Many of the transplanted geminata(?) continue to stay put on their new hosts, it's always neat how with lethargic insect taxa you can see the same individual animals over and over again.
Also put three Dictyobia (shown above, although above is not necessarily same individual I caught) at Plymouth Elementary recently. One appeared gravid. I could not relocate any of them the next day but imagine they are still alive. Also, their host is the same morphospecies as Salvia apiana.
I have no hard evidence but based on various evidence-based intuitions I'm pretty sure that despite the large wings this hopper taxon is bad at dispersal and is thus vulnerable to habitat fragmentation + failure to colonize native gardens for the same reason flightless insects are. Probably a better bet for transplanting than Cryptocephalus anyways, due to the lack of detritivorous larvae and the seemingly poor quantity and/or quality of detritus in most urbs/suburbs.
Probably gonna leave this post up at the top for a while because the picture's nice and because there's honestly not that much point in further smalltalk about sunflower leaf beetles not dying. When left to their own devices they don't really do much besides not die and sit still for hours (they don't even eat that often). Update: ha, posted again pretty fast didn't I?
Update 5/2: put some geminata(?) in the Huntington. Also added both some rotten logs that fell off someone's front yard tree (and dead cacti from around Santa Fe Dam for the sake of cactophilous flies) to Plymouth Elementary School.
Update 5/6: my intentions to put Dictyobia in the Huntington are cancelled, because I saw a nymph that matched. It was in a really isolated planting in the parking lot too (the plants in question were surrounded on all four sides by many yards of bare asphalt), suggesting that if Dictyobia and such are bad at dispersal their dispersal limitations are not as bad as some other slow-dispersing Hemiptera out there. With that being said, those big round wings don't look very aerodynamic (can the hopper even fly?), and I continue intending to throw members of the genus into Plymouth Elementary given that it's significantly farther from the wilderness than the Huntington is (the Huntington has a secret backwoods that visitors aren't normally allowed into, and that backwoods although extraordinarily degraded is still intact enough to have Phloeodes diabolicus living in it).
I've found several definitely-flightless hemipteran hopper taxa at Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area, and am thinking about culturing them to throw into the Huntington, Plymouth, etc. To my confused horror I accidentally and mysteriously killed this one, somehow (in other news several millipedes have also died, and I feel very bad about it, although the surviving pedes are seemingly doing okay-ish for now).
Added more logs to Plymouth.
