Trivial updates

 Slime still alive, has taken yeast pellets. Often moves away from food for no apparent reason.

Millipedes still overpopulating. I have thought up some tactics to encourage Original Adult (it still seems to be alive) to lay its eggs on the surface. By the way, for the record I am well aware that its life doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things and that arthropods are possibly all unconscious anyways, but I shall nevertheless attempt to commit ethics at it for some reason.

Anyways, the juveniles grow quite rapidly. Here is the exterior of an egg nest and a nearly adult juvenile:

All juveniles I have are white. It seems very likely they do not become visibly colored until shortly after (or during the premolt/molt to) adulthood. So far it appears that none of the immatures have reached full size yet.

The misery is finally ending

 I am currently doing an ambitious project on Asterella californica's ecology! Somehow I'm even going to get electron microscope permissions, wew!

Right now I'm still in the "boring phase" of the experiment, but I did conclude that its absence from a Certain Restoration Site is in large part because the soil is too loose or has too many leaves (causes it to be smothered). The restoration staff adding so much mulch (again, fatal smothering) sure isn't helping the thing either.

Californian native gardeners in general use so much mulch and it pretty much kills cryptogams and tiny angiosperms wholesale. I've never seen natural mulches occupying any appreciably large areas in my area, even in log piles most of the litter is leaves instead of wood fragments.

I have kidnapped a slime mold from the woods

 

I am surprised the thing did not die on me.

Current inventory (excepting dormant specimens)

Most of these IDs are (as usual) provisional but almost surely correct. The remainder are undoubtedly correct.

Cryptogams:

Iridescent gametophyte (due to its low-light-tolerance it is basically immune to the cyanobacteria mentioned below)

Noniridescent gametophyte (seems to be slowly dying from cyanobacterial allelopathy)

Asterella californica

Sphaerocarpos

Invertebrates:

That unidentified millipede species I've been posting about (it's visually identical to Cylindrodesmus hirsutus, if I haven't said so here already)

Angiosperms:

Crassula connata (most are dormant seeds, the three that germinated in the summer are growing very slowly due to chronic neglect; admittedly I'm favoritism-ing the Asterella)

Cuscuta californica(?)

Cuscuta subinclusa

Several potatoes and weeds (for feeding dodders)

Sorry, not going to post dodder/Crassula pics here, see previous commentary on marcescent leaves aesthetics crisis (I know dodders have nonexistent or barely visible leaves but I am also suffering from a floral abscission scar aesthetics crisis).

In case I haven't mentioned it subinclusa turns green in low light just like californica(?), and when grown side by side the vegetative parts of the two look noticeably different (subinclusa is thicker on average, able to turn greener, has leaves(?) that are consistently larger, and has little prickles like a cucumber on parts of its stem near the haustoria). I'm going to assume the fleshiness is because subinclusa is a taxon of less arid microhabitats than californica(?), no idea what the prickles do though.

All 4 of the other juveniles molted in sync

 

EDIT 10/10: no longer 100% sure all of them molted simultaneously, counted one recently and it still had same number of segments?

Caught the entire batch molting at the same time! I'm very relieved. In the past few weeks I'd been biting my nails because I was worried they'd be so cowardly that they'd get malnutrition and die half an inch underneath the proverbial milk and honey. Remember how that's seemingly almost what'd been happening with those Nyctoporis grubs?

The adult seems to be significantly less epigean now (but still surfaces near-daily for considerable periods because of its voracious appetite). Whereas it tended to completely surface in the past it now prefers to feed on the undersides of leaves with only its anterior end above ground (tenebrionid larva style). The highly surface-active behavior it displayed previously appears to be initially from inadequate nutrition and then (once I had figured out how to rot leaves properly) from several weeks of intensive compensatory feeding.

I guess this means the ones loose at the Arboretum are, like, somewhat constantly starving. Such is life?

Random stylish backswimmer pic

 

Buenoa sp.

I may not actually enjoy photography for its own sake but I have a feeling this photograph might come in handy for something in the near future. Going to dump it here I guess! If you're more into eye candy than I am I suggest clicking to view full image.

Also, it hates the bubbles, they make it itchy.

Edit: let me just dump these here too.

Noticed two hatchings today

Gave last post's nest a glance and saw something walking around! The second juvenile is still curled and immobile though.

It's so funny to me how juvenile millipedes start out with only a few segments/legs and grow more as they get bigger. It sounds like it ought to be a myth perpetuated by Certain Arcade Games [coughcough] but somehow it's actually true.

Another dissected nest

 

You can actually see the body outlines if you look closely!

