drought-related phytochem changes certainly don't seem to be affecting this small (1cm) measuring worm, an adult must have oviposited on/near my large* Salix lasiolepis specimen back when the plant was still in my yard. I mean, it's welcome to stay and eat the willow since hardly anyone else wants to, but I'm irritated it seems so content when the hoppers are stressing out. 

*I have acquired more willows yesterday, probably the same species; they were juveniles near the Bridge to Nowhere, and were so crowded they could not have all survived to adulthood so I figured taking a few would be harmless.

Before I realized the Scolops was so distressed I also took this nymph from the Bridge to Nowhere sprouts. Fortunately, so far it has shown no signs of distress after being put on the large specimen (I am not feeding it on the small specimens so they can grow leaves quicker). No idea why it's white, S. lasiolepis leaf undersides are white but not this white. Edit: looked at the petioles and underside of midrib and they're a similar sort of pale, I suppose it's mimicking those?

Also took home this Micrutalis pair today (pictured here before capture). They're color polymorphic. Only membracid I've seen ever, and the most common hemipteran on Croton californicus at Santa Fe Dam (but still relatively sparse). I've noted these are often present on small, droughted, and/or thermalrefugeless plants in the wild so figured they probably wouldn't throw a fit in captivity.

Current non-dormant inventory:
- Salix lasiolepis (several)
- Croton californicus x2 (gained one today by pulling it out of a sidewalk crack)
- Heterotheca grandiflora x1
- Calasterella californica x1
- Unidentified white hopper and caterpillar x1 each
- Dictyssa obliqua x2
- Micrutalis x2
- Xerophloea peltata x2 (still feeding calmly)
- Cuscuta subinclusa (much)
- Cuscuta californica (much, but less; I've been neglecting watering its host because mentally ill)
- Various hosts for the dodders, mostly weeds and domesticates
- Disabled Eleodes acuticauda female I offhandedly mentioned a year or so ago x1 (it has not lost any leg since I rescued it from the wilderness, unfortunately it's stressed right now, apparently because its shelter objects have gotten old and stale and apparently smell wrong to it; I need to find it a new thing to hide under)

I also plan to germinate a new Navarretia batch soon.

Soft-chaparral hemipterans update

Caught 1 more D. obliqua (pictured above) yesterday (new total: 2), both specimens still feeding well on dodder.

Caught a pale green morph of what appears to be another X. peltata on the same excursion, both specimens motionless and apparently feeding well on Croton.

Caught weird pinstriped Croton associate weevil on the same excursion, seems to be doing well in the enclosure with the hoppers.

Scolops is not fleeing the hosts but kept shifting around between spots on the willow, and is now of its own volition on the Croton again (unclear if this is male matesearching or if something's still subtly wrong with the host hydration status or whatever it is); I did not find any additional specimens, so it has no mate.



Also of note is that I've noticed D. obliqua will lower their wings when frightened, that when only one of the two wings is raised it seems to be consistently the left one, as is the tendency among Elicini (side effect of brain lateralization?), and that voluntary (as opposed to alarm-induced) locomotion is at least sometimes accompanied by slow, monotonous up-and-down wing flapping movements reminiscent of tephritid wiggling. While I assume the wings mimic chewed holes in foliage, it is clear that breaking up the animal's outline can't be the reason (or at least the only reason) they're held raised, or else why would frightened animals lower them?

Tephritids use their wings as social signals but I've not seen my two dictys socially interacting so far (the wing-flapping observation occurred before I caught individual #2). Like the other hemipterans currently in my care they spend most of their time sitting still, as one might expect from an animal adapted to a low-nutrition diet. As I suspect they are male and female I might try and prod them into standing next to each other to see if they're interested in mating.

Update: prodded them into chemosensory and visual contact with each other. No detectable response.

Scolops threw a fit too

 I have moved it to a willow in hopes it is more palatable than Croton.

Dictyssa and Xerophloea are still feeding well on Cuscuta and Croton respectively.

Found weird hoppers from Santa Fe Dam today

 

Santa Fe Dam. All on Croton californicus. Attempting to rear these 4 conservation. Note that despite all being camouflage-colored C. californicus has none of these textures on its body. They must get away with the poor camouflage somehow.

