Loensia maculosa dies

 I have good reason to blame the yeast paste being inadequate nutrition. I had a feeling that would happen but the animal showed no clear signs of the frantic behavior one often sees in insects being kept incorrectly, so it caught me off guard.

Boring updates of the day

 - Church dodder is huge now and flowering. I also got myself the small presumably-annual species from Santa Fe Dam. Unfortunately my personal subinclusa culture has fizzled out because the plants were too dumb to grow downwards, and I'm trying to reestablish it from cuttings of the bit I put into the church.

- Grabbed myself a Loensia maculosa specimen. Call it maladaptive coping mechanisms, because honestly non-indoors Psocodea consistently seem to be among the most painful of the detritivore taxa to feed (it would not eat a lot of things tenebrionids, isopods, etc. love). I have it in a dry container full of dead leaves/petals smeared with yeast (it doesn't seem to require drinking water or even juicy food and apparently is one of those species that magically hydrates itself out of thin air), and it did eat the yeast, but seemingly refuses to eat anything else. I know L. maculosa is a facultative synanthrope (specimens have even been recorded from bark of Eucalyptus) and thus of relatively little conservation value, but in this day and age, well, one never knows.* I collected mine from native plant wilderness though, maybe the wilderness genotypes are different from the urban ones? Something something intraspecific invasive genotypes something something? Also I threw in a probable Blaste oregona nymph (suburban origin, not from native vegetation stand) in with it a few minutes ago on a whim. This seemed to go poorly so I re-released the nymph.

*I keep hearing about potential declines of synanthropic birds and native semiweedy flora.

- At least one of the macrosternodesmids? is still alive and eating. Now that the weird horrible mold has left their enclosure and the dirt actually smells nice I've dared to put in dead leaves more generously, and the Hibiscus ones are being eaten enthusiastically.

- F2 generation of haplodesmids? produced, although my attempts to delete excess eggs have prevented a population explosion. Nevertheless some of the F1s apparently died for some reason and I feel bad about it (although I still have way too many of the species for my and their own good).

- Sent some more misc. insects to acquaintance for potential conservation-rearing.

- Asterella californica project severely stalled due to rains and resulting mudslide and resulting forest closure, the ones in my culture are doing okay tho. The Sphaerocarpos in the same cup suffered a huge dieoff as I kept the dirt slightly too dry (was trying to prevent soil algae), but I still have some balloonworts alive in another cup.

I should stop calling it "sunflower etc. project", the emphasis on sunflowers is getting rather misleading now

In one of those depression moods again (I say "again" as if I had ever stopped being sad), but here's the important stuff:

- Attempting to rear Pachybrachis bivittatus with an acquaintance (pic credits his). He reports they don't do the obnoxious "continuously try to escape via ceiling" thing. Also, he's discovered the adult not only eats willows but will also reluctantly consume Baccharis. New host record. Also threw in some hemipteran hoppers in his rearing jar.

- He's also trying to rear a native-looking Anthonomus I found.

- Turns out Closterocoris amoenus (I have confirmed them as such due to having reared to adult) and Dictyobia were getting restless and stressed due to host plant phytochemical reasons (I did a little controlled-variable experiment and ruled out overheating, lack of leaflitter shelter to hide in, sleeve interfering w sap flow, etc.) Evidently some hosts are simply unsuitable even when other identical-looking ones are not. The adults I reared seemed to have molted more from their stored calories than any new nutrition gained while sleeved on my host at home, although they did feed with reluctance on the latter (and somewhat less reluctantly on supplemental honeyed cashews I offered). If you really want to see pics of them go stalk my Bugguide. In any case, I will not be attempting to rear any more hemipterans that show this sort of severe host-intraspecific pickiness for now. I already have enough blood on my hands.

- The adult Cryptocephalus may have been awful captives, but they did leave some egg capsules behind if I didn't mention that before. They look similar to those made by other members of the genus. None have hatched as far as I can tell.

- Threw some more gray Spastonyx? into Plymouth a few days ago. Several if not all have survived till today.

By the way, if you're a biohistorian from the future and are reading all this to figure out whether some distributional anomalies were my doing, rest assured that I am extremely cautious not to forget to mention any insects I've relocated to non-captive habitats (I may be sloppy with the tags these days but not the actual post documentation). By the other way, it seems that fasciatus-morphospecies Oncopeltus wildtypes experience low mortality on a diet of honeyed cashews and Asclepias curassavica buds/flowers/leaves when no fruits/seeds are available (as opposed to reports in the literature of high mortality when offered only sunflower seeds/cashew and water, or only vegetative/floral milkweed parts but nothing else).

Sunflower etc. proj update 4

Attempted to culture Dictyobia, they threw fits for no apparent reason and when I took them out of the rearing sleeve they seemed to calm down at first but then threw an even bigger fit while I was looking the other way and escaped outdoors.

Also grabbed some unidentifiable ant bugs (prob not IDable until mature but context strongly suggests Closterocoris amoenus). All I will say: confining insects in tight bags with resinous leaves is dangerous, the resin gets everywhere and can glue/suffocate them even if they're normally immune to it. One died, the other 3 lost some legs and are recovering. Update: 2 molted and promptly ran away to god knows where because I trusted them to stay put uncaged (I suspect sleeve caves subtly interfere w sap flow and thus feeding). Third has been re-sleeved and didn't make attempt to flee, possibly because it is preparing a molt of its own.

Sometimes I wish I could just quit entomology so I don't have to deal with these sorts of stupid things, but if I don't do the conservation science who will? Just look at Bugguide and bug iNaturalist for LA County, almost no one (except approx. 4 people, including me) photographs anything except butterflies and such because of that stupid shit about only butterflies and such being socially acceptable. Oh god I hate everything.

Sunflower etc. project, cont. 3

 Went back to Peck Road Water Conservation Park just to make sure the leaf beetles I had transplanted there really were absent, and not merely falling below detection thresholds as a result of having had a "bad year" last yr. Despite continuous searching for more than an hr I found none.

The ones at Plymouth Elementary have also been periodically disappearing. Some leave within several hrs to a day after being put there (possibly due to host phytochemical reasons relating to drought?), the rest have a retention half-life of 2-4 days. Given that Plymouth has only three fully leafed-out sunflower bushes at the moment (and therefore it is easy for me to search them extensively), my favored hypothesis is that birds are eating them all because foliage-gleaning bird density is elevated at Plymouth and moreso at Peck compared to Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area's aridland, and because there exist birds capable of detoxifying Encelia (so presumably there also exist birds capable of detoxifying Trirhabda geminata, given that Trirhabda presumably sequesters its defense chemicals from its host). The 2-4-dayers generally seem contentedly lethargic in the days preceding their disappearance (in contrast the quick departers were observed walking restlessly even after feeding), so host chems may not be to blame for 2-4-dayer demises.

In other news an acquaintance also helped me plant a live cactus in there (to further feed the cactus flies, and also Nitops pallipennis, which breeds in the flowers), so at least there's some progress made, I suppose.

No update on the Huntington ones yet, for the simple reason that I haven't bothered to check. I did edit the post preceding this one with some updates, tho.