I really seem to be getting the hang of things

 As I probably said in the past, for some reason the default state of permanently damp rotting plant matter in Los Angeles County (whether in a well-aerated compost bin or in the wilderness) always seems to involve becoming moldy and horrible-smelling, and then have the mold go away but some vestige of the horrible smell remain (or for it to change into a different and less displeasing but still unpleasant smell for the remainder of its existence).

Anyways, after some confused trial and error I seem to have inoculated the pede's soil with a blend of microorganisms that suppress the mold. Now if I drop dry leaves at a certain stage of post-death breakdown into its cage they turn deep blackish brown within two days and do not mold at all. It loves those, and while its jaws seem too weak to eat the leaf itself even in such a softened decay stage it does enjoy scraping detritivorous microorganisms off the leaf surface. I'm reasonably sure the feeding difficulties I have w it are finally over, time to spare a few of its eggs from euthanasia.

Help me

 I'm depressed so this post is way overdue but a year or two ago I'd been importing locally sourced tenebrionids (incl. some esoteric understudied species), one mutillid fem, and what I provisionally take to be Trirhabda geminata adults to Peck Road Water Conservation Park. Also dumped seeds of some esoteric native flora at a school's native garden, because the state of the art here is that native gardeners don't have much idea what they're doing. If you're some ecohistorian reading this long after I'm dead and you find some sort of distributional anomaly at Peck now you know who to blame! Edit: haven't checked up on the tenebs yet but trirhab vanished. Not sure if they're supposed to have boom/bust years if that magnitude or if Linepithema killed their larvae. The adult trirhabs I imported definitely lived a goodly while though, several were resighted by me several days later and were eating.

Peck did have Blapstinus, Metoponium, Coniontis, and Phloeodes diabolicus long before I arrived though. Was surprised to see diabolicus surviving in habitat fragments that small, considering that it can't fly (at least some Blapstinus and probably some edrotines can fly, and conions do well in super tiny crap habitats despite seemingly all lacking flight wings).

I discovered dodders can induce the green island effect while culturing what's provisionally C. californica.

Current inventory, all IDs provisional (I recently remembered provisional was a word and provisional is generally a more accurate descriptor for my taxonomic knowledge than tentative):

Plants I have dormant, collected from wild except the vegs:

Encelia farinosa

Lepidospartum squamosum

Salvia columbariae

Zeltnera venusta

Camissoniopsis bistorta

Cryptantha, Plagiobothrys

Crassula connata, colligata

Selaginella bigelovii

Riccia campbelliana, trichocarpa, maybe nigrella is hiding in there

Asterella californica, palmeri

Fossombronia

Domesticated hot pepper (dodder food)

Some other things I can't ID or maybe forgot

Things I currently have actively growing:

Cuscuta subinclusa

Sphaerocarpos

The two different unidentifiable gametophyte things

Mosses that show up uninvited

My haplodesmid-y thing

Too tired to tag this post properly but at least I managed to type it all out. I'm also having a bit of an aesthetics crisis over the ontology of wrinkles and marcescent leaves (I take aesthetics very seriously) so I don't think I'll bother to post pics or further pics of most of these (the marchantiophytes all get a Get Out Of Jail Free card because I actually have some idea why their basal death exists. That's... not the most well-reasoned rationale I admit, but one has to draw the line somewhere). Also yes yes I know my blog looks kinda "web 1.0" and I really hate the depressing sterile Brutalist-ish look web 1.0 sites of this sort have but I don't hate it enough to resort to the alternatives. The alternatives are worse for my intents/purposes, many make the label tag list-thing disappear. Kind of hypocritical considering how I'm not even bothering to tag this post amirite? Whatever.

Maybe I'll gain enough psyche healthpoints to add the tags in a few years. Will I even survive that long?

Ugh it eats so much

 I'm already running out of its preferred microbes again. I put it back in the unsterilized substrate vial and euthanized the four or so nestfuls of eggs it made in the microwaved substrate cup (don't want its descendants to be miserable). Each nest contained approx. 3-6 eggs, and I think it's pretty safe to say that laying eggs in small batches is normal for the species.

I seem to be getting the hang of things

 The fish food didn't fully cure its stress behaviors but apparently reinoculating the dirt/wood it was dissatisfied with with dirt it liked did (I squashed the inoculant very carefully to destroy microanimal eggs hiding in there).

Several yogurt-shaped bacterial(?) colonies that took me weeks to grow were eaten in a day or two.