I've a C. californicus in a pot btw.

Update: they're respectively Scolops californicus (well, probably), Dictyssa obliqua, Xerophloea peltata. Feeding on C. californicus confirmed for the first, and probably for the third, judging by the latter's behavior. The dicty threw a fit after some hours (possibly from noxious phytochemistry increasing from my not having watered the host enough in the past, even though it was well watered at the time I offered it) but I offered it a bit of Cuscuta subinclusa and it fed on that.

Scolops californicus and Dictyssa obliqua are endemics, while Xerophloea peltata is more widespread and reported to be a minor pest of economic plants, but all 3 may be of some conservation value in my area due to their seemingly tight association with soft chaparral, a habitat type that is disproportionately destroyed in my area (unlike the very different-looking hard chaparral). Of course, being so understudied, no one actually knows exactly how threatened or not they are, so I'm going off educated guesses and all that.

C. sanguinicollis breeding project now cancelled

I can't seem to keep them placated for more than a few hours a day. Perhaps my movements around the room scare them (although they don't fly away immediately when I'm near them, and sometimes don't react at all), or perhaps they endogenously attempt to fly even when all their physical needs are met.

Anyways, I released the female, euthanized the pupa (it metamorphosed so poorly it could not walk after eclosion), and am going to release my new female soon. The last of the 4 individuals is still a larva and shows no intent to pupate.

Rest of my life's been uneventful. Dodders and Calasterella and aridland wildflowers are doing basically nothing worth my time to mention. Still depressed to death, only respite is the too-infrequent Ultraviolet Grasslands games.

Oh, and that weird hairy mystery plant from the China trip is probably some sort of Draba.

Addendum to prev post

The sanguinicollis female appears to operate according to the following protocol when not frightened by handling:

- If no or only small patches of direct sunlight are visible anywhere, remain calm/lethargic on host.

- If direct sunlight is shining on body, bask and become slightly more active, but nevertheless remain calm/lethargic on host.

- If no direct sunlight is visible within the enclosure but large quantities are visible outside the window, attempt to fly towards window and become restless.

Keeping the curtains closed until the sun moves into a position where it's directly shining on the beetle seems to keep the animal calm throughout the entirety of the day.

Cryptocephalus sanguinicollis success

One specimen is now adult (a female), with another freshly changed into a pupa. Perhaps the acquaintance I enlisted to care for them during China did something right that I didn't (more consistent/stable humidity?) that made the larvae eat more regularly, or perhaps their endogenous clocks simply told them they had to metamorphose.

Said acquaintance's roommate was a little shit who was grabbing and inspecting my specimens without his permission and accidentally cracked open the latter larva's fecal case shortly before it pupated, but I suspect the pupa will survive anyway. I'm keeping it very lightly damp to mimic the humidity conditions presumably experienced inside a case.

Unfortunately, as you can see here the pronotum and wings are a bit misshapen, and more concerningly it only seems to have 3 legs (or, worse, maybe it has 6 legs but 3 are still larviform, a thing that's known to happen during severe pupal molting disruptions sometimes). I swear to God I'll give that roommate the beating up of his life if I ever meet him in person. Even my acquaintance never liked him.

Also, my single adult's behaving normally. As I had hypothesized, tricking it into thinking there was no ceiling helped. Long story short I got one of those giant mesh pop-up cages, put a hostplant (Rubus) in in a way that the leaves weren't touching the walls/ceiling, and put the beetle on the plant. It usually flew away in alarm from being handled (and, being too attracted to light, was psychologically unable to fly/walk back to the host once on the cage walls/ceiling), but sometimes it would get hungry enough to start eating as it was climbing up to the top to prepare for its escape flight and forget it was scared, and (more rarely) it would initiate the escape flight and bounce off the wall in just the right way to end up back on the host by accident. In both of these cases it would calm down and remain on the host (however escape flights that were only a cm or two long did not placate it when they ended on a leaf, probably because they were not long enough to count as a "successful escape" to its instincts).

The adult seems not to like eating Salix lasiolepis for some reason (but will calm down and remain on it anyway when I use the above technique), which is why I switched to Rubus. Ideally I would've used Salvia apiana or Acmispon glaber as those seem to be preferred wild hosts.




