Collection update

50-ish Cryptocephalus spurcus larvae (F1)
7-ish Eleodes littoralis adults (F1, I may release these, we'll see)
Disabled Eleodes acuticauda female sent to Arthroverts, he says it is apparently now hiding normally again when it sleeps

Baccharis salicifolia (several)
Salvia leucophylla (1 specimen)
Salvia mellifera (1 specimen)
Cuscuta subinclusa (a lot)
Calasterella died a few months back =(
Croton californicus (2 specimens)
Monardella viminea "Russian River" (1 specimen)
Clinopodium chandleri (1 specimen)
Trifolium fragiferum (several)
Eriogonum elongatum? (cutting, hope it roots)
Iva hayesiana (several)
Grindelia stricta (several)
Encelia californica (several)
Salix (native one I assume, only 1 specimen)
Artemisia californica (several)
2 leafy Marchantiophyta spp., non-gemmiferous permanent fern gametophytes, & that one unidentified Chinese moss (several colonies)
Strobilanthes dyeriana or whatever its true name is (1 specimen and the branch I broke off of it)
Scorzonera? (1 specimen) I actually had this one for a while but never mentioned it, also differently shaped leaves from the same plant key to different species [it's really phenotypically plastic] so clearly someone needs to revise the genus

All of the native shrubs/trees are juveniles or medium adults (except for 1 Croton around full size, but full size adult Croton is the size of a medium juvenile sagebrush anyway).

Apparently some C. spurcus individuals are unsuited to captivity too

The latest one I caught seems pretty afraid of me (it tends to duck to the opposite side of the plant whenever it sees me, whereas some other individuals don't react to suspicious visual stimuli, only vibrations) and keeps trying to fly away and flee its hostplant to the point that it's not eating properly even when I don't come near it, I guess the whole "insects have personalities" thing is true yet again?

I released it because insect personalities are (disturbingly) somewhat heritable apparently habitat fragmentation can make some butterflies evolve to be less explorative and I don't want to raise a batch of specimens that's constantly terrified of me (not to mention the hassle of having to put them back on their plant).

I no longer love my new dirt molecule!

Some of the Exema were running up and down their plant frantically and then flew away (they did eat the sagebrush I provided though). I think I shall return all of them to their habitat, they clearly are stressed somehow.

Elater lecontei have also been released a few days ago, as will the 2 remaining Tiaja (neither of which has apparently laid eggs) and Xerophloea (which seems unfertilized) soon.

Cryptocephalus spurcus larvae are doing well tho, they doubled in size in like only a day or two. Also noticed they will eat lettuce like C. sanguinicollis.

Plans to rehome the disabled Eleodes acuticauda (which is miraculously still alive after all this time, having already seen 2 years, and in that time has lost only a palp even though old tenebs are supposed to be losing legs left and right) are also in the works, since I'm depressed and feeding it drains my mental health (plus it is doing that thing again where it won't hide under its provided shelters because they apparently emit some sort of bad odor only it can smell, and since it is so hard to find unmoldy bark here I'm not sure I can provide it a suitable replacement). Might get rid of the 6 or 7 surviving E. littoralis that I raised from the wild females' larvae too, depending on how stressed they are and I am (though currently they are apparently mostly inactive/buried and not throwing any fits unlike the acuticauda as far as I can tell).

The small millipedes are still doing somewhat ok though since they hide their eggs in the substrate where I can't euthanize them they are inevitably overpopulating as per law of nature and I always feel bad about it. That's why I like cryptocephalines and external-laying Auchenorrhyncha, if they're not laid underground or embedded in plant tissue you can just squish the eggs guilt free, it's not like eggs have feelings.

Caved and took home 5 Exema (albeit from Artemisia)

I love my new dirt molecule!

Cryptocephalus spurcus hatched

Sudden rainstorm today, which raised the indoor humidity so high I was struggling to breathe, and it apparently kicked some of the eggs out of dormancy. They're already feeding on the rotten Baccharis salicifolia leaves I've made for them.

Apparently one trick to making rotten leaves without mold is to force them underwater and keep them there for about a week, molds in my area do not appear to survive on plant litter when too wet (but can grow in the very small air bubbles that form underwater on said leaves).


Also: my suspicion that there was some similarly late-summer-active cryptocephaline in the hard chaparral was confirmed, I found some Exema on brickellbushes on the road leading to Chantry Flat. I did not keep them though because I have something coming up next month and can't risk it since brickellbushes are so hard to come by in the trade (and I have none).

Exema eats live foliage as larvae but I wonder if there are any detritivorous late summer equivalents within reach of me.

New macro lens!

Unrelatedly all Cryptocephalus have been released since I now have enough eggs.

one more spurcus female caught

Darker morph than usual, though the Santa Fe Dam population seems to vary only weakly. Going to try and see how heritable the morphs are, so separating the different females' eggs.