Also excessive humidity seems to make it panic and stop burrowing, so I've been keeping things more lightly damp. It seemed to have made some more egg nests two days ago.

Golly gee it sure likes fish food

 Ate near-continuously for more than 12 hr, in fact I had to confiscate the pellet to prevent mold (after I put a new pellet in it resumed eating).

(I wonder if in the wild it's specialized for grazing extra-proteinaceous bacterial biofilms. I wouldn't expect a pillbug or Oxidus to act so restless when given high-quality wood without fish food).

Is it just me or is this thing an epicure?

Gave it piece of wood from park tree (well rotted dark crumbly, and with preexisting millipedes, which I of course removed before taking the chunk home and microwaving it). It seems to like eating the wood but still seems discontent. I'm getting frustrated, might release it back into the Arboretum if it proves annoying enough.

Anticlimactic egg pics as was promised

 

Here's a pic of the remaining female. You can tell how much dirt it's eating just by looking at it.

And here're its eggs inside their capsule nest (which it makes by walking in circles for several hours while somehow extruding fiber pulp it's ingested).

The capsule itself has only one dirt wall (the other wall is the plastic wall of the vial, so I don't have a decent pic of the capsule exterior because it got squashed when I tried to remove it from the vial's wall, but I swear it looked like this). Not sure if E. elegans actually "broods" as per the caption though; my specimen abandoned its nests after their completion and it's conceivable elegans may desert its eggs in the same way too.

By the way, have I mentioned on here just how boring the animal is? Whenever it isn't in substrate that makes it restless and agitated, it sits around (usually underground, though it does surface approx. once every several days) and doesn't do much except slightly adjust its position every few hours and eat things occasionally. Some animals are highly secretive but active within their shelters, but this thing doesn't even do much when buried. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I regret impulse-grabbing it during that Arboretum trip (well, not exactly regret; more like "I knew it'd bore me and I'd not even get temporary enjoyment out of it, but I did it anyways because brains are irrational and I couldn't help myself"). The other reason, of course, is that arthropods are possibly conscious and thus an ethical liability. Asterella and Sphaerocarpos may exhibit an equal lack of behavior but at least they're plants and thus unconscious. And if I ever become affluent enough to finally do some fun Deep Research, I'd honestly have no idea where to start with the millipede (which is not to say that there aren't fascinating adaptions in its physiology), whereas with the worts I've already compiled a whole list of hypotheses to test.

Both of them turned out to be ovigerous females

Unfortunately today I had a meathead moment and unwittingly dumped one of the females in my yard because I thought I was holding an empty container. Felt so ashamed about it I had another mental breakdown (I do forgive myself, but still).

Also, here is a pic of the now-escaped one eating aquarium fish pellets (ingredients include fish meal + various grains and similar seeds) just for data's sake. It chewed that thing for hours. Blah blah another data point for "many detritivores love scavenging carrion", blah, etc.

Not that all detritivores are like that; Blaste oregona seems to refuse anything except some sort of unidentifiable bark dust (which is why I released the barklice a day after catching them; after the release they instantly began gorging on said dust and ceased their restlessness). Though I bet the lice'd still eat conspecifics dead of natural causes.

I have two millipedes now and they look like this

 

Long story short, I was at the Los Angeles County Arboretum looking for accidentally imported Marchantiophyta in the greenhouse and impulsively caught these pyrgodesmids(?) instead (I could not find any marchantiophytes). Or maybe they're Haplodesmidae.

I'm not really even interested in millipede husbandry any more! How does one get overexcited enough to impulse-acquire things one doesn't even slightly want? What's wrong with me?

Anyways they've been doing well in potting mix but seem annoyingly specific about what potting mix they consider acceptable. Even microwaving the one they like (and then  reinoculating the clean substrate with their presumably favored microflora) seems to induce tantrums I can only seem to stop by putting them back in the unsanitized dirt.

Update: Derek Hennen says it looks haplodesmid.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

SISYPHUS ROLLED THEIR BOULDER UP A HILL. THEIR LIFE HAD BEGUN LONG BEFORE THE MAN WHO BORE THEIR NAME - THEIR AFTERLIFE WOULD CONTINUE UNTIL THE END OF TIME OR THE END OF TYRANNY [WHICHEVER CAME FIRST]. BY NOW, THEIR FACE WAS A MANIFOLD, EVERY PIECE OF ITS FLESH THE VISAGE OF A DIFFERENT INDIVIDUAL WHO HAD CHALLENGED AND LOST TO THE NATURAL ORDER. THEIR ARMS HAD GROWN SIMILARLY MULTITUDINOUS, YET STILL THEY COULD NOT OUTWIT THE INFAMOUS STONE.