Edit: it got mad at being in the shade (because my house only gets direct sunlight in the mid to late afternoon) and left its host. I re-placated it, but this animal is going to be one hell of a pain to keep satisfied. Don't want to put its cage outdoors which might kill it from overheating. But then again, I've seen wild specimens making no attempt to seek shade at temperatures physically painful to myself, and I'm pretty heat-tolerant.

I am no longer in China

I do intend to add some additional commentary below later though.

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 金仓湖 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 9-24 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 anyways I went to the Hot Sea Scenic Area (geothermal springs and adjacent forest; 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)

Update: entry expanded as promised. For some reason there don't seem to be any easily accessible pictures of the Hot Sea's wilderness-area vegetation on the internet, so here's some I took. Of some note is that the plants being exposed to the geothermal vapors have no outwardly visible specializations for doing so and don't seem very different from the flora elsewhere. Even normal-looking serpentine and calaminarian flora at least tend to be different species from those of the nontoxic soils nearby, so not sure what's going on there.

There were bloodworms in the water too. I didn't check if there were any living in the actually hot part but I bet there were.

On an unrelated note I stopped procrastinating and took a picture of the camphor worm in its new instar, if it helps with the ID at all or is otherwise of any sort of value.

c a m o u f l a g e

Also after thinking about things some more I suppose the lack of Marchantiophyta in most of the Calasterella-style habitats seems to make some sense, as during monsoon season they would simply wash away and during the non-monsoon season rains (although still somewhat frequent) do not compensate for their frequency by allowing the ground surface to stay wet for very long, conditions that tend to allow angiosperms/ferns/mosses to outcompete them. In support of this was that the only two colonies I did find were on stone, this one was on one specific lava rock staircase and I was too depressed to photograph the other species or to sample the photographed one.

Oh, and that millipede wasn't the only bug I saw dead in a stupid position. Unless the ceramb is faking it (but I doubt it).

Chlorophorus?

5/12: Went to summit of dormant Tengchong volcano, I forget if it has a name. Anyways, same story, no Marchantiophyta found. It seemed very pristine, with high nectarivorous beetle population density,

Round flea beetles seemed biodiverse here. Yes, this one really was drinking the sugar, not just sitting around.

and I wanted to explore its small angiosperm flora thoroughly (this was one of the first places that I saw herbaceous noncultivated angiosperms that didn't look weedy) but I couldn't stay very long because of Reasons. I was glad of the Reasons this time as a bunch of torrential rains started almost immediately after I got back (didn't bring umbrella), although this was little consolation. Here's a really low effort picture of the crater I took, I don't like the sky-ground ratio but I can't be bothered to edit the image.

Other things I saw included this giant shield bug, also here's pictures of some of the ground vegetation. Unsure if any of the pictured herbaceous taxa count as nonweedy, they're not the ones I was talking about.

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 (including bug photography) 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 really would appreciate an ID on this one in specific. It's a generic small hairy plant of course, but it seems really cool.

I did see this intriguing small angiosperm on a cliffside near Lijiang (alarmingly there were only 2 individuals of this morphospecies along the entire trail, and I have not seen its morphospecies anywhere else before or since), due to the semiarid-ness there were few other nonweedy small angiosperms in the area except some things I assume are asian Gnaphalieae. Part of me wishes Yunnan was my normal area of residence and not just some travel destination so I could protect the thing from whatever's making its population so sad, but obviously that's not realistic, so I left the two plants alone. I suspect that given how metapopulation dynamics and stochastics work the species is locally doomed even if no further habitat destruction occurs in the area. Let's hope it has nonlocal populations that're thriving.

5/17: Took a trip to the Kunming Stone Forest. Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage Site the illegal smoking was so bad that eventually I got a tobacco-poisoning headache which lasted several hours. The Stone Forest has plenty of pictures on Google and such so I won't bother posting any landscape shots; blah blah blah magnificent karst caves and pillars, you get the idea. I will however note that the area had an unusually humid microhabitat (which I assume relates to the karst in some way) and was much more full of saxicolous "tropical-looking" small angiosperms and cryptogams (in other words, more stereotypically Yunnan-y) than most parts of Yunnan I was able to visit. Nevertheless, it did not give off Riccia-habitat vibes and because thallose Marchantiophyta are naturally less biodiverse than the leafy ones the only thallose sorts I saw there seemed to be one or two species. I suppose they're being beaten at their own game by fern gametophytes.