I don't know if C. spurcus is found at higher elevation pinebush habitats (e.g. Deukmejian) but at Santa Fe it is definitely in danger of local extinction, as pinebushes (and by extension the beetle, which is not found on every pinebush) occupy only a small portion of the total habitat, and scalebrooms/mulefats seem to occur mostly in areas unsuitable for larval development (e.g. lack of detritus, no shelter from sun, mysterious other factors, etc.)

Also went to Monrovia Canyon to search for hard chaparral, riparian, and sclerophyll forest cryptocephalines but found none. The habitat restoration there is horrible as is par 4 course here, they put Salvia apiana a few inches from the river among other things. That's like like the most blatantly xeromorphic sage ever how could they ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Xerophloea is now in culture again

solomon hendrix refused to take it past genus tho (citing unrevised taxonomy).

Why are dodders ectoparasitic?

Old pic of my C. subinclusa

Anyone with a passing familiarity with heterotrophic parasitic plants knows that they are mostly invisible. Monotropa, Rafflesia, Orobanche, Pholisma: all undetectable lumps and/or strings buried in their hosts or in the ground, shortlived flowers notwithstanding.






So why the hell doesn't Cuscuta do that?






The dodder literature is silent on the matter, but we can make a few deductions. First off: Cuscuta is in the bindweed family. This seems a bit too on the nose, if you ask me, like it's from some sort of video game with a questionable understanding of biology that went "oh they don't look similar but they're related because they're both twine vines!" What's next, dodders with wings?
I mean, monotropes don't superficially look like free-living members of Ericaceae either but it doesn't feel as weird to me that they're related.

But obviously this is real life so Cuscuta really is in the Convolvulaceae apparently [shrug]. According to a low-effort glance at the taxonomy literature the genus's position in the family is unclear, but I do think that the twining ability shared by dodders and morning glories is a synapomorphy of the clade (I have no proof but I do feel that this isn't one of the cases where climbing behavior convergently evolves multiple times within a family).

If we assume this to be true then the evolution of Cuscuta's particular growth habit is not particularly surprising. One is tempted to conclude that evolutionary constraints have so far prevented dodders from becoming full endoparasites, and that this is a highly imperfect solution because evolution is imperfect, and/or that perhaps given more time to evolve the distant descendants of dodders may circumvent said constraints and become fully internal parasites.




Is that really the story, though? I mean, don't get me wrong, evolution is imperfect but I find that it is not as imperfect as people tend to think sometimes. A lot of traits that get handwaved away as "oh just arbitrary stuff caused by phylogenetic history, not everything the blind watchmaker does has to have a function" actually turn out to be pretty important adaptive features.

I suspect external climbing is an important part of the dodder life history strategy. The dodders I've worked with (and seemingly other dodders, from what I've seen online) appear to be tender-shoot specialists, and apparently die of malnutrition on sufficiently mature stems even when they manage to penetrate them. Which is a bit weird, since mature stems carry nutrients to the more nutritious juvenile tissues at their tips and if you've encircled the former it seems like you could intercept the nutrients going to the latter right? But leafhoppers and aphids able to feed on mature stems also tend to preferentially move to and feed directly on tender shoots when they can afford it, so I suppose whatever logic governs nutrient extraction efficiency applies to both the herbivorous insects and herbivorous plant in question. Also, dodders seem to feed only or mainly on plant parts they are wrapped around and not the rest of the plant; I have repeatedly seen strawberry petioles and nightshade stems that have been wrapped rapidly wither and die while all adjacent uninfested ones on the plant remain healthy. Though I have seen both C. subinclusa and C. californica form green islands on dying host tissue in certain circumstances (though not others), so some limited level of nutrient redirection seems likely.

Suppose you are a dodder and wish to maximize your intake from tender shoots while minimizing the volume of tissue you grow, given realistic environmental constraints. To get from one tender shoot to another on an adjacent branch, an obligate stem endoparasite would have to grow all the way down the branch and all the way up the other branch. Why do that when you can just bridge the gap by growing across? It's much less of a distance, and air is presumably a less resistant medium to grow through than rigid plant tissue. Plus being ectoparasitic allows dodders to span multiple hosts at once; this seems not that common in wild adult subinclusa and californica, but is apparently a major means of spread for temperate dodders, and juvenile subinclusa (in order to get at the part of the tree that's nonwoody enough to actually penetrate mechanically, since regardless of how nutritious it is or isn't the main trunk is just too thick to drill through) often start out feeding on small herbaceous plants and gradually climb taller and taller plants until they reach the edible portions of the tree.

You may have seen me occasionally complaining about my dodders mindlessly climbing upwards the same way ladybugs and a lot of other foliage-inhabiting insects do; while it's definitely pretty annoying in captivity (since when the old host is exhausted and you put a new host that's shorter next to it the dodder often struggles to find it), the adaptive benefits of this in nature are pretty clear.