ONE OF THEIR FACEPIECES NOTICED A LICHEN UPON THE STONE. "THE ONTOLOGICAL AND ECOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS ARE FASCINATING," THOUGHT THE PIECE TO ITSELF.

BUT THE TWO HOLOBIONTS ROLLED DOWN THE SLOPE. TOGETHER.

Comparison

 

2 different localities from same county. The bottom one's near Azusa River Wilderness Park's entrance; the top, a short distance beyond the Mount Wilson Trailhead entrance. The Azusa specimen is the same one pictured on a previous post.

I'm running a common-garden experiment to see how much of their phenotype variation is genetic and how much is environmentally induced.

Edit: oh god I think the top one's apical notch has died, looks like it's time to get a new sample. 

Not that it's incapable of making new notches (but when the preexisting one dies the new ones come out on ventral branches, and I can't figure out a 100% objective way to distinguish ventral branches induced by clonal regeneration from ventral branches of a genetically different specimen that happened to have been hiding underneath as a spore or something. Sometimes two overlapping specimens are appressed + affixed to each other so tightly they look like they're part of the same flesh even though they aren't.)

Another intriguing observation

 

I discovered the drought-stress phenotype of Marchantia polymorpha (above) is uncannily similar to the normal wild phenotype of a lot of aridland Marchantiophyta. In particular, note the dying sides and unusually large fraction of dead rear here; compare to Asterella images from my previous posts.

In a way it's kinda unsurprising, but on the other hand I suppose it's pretty weird Asterella evolved to look (and possibly act) half-dead by default, know what I mean?

The ventral surface of Asterella can iridesce

 

Who knew? 

Here is its dorsum by the way (I assume the yellow crumbs are pollen from some bush or someth- edit: wait a minute, just realized the thing has macroscopic spores! These are probably what they look like, I shook a sporophyte repeatedly and they kept falling out.)

Followup to below

I've been seeing large aggregations of various synanthropic native and invasive aphidophages (golly gee, what a lot of adjectives) in the wilderness, but only near weedy mustard megaclusters. Presumably they are murdering various mustard aphids.

More "pristine" habitat remains low in insect density, with a few exceptions.

Random observation

 Despite the co-occurence of drought-relieving rains and plentiful host plants (many mass-blooming), insects (aside from A. mellifera and a few other ecologically aggressive spp.) continue to be sparse at both Millard Canyon and Sante Fe Dam Recreation Area. I don't think it has to do with pesticides either.

A few hypotheses:

- Low insect density may be natural (this is less unreasonable than it sounds; there are high numbers of self-fertilizing native plants present, and the Eleodes of the dam are suspiciously violent towards conspecifics).

- The rains may not have been enough; insect populations there only rebound after many consecutive nondrought years.

- The rains were enough but habitat destruction is so bad that rain is no longer a population-limiting factor.

"Three papers on insect tameness": a followup

 One paper on insect obliviousness.

https://doi.org/10.3390%2Finsects9040179

Their findings make sense, considering how a number of non-lepidopteran bugs in the hobby have trouble finding food in large cages.

Navarretia hamata has also decided to be pretty

 

Flower 1 opened Feb 15. Flower 2 (directly above it in this image) opened today, and in fact did so exactly 30 minutes or less after I took this photograph!

The other two hamata currently in my tray have no visible flowers as of this writing. All three've bolted some time ago, though.

Note 2 self: how to rule out atractyl?

Crassula connata has decided to be pretty

 

But pretty botany pictures are rather boring. Also, note that the small size + redness are due to it being a heavily-insolated wild plant; my other specimens are green and resemble miniature bushes.

The pictured individual eventually turned green too after being transplanted.

New microwort

 

More about it later; I'm too depressed to post my paragraph.

Update: it died a week or 2 later.

Sphaerocarpos is p much fully metamorphosed

 

It's also way larger than it was only a month ago, though this isn't obvious in the pic.

I regret calling my gemmaless gametophytes noniridescent

Left some in a bag for several days cause I was depressed, and they turned slightly metallic (well, either that or the gemmiferous one infested its container, which is very unlikely).

Remind me to not make sloppy assumptions.

Edit: perhaps I may have mistaken their standard satiny sheen for iridescence. Remind me to not make sloppy assumptions.

Sphaerocarpos metamorphoses into its high-humidity form

 

Photograph taken on 1/6, but metamorphosis had began way earlier. Hard to believe it's the exact same individual specimen as the one in the previous post, isn't it?