The Bagrada hilaris female had been its usual self during the first several days of January, though refusing to stay planted on its food after eagerly proboscising it; another few days later it was deader than a bag of cricket flour.
I am quite appalled, since I suspect that there may have been a problem with hostplant quality; many specialist oligophagous herbivores are prone to mysterious tantrums if they smell that a particular host is excessively well-defended or lacking in nutrition. I imagine it could have been easily averted by providing a wider selection of different brassicaceans to it each day, since this has worked well in the past when it probed and rejected one leaf or floret. Unfortunately, my now-constant lack of sanity (and thus energy) had been causing some problems with plan implementation and furthermore I could not have released the poor hemipteran anyways; why are brassicacean weeds always rare when you really need them? I am tired of detecting potential ethical disasters and consistently failing to avert them despite frantic efforts.
In any case r-strategists are built for high mortality rates anyways; I suppose I can tentatively hope that whatever I did to it is less unpleasant than its natural fate...? After all despite the frequent broccoli shortages I did fish it out of the swimming pool and allow it to live several months longer than wild specimens (which I presume are literally annoyed to death by heapfuls of desperate males on a regular basis). Those broccoli shortages were still awfully long, though.
Fortunately the Pomacea diffusa specimen is still doing quite well, though it hasn't stopped fasting yet.
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