new acquisitions (part 5)

Went back to Deukmejian Wilderness Park, acquired some more grayish hoppers.

Also found a single different-looking nymph, note the smaller head and orangy brown color. I wouldn't have taken it home if I had seen it was parasitized, but the hopper was like half a cm long and I didn't realize the infection was there till I got home, so after some deliberation I popped the wasp grub. I accidentally sprained (is that even the right word?) one of the nymph's hindlegs in the process and the leg couldn't move for about 12 hours but this afternoon I was checking up on it and all the legs were functional again.

I don't normally endorse killing parasitoids because they're important to the ecosystem, equal rights for parasites, blah etc., but I really wanted to see if I could get this nymph to adulthood and make it half of a breeding pair before the season ends. I mean, a lot of flightless aridland planthoppers here are really hard to get one's hands on, remember how I was complaining about how I hadn't seen Tiaja for years?

Anyways all the new acquisitions (including the orangy brown) are feeding well on dodder.

Dictyobia aren't doing cool things at each other

Assembled some adults into same-sex and different-sex pairs. They pretty much ignored each other, didn't even mate. Evidently at least some of them (esp. fem, due to eclosing later) are sexually immature. I mean I was expecting some sexual immaturity since all my other hoppers had to feed for a number of days before mating, but I'm kinda disappointed there wasn't some sort of communication dance even the unripe adults would do.

Also, I observed some specimens to switch the asymmetry of which wing was raised higher than the other (not in relation to social interaction; just spontaneously, before I even housed them together).

More Dictyobia adults

Gonna stop announcing new adults now.

Of interest is that one individual seems to be "right-handed" in terms of wing-raising behavior, the others so far all seem "left-handed".





Pissonotus delicatus released, it was doing perfectly fine but I realized I was biting off more than I could chew again and needed to keep my unhealthy insect-hoarding habits in check. It was never my favorite anyway. Also I know widespread insects are said to be paradoxically in more danger than rare ones but P. delicatus strikes me more as the sort of widespread insect that'll do fine in the upcoming decades than the sort that's declining drastically. I could be wrong tho. Maybe it's extra vulnerable to climate change because it naturally lives in harsh disturbed environments and can't take any harsher a life than it's already tolerating? Still, I'm not getting many "common bug about to decline violently" vibes from it. I'm more worried about periodically-outbreaking-but-sometimes-naturally-rare taxa like Xerophloea, Vanessa, Oedemasia, & Trirhabda.

In any case I assume the pisso laid eggs inside my telegraphweed, I'll take a laissez-faire approach to its offspring if any hatch.

Matured a second dicty adult today

 It was fully hardened when I found it but when I threw it in with the first adult they seemingly ignored each other. Maybe both sexes need to be present even to induce nonsexual social interactions (since those may be an indirect method of competing for mates)?

First dicty adult eclosed last night!

Rest still nymphs, I'll be watching them carefully since females probably only mate once in their lives unless copulation is interrupted and I'd hate to miss whatever wingflapping courtship dance they do for it.

It refused the Artemisia I put it on (probably because it was producing drought foliage when I bought it) and instead began drinking from the white clover I was using to make Tiaja oviposit.

part 4

Pissonotus-generating telegraphweeds by the side of the road

Finds from Santa Fe Dam chaparral today: Pissonotus delicatus adult fem and one more presumed Lystridea nymph. Also new less hideous blog color scheme.

Kinda surprised the former were able to survive on such low-growing plants, I'm under the vague impression a lot of herbivorous bugs in my area avoid plants that're short and prostrate because it's too hot near the ground. I mean even that thing Xerophloea and co. do where they go to the base of the plant to feed doesn't mean they'll show up on juvenile plants, in nature it tends to just bring them into the shaded undergrowth of their host. I've never seen hoppers of any sort on sufficiently young Croton (or, indeed, sufficiently small individuals of almost every other plant. Santa Fe's rich diversity of annual flora hardly attracts any herbivores as far as I've seen).

2/26 edit: When I released the Pissonotus I saw a conspecific at the Dam nature center surviving in a patch of like 3 super isolated telegraphweeds under the big tree they planted. No wonder delicatus is so widespread, it's clearly one of those species that can teleport to its hosts and not die of metapopulation collapse in small habitat patches. I've never seen them fly to the telegraphweeds I'm growing in my yard tho, maybe I was just unlucky.

new acquisitions (part 3)

4 days ago I was walking around somewhat aimlessly in the Santa Fe Dam chaparral again

here to be exact

when I saw a Certain Shape sitting on a Croton californicus leaf. Instantly knew it was Tiaja. This is a small (sciarid-sized) and rarely seen endemic flightless leafhopper. I assume the wings not being vestigial-sized helps protect against abrasion?

I've been trying to catch Tiaja for 2 years straight; in 2024 I saw one on a sunflower bush and (not knowing what it was) photographed it and didn't bother to catch it. Never saw one again for the rest of twenty twenty four, nor 2025 for that matter. So you can imagine I was pretty pleased to be seeing one again, especially since the part of the chaparral it was in seems due to be cleared for some sort of """sustainable agriculture""" demonstration garden* and thus making the animal of some conservation value (I mean I'm under no delusion that smallscale rearing is gonna do much for the species but since my efforts to halt the development project directly have all failed I figure it's better than nothing).

