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?