Cryptocephalus sanguinicollis success

One specimen is now adult (a female), with another freshly changed into a pupa. Perhaps the acquaintance I enlisted to care for them during China did something right that I didn't (more consistent/stable humidity?) that made the larvae eat more regularly, or perhaps their endogenous clocks simply told them they had to metamorphose.

Said acquaintance's roommate was a little shit who was grabbing and inspecting my specimens without his permission and accidentally cracked open the latter larva's fecal case shortly before it pupated, but I suspect the pupa will survive anyway. I'm keeping it very lightly damp to mimic the humidity conditions presumably experienced inside a case.

Unfortunately, as you can see here the pronotum and wings are a bit misshapen, and more concerningly it only seems to have 3 legs (or, worse, maybe it has 6 legs but 3 are still larviform, a thing that's known to happen during severe pupal molting disruptions sometimes). I swear to God I'll give that roommate the beating up of his life if I ever meet him in person. Even my acquaintance never liked him.

Also, my single adult's behaving normally. As I had hypothesized, tricking it into thinking there was no ceiling helped. Long story short I got one of those giant mesh pop-up cages, put a hostplant (Rubus) in in a way that the leaves weren't touching the walls/ceiling, and put the beetle on the plant. It usually flew away in alarm from being handled (and, being too attracted to light, was psychologically unable to fly/walk back to the host once on the cage walls/ceiling), but sometimes it would get hungry enough to start eating as it was climbing up to the top to prepare for its escape flight and forget it was scared, and (more rarely) it would initiate the escape flight and bounce off the wall in just the right way to end up back on the host by accident. In both of these cases it would calm down and remain on the host (however escape flights that were only a cm or two long did not placate it when they ended on a leaf, probably because they were not long enough to count as a "successful escape" to its instincts).

The adult seems not to like eating Salix lasiolepis for some reason (but will calm down and remain on it anyway when I use the above technique), which is why I switched to Rubus. Ideally I would've used Salvia apiana or Acmispon glaber as those seem to be preferred wild hosts.




Edit: it got mad at being in the shade (because my house only gets direct sunlight in the mid to late afternoon) and left its host. I re-placated it, but this animal is going to be one hell of a pain to keep satisfied. Don't want to put its cage outdoors which might kill it from overheating. But then again, I've seen wild specimens making no attempt to seek shade at temperatures physically painful to myself, and I'm pretty heat-tolerant.