Unfortunately I accidentally flattened the Graphocephala cythura female a few months ago while trying to release it during a host shortage (cause of that thing where Croton californicus seems prone to very slowly dropping leaves from dehydration indoors despite having damp soil and strong lighting), haha another thing to feel guilty about haha,,,
I also released the Micrutalis (aside from 1 unmated specimen) and moved the Xerophloea (I currently have 7 of the latter) to weedy mallow indoors to allow the Croton to recover. X. is particularly destructive when it feeds because it causes strong hopperburn and can distort new growth, whereas the Micrutalis seems to cause little damage even at relatively high densities, which I guess makes sense given that M. seems adapted to being relatively common on its host for much of the year without overexploiting it, but given that my copious watering seems to have boosted M. populations slightly above wild densities I was getting kind of worried anyway as the honeydew was seemingly causing premature leaf drop and also growing a lot of sooty mold. Wild Crotons here usually have perfectly clean leaves because M. and X. shoot their honeydew away and thus make it unlikely to land on foliage, but of course when there are many hoppers on a plant the leaves get dirty anyway due to infinite monkey theorem reasons. Still, the fact that I was able to increase the population density above wild levels does imply I've figured out a reason why wilderness insects are naturally low-density in my area, which I've been investigating as part of my whole "why do restoration plantings reliably fail to support non-synanthropic arthropods" thing. Also, note how the pictured X. nymphs retain the pale blues and greens of Croton even on other hosts; the body color isn't strictly genetic and can change based on environment but apparently this strain is so adapted to Croton-feeding that the various pale morphs can show up even on host species incapable of pale foliage. I've noticed some mildly interesting phenotypic plasticity in the Micrutalis too, there's a yellow with black specks nymph morph that doesn't normally appear but showed up in small numbers during the sooty mold outbreak. Kinda cool when bugs mimic their own feeding damage.
Disabled Eleodes acuticauda is doing ok, a few months back I'd found it some cardboard hides for it that it doesn't hate the smell of.
Calasterella dead from a series of mishaps, if I didn't mention it before. I have acquired new stock.
Also scooped up some fresh Helmithoglypta from an area of Santa Fe Dam threatened by development from misguided sustainability initiatives. For those of you not in the know, these are snails which spend most of their lives dormant waiting for the rain, and are commonish in my area but under high conservation risk because they have small ranges (in captivity all three local spp. just act like normal snails and seem not to need any dormancy or unusual diet, as far as I can tell, although they seem to hate the smell of coir and won't eat rose petals). Also going to the ceiling seems to be a sign of stress for them, they do it for a day if I lift their foot off the ground. If lifted together with the ground they don't do it. I'm currently working on an informal proj with the Invertebrate Club of SoCal to stop the development effort btw, if you can lend any sort of aid please let me know.
Dodder (C. subinclusa) underfed but surviving. A major problem is that hosts are expensive and another major problem is that Home Depot has shit biosecurity. Still trying to get rid of spider mites on the strawberry, fortunately I had enough foresight not to keep it too close to my more valuable flora.
That weird polytrichaceous-looking Chinese moss is still alive and has fissioned, as is true of many of the other exotic cryptogams I have. I also am amassing various native and nonnative angiosperms for insect/dodder fodder and informal research purposes, which I will not bother to mention in detail because of a lack of noteworthy behavior. But free tip, I recently discovered firsthand that you can asexually reproduce Baccharis and Eriogonum (and probably many other natives) without rooting hormone if you bury stem fragments. I thought that was a myth but then I realized that the fragment has to be mostly defoliated and mostly buried for it to work properly, otherwise it tends to wilt to death even if there are preexisting roots on the stem because angiosperms are weird like that.
Updated Research Stash page (see below).
Went to Invertebrate Club of SoCal outreach meeting at California (Native) Botanic Garden a few months back, where I presented some live Oedemasia salicis caterpillars I found starving to death on the sidewalk and saved. I don't usually make public appearances because I'm a transhumanist and don't think my meats are aesthetically representative of me (I kept my face/body out of the recording on purpose so don't go looking for it), but I was desperate and hoping to reel in one of CalBG's juicy higher-ups. However was just asked generic amateur questions by everyone and bored to death. No offense amateurs.
Some of the larvae have turned into adults by now and were released. In an effort to fight the weird habit of entomologists of falsely accusing bugs of being aphagous I tried to feed the adults, but could not get them to do so even with the forced proboscis unroll trick people use to feed hawkmoths. But they do have a tiny (albeit functional-looking) proboscis so I can't prove aphagy. I mean I've seen Estigmene drinking with a similarly small tongue so size alone is not indication of vestigiality and I know there are notodontids that do adult-feed.
I also went to Joshua Tree for a few days (where I saw creosote and an Eleodes armata in person for the first time ever) and was bored to death the whole time because there wasn't much to do besides look at eye candy. But when you're offered a free trip to the high desert and you have nothing better to do, well, you don't refuse do you?
No comments:
Post a Comment