(I did not take any specimens, I doubt I could've gotten legal permission to sample at a UNESCO site and while I know could've easily gotten away with collecting there if I had tried I didn't want to try. There's the harmless, low-key sort of illegal California plant/invertebrate collecting that everyone does because CA collecting laws are unreasonable, and then there's Tropical Angiosperm Poaching. I... draw the line at the latter. Besides, the Stone Forest's already been wrecked pretty badly by secondhand smoke and park mismanagement and I feel like the "even small acts add up when lots of people do them" logic behind "leave no trace"-type policies is actually applicable here, unlike when one takes a few Coelocnemis or whatever from some Los Angeles scrubland, coelos are too unpopular for collecting to have much impact*. And besides the "besides", I saw no angiosperms or cryptogams there I strongly wanted anyway, Reboulia/Plagiochasma are monoicous.)

*I do oppose the blanket statement that insects all breed too fast for intensive collecting to impact them. See: Pasimachus, which lays only 1-2 huge eggs at a time and should obviously be taken in moderation, or less obviously one of those insects which is widespread and fast-breeding but which have source-sink dynamics where almost 100% of the range is naturally sink. I don't think cryptoglossines tightly conform to either of those models but I'm somewhat worried about their popularity causing Certain People (y'know, the same sort of people making parts of the reptile and rare isopod hobby becoming all shitty) to overcollect death-feigning darklings. There was a paper somewhere saying that even mild chronic roadkilling of darklings could significantly depress the population over time and the same logic probably applies to massive feigner harvests.

5/19: Went back to my "base" in Taicang last night. Still thinking about the dead caterpillar. Not sure whether to feel guilty or unguilty about it, because a certain mental health incident I don't wish to discuss in public (ha, I say "public" as if more than like 3 people even read this) was largely responsible for its demise and I'm not sure how much of its death was my fault and how much of it was due to the incident and not my fault. Plus no one even knows if insects are conscious or not. But guilt or lack thereof aside I certainly felt bad about it so today I went and gave this huge peppered moth a meal (coconut water) after saving it from a window. It wasn't too weak to fly but it tried to lick sweat and/or oily hand secretions* off my hand so was cooperative enough to go up the elevator with me to my room.
*I don't know if this is a species that habitually drinks mammal fluids or if it merely smelled my hand soap and thought my hand was sugar.

It's not a The Peppered Moth (Biston betularia) of course, just an a peppered moth. Also, given that I've been talking about white moths with orangish markings a lot, I feel obligated to note that there were no similarly colored trees/lichens anywhere in the area (nor do I assume bird droppings can be speckled in this specific way) so I have little idea as to why it's this color. Maybe there existed orangish non-eutrophic saxicolous lichens  in the area before humans polluted it and the moth hasn't evolved to adapt to the loss yet, although given what peppered moths are best known for I'm not sure that's true. Although one time I did see a lep pupa in California that was very blatantly mimicking a greenish foliose lichen in an area where greenish foliose lichens had all been extirpated. In any case lichen mimicry just doesn't seem likely, says my intuition. Maybe there's no real story to this one's colors besides "aposematic", who knows?

Also I'm super tired right now from the aforementioned Not Having Interesting Things To Do so for the sake of brevity I'm going to write the rest of this post mostly in bullet points.