*Which is the area currently inside the pictured fence, though since I've seen mulch being laid right outside the fence too I suspect that the farm may expand beyond its current borders, or, more likely, that the farm won't expand but the outside-fence area is gonna be cleared for agriculture-unrelated """native plant""" installations as landscaping for the trail around the farm. To be clear, I didn't trespass, the Tiaja were outside the fence, the crops were inside the fence, but I suspect the Tiaja habitat is gonna be destroyed anyway.

I missed. The individual in question was in an erect stance and didn't look like it was feeding, and from my rearings of other species I've learned that many otherwise unwary hoppers are extra nervous when they're in travelling mode. It saw me coming and got the hell out of there, I couldn't find it after it jumped. Didn't even get a photo this time.

But Tiaja is flightless, so I figured there'd be more where that came from. No luck for the rest of the day.



3 days ago I was walking around somewhat aimlessly in the Santa Fe Dam chaparral again. Same spot. Figured I'd give the bushes another eye-basting because why not. No luck for the first approximately 15 minutes. Then I caught 2 Tiaja sitting high up on Acmispon glaber, both gravid females from the looks of it. This time they really were unwary, didn't react to me approaching or even touching the plant. And that's why I have a photo of one as a header image for this post. Yeah.

...I've moved one of the specimens to a white clover plant I've been growing in advance specifically for Tiaja-related purposes, since a paper reports that they often refuse to oviposit on their native hosts but will lay eggs in clovers.

Caught some juvenile Elicini too, but they look exactly the same as the other nymphs I've posted so I'm not gonna bother posting another picture.

new acquisitions (part 2)

 

5 more hoppers that look more or less the same as the others, but this time from Deukmejian Wilderness (above and below). They seemed to be feeding on Eriodictyon crassifolium (the pale plant in focus, above) but were apparently happy to consume the dodder tendrils I've been feeding the others. Hopefully at least some of them will turn out to be the rarely seen Dyctidea intermedia (known from this locality)?

More pictures of the place:

Stone Barn Nature Center

(it's not obvious in this image because camera distorts perspective slightly but the trail was very steep and full of somewhat scenic changes in elevation)

new acquisitions

Eleodes littoralis pair (pictured) from woods near JPL; hoping that since these are relatively forest darklings they'll not do weird things low-density tenebs from featureless aridlands do. They've buried themselves and not moved (to my knowledge) in the week I've had them, not even at night.

the woods in question (note that this picture has more grass than usual for the area, though it's otherwise pretty representative)

Lots of upright-winged hopper nymphs caught at Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area (though I usually only catch 1-3 per hourlong trip; they're sparse), I have like a dozen or so now. Since like many hoppers they seem to have no ability to intentionally walk towards a host (and will starve to death if they don't walk onto one by accident) getting them to settle on the dodder stems I've provided them has been a pain. They walk towards light tho which makes it slightly less of a pain. Found them primarily on large, lush-looking Salvia mellifera and Artemisia californica. Here's some pictures of the scrublands I've been catching them at by the way, to give you an idea of what typical Santa Fe Dam chaparral looks like.

Lystridea nymph x3, I had a fourth but after I changed its cutting to a fresher one it rejected the fresher one repeatedly and died from famine unusually fast compared to the other hoppers I've raised (6 hrs vs. 3-ish days), seemingly due to effects of dehydration from a thin cuticle; this may in part explain why the genus is a narrow endemic (though perhaps it may be instead that the creature became a narrow endemic first and then lost dehydration resistance due to being in a sheltered microclimate). In the wild they seem to appear primarily on large contiguous patches of the same host as the upright-wings, with the upright-wing nymphs seeming to appear primarily at the disturbed edges of said patches and the Lystridea seeming to be more common in plants at the center and not edge (microclimate buffered in center I bet). Interestingly they seem to drink xylem and not phloem sap, unlike all my other current hoppers.

Also acquired unknown wireworm species while collecting rotten wood for beetle oviposition substrate. The wood chunks it was from smelled so good by the way, not like the usual horrible mold smell rotten logs in my area tend to have; I let a few chunks go unsterilized (though I did pound them thoroughly to squish any eggs hiding in there) in hopes that whatever microbiota live in it can make my beetle enclosures continue to smell nice. Good-smelling saproxylic microbes are sooooooooooooooooo hard to find in my area.

I also bought some sage and sagebrush from CalBG's nursery the other day. The sagebrushes were looking very dehydrated (though healthy, and not wilted) and the sages were infested with powdery mildew but I picked out the lushest ones I could find of the former and an asymptomatic specimen of the latter as emergency food just in case the cuttings get mysteriously rejected again, and also so that the hoppers would have a place to oviposit once they grow up. Tried to see if the nursery staff could do anything about the Santa Fe Dam mulching and construction work habitat destruction thing, the person I talked to was preexistingly aware of the situation but couldn't do anything about it.

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.