- Some individuals of Biston suppressaria also have orangish wing markings but are convincing adult mimics of certain types of bark. I do not know whether my specimen is suppressaria. And, again, trees matching my specimen's color pattern are absent from my part of Taicang and I suspect they were absent even before humans deforested the place.
- The specimen was apparently quite sleepy from being stuck in front of a window all night and would fall asleep repeatedly when I was holding it, and when it briefly escaped it also would attempt to sleep on curtains in my room completely unmatching its coloration. After I released it it seemed similarly indiscriminate and attempted to land on a very green bamboo (it slipped and fell and vanished so no idea where it went, but I doubt it had the energy to care about what color its perch was). Thus I cannot conduct experimentation to determine what the preferred sleep-perch coloration of this species is.
- Note the shortness but thickness of the proboscis. I suspect that in nature whatever species this is feeds on sap/honeydew primarily if not exclusively. I also suspect that The Peppered Moths have short tongues too (there is a caption on Google somewhere showing the B. betularia tongue but the image itself is paywalled).
- B. betularia and several other (all?) Biston are not believed to feed as adults.
- I do not know whether B. betularia feeds as an adult, but it is possible the belief originated when an entomologist examined a dead The Peppered Moth, saw a short tongue, and assumed that it was short enough to be vestigial without rigorously confirming or denying its functionality.
- By the way Estigmene acrea (sap specialist too?) also has a proportionally even shorter tongue (and has sometimes been assumed aphagous too) but I once personally saw an E. acrea specimen feed for several hours after I presented it with honey solution. In any case I have proven that at least one type of peppered moth can feed in adulthood.
- By the other way if I haven't told you about it here already (I grow forgetful these days) I made a post on Bugguide cataloging all the saturniid taxa known to have functioning adult mouthparts.

Well, that wasn't brief as I had hoped. I have little else to note other than that I've acquired some lichens that seem to be Xanthoria parietina. As some of you may know I have long been interested in advanced lichen culture techniques for that species, and given the death of my last batch I'm glad to have new samples to experiment with. I even went and watched them complete a full hydration-dehydration cycle in situ, so I have a good idea as to how long to keep them wet when artificially irrigating them. The sample (being from Yunnan) may also possibly be a genotype more able to sustain positive caloric gain under relatively warm conditions than my previous one.

5/24: went for a bored stroll around Taicang's 天镜湖 [translation: Skymirror Lake], heavily promoted as part of Taicang's efforts to become an ecologically friendly "green city". This is an anthropogenic lake and the lake's park is a pretty generic soulless-looking Chinese suburban park. A number of the plantings seem to be some sort of nonnative (but US-native) Coreopsis, which I hear have become some sort of invasive in Asia (I've seen a few in Yunnan sidewalk cracks), but they certainly helped support the local floral visitors and don't seem to be invading here. Just because something's nonnative doesn't prevent it from providing keystone ecosystem services. Was deeply unsurprised at the ecological mess the park staff were making though since China seems to be far behind the US in terms of the native plant game, Chinese bureaucratic restorationists largely don't even seem to understand native plants are relevant and just think any greenery suffices. Sometimes they even proudly claim their creations have 0 net carbon.

The 天镜湖 lawns did have sparse, nonclustered populations of Spiranthes chinensis sensu stricto* though (native!), I knew weedy orchids were a thing but was surprised to see one there. These are absent from my residence's own lawns/gardens, which only seem to contain hardier weeds.
*I keyed it out. It can't be anything else.

I know that Asia has lots of rare synanthropic ruderals (maybe incl. S. chinensis? Too lazy to check) threatened by excessive succession and that disturbed places like suburb parks can be vital habitat for them, but that doesn't mean it's ok for the local ecologists-in-charge to be so bad at their jobs. I mean, disturbing a habitat with thoughtful ecological intent and disturbing it out of ignorance just... aren't the same, even if their effects on the biodiversity are.

5/28: Entered Shandong a few days ago. There is a population of Trichocolea (ecological group: hydrophilous specialist, requires pristine stable microclimate) on at least one of the mountains there, and I've felt like paying it a visit, my eyes have turned into Trichocolea crosshairs lately, but more annoying coincidences (including trail closure due to a firefighter practice drill) and quasi-coincidences (including one of the not-Trichocolea mountains seemingly being naturally(!) low in both biodiversity and morphological weirdness, even at the peak) have been getting in the way and I've not seen a single marchantiophyte in all my time here. I got so close to the Trichocolea populatiiiiiiiiiion!

Also I saw a few clams at the shitty beach.

5/31: finished typing out trip report commentary for 5/11-5-17 (plus 5/24). Scroll up. Also I'm still miserable.

6/3: Bad internet connection deleted my post but basically nothing of importance happened besides my successfully releasing a lacewing larva I rescued from the fruit bowl some days back. Tomorrow is my last day to do anything of note, at noon I leave for Taicang and expect to spend the rest of my stay in China packing my stuff and being in air transit to Los Angeles.