Today's non-adventure

Checked the "loose sands Notibius zone" part of Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area though since the pictures were taken in the future of this post and it had rained by then the sand in them is temporarily not loose to see if it had any cool summer endemics the more stable sand elsewhere lacks.

Kind of disappointed the Cryptocephalus there were still spurcus, also found a whole bunch of 5mm-ish microweevils on scalebroom flowers I didn't keep because they looked like they might be gall inquilines (weevil larvae as a general rule are endophages on seeds and other high-calorie plant parts and these were too fat to fit into any of the seeds nearby. Even if they were stem borers or root eaters though I'm not willing to take any chances because I only have one scalebroom myself and it's still in its whiteleaved "larval" stage, assuming that's even the oviposition host, and I don't happen to have either mature individuals or any individuals of any of the other plants in that microhabitat).

No big deal though, I was expecting pretty much exactly all this to happen (and I did take home both the spurcus I caught anyways, for genetic diversity, so I'm not exactly complaining). I wonder if the unmarked and/or sunshine yellow morph lives in my area? Well, probably not the latter, that's probably a high-desert special, but unmarked beige ones seem likelier. The stripes undoubtedly help them camouflage as marcescent flowers/seedheads of pinebush so I've been looking on scalebrooms for stripeless ones, albeit to no avail (scalebrooms seem to provide poorer habitat somehow [probably due to their vestigial adult leaves translating to poorer microclimate protection and poorer edible leaflitter], this year I only saw one on that plant and it was striped and it got away).

The previous spurcus are both gone [one released after it laid enough eggs, the other escaped and died and I still feel extremely bad about its death] so my current cryptocephaline population remains at two, not counting the 32 eggs.

PSA: postmetamorphic larval memory retention

 A lot of you have probably seen those recent viral news stories about the Japanese boy who wrote a study about swallowtails remembering stuff from their time as caterpillars. Just noting here that: 1. this is not the first experiment of its kind 2. Manduca sexta adults only seem to remember fifth instar memories.

I assume hemimetabolous insects tend to remember more of their juvenile lives.

Cryptocephalus hunting again

 

Have continued to be bored to the point of serious mental illness. Went to the Santa Fe Dam soft chaparral a few times again to see if I could bag anything because collecting bugs is my unhealthy coping mechanism apparently.

Now, the thing about the soft chaparral here is that whenever the summer dry season hits and the bushes "die" (aestivate) the already low insect density drops even further (the hard chaparral and sclerophyll oak forest stay active a bit longer into the season because they are by nature less arid habitats). It's our version of winter; it's when life drains out of the world; it's the end-scene of HG Wells' Time Machine with the quiet beach and the endless night and the red-overripe sun waiting to burst. It's kind of sad that extremophiles (for all their tenacity) are still so helpless against natural extremes. Why can there be only a few snow crane flies, a single Antarctic midge? Why must serpentine flora be forced into stunted growth? Why does Mono Lake lack a second brineshrimp?

Nevertheless, life still goes on, albeit not very vigorously. The cacti here do not turn brown, of course, because they are cacti (Narnia and Chelindea continue to suck on their fruits all summer but the few cactus genera here don't seem to host much more than that at any time of year, unlike in, say, parts of Arizona, so I will not be mentioning them further), and Malosma plus the lemonadeberries stay almost as alive, but they seem to support even fewer local insect taxa than the cacti this time of year so will not be mentioned further either. This leaves us left, for the most part, with the summer-specialist dandelion guild: Lepidospartum squamatum (scalebroom), Ericameria pinifolia (pine goldenbush), Lessingia glandulifera (vinegar tarweed), Heterotheca grandiflora (telegraphweed). I'm tired and not in the mood to talk fluidly any more right now so suffice it to say:

- the above pic is one of the lushest microhabitats left right now (not pictured: miles of brown desolation)
- summer-specialist insect guild largely gone from soft chaparral, the occasional Eleodes acuticauda notwithstanding; many of the other spp. emerge and die earlier in the summer when the growing season is ending but not ended for the summer-dormant shrubs; no Elicinae seen
- Cryptocephalus spurcus is still in season as it eats goldenbushes and scalebrooms, which are both blooming and lush
- yesterday I caught a mating female of Cryptocephalus spurcus
- it seems to be slightly (but only slightly) less behaviorally problematic than C. sanguinicollis but "slightly" can make a big difference; after some initial struggling I've successfully gotten it out of "too scared to eat and rest" mode and so far it has not resumed panicking/flying as sanguinicollis has always done in my care (hoping I don't jinx it)
- to my unsurprise I am still exactly as bored and mentally ill as before

Update 7/31: caught a second one. First one has made exactly one egg capsule so far, it has the cool helical ridges typical of this genus (which is formed, if you weren't aware, by the female turning the egg spirally as it defecates, which I assume is the simplest way to coat a round object without missing any spots).

What is it like to be a leafhopper?: a speculative essay

Imagine that you live on a tower of pipes so tall it extends beyond view.

Imagine that it is filled with juice, and that you are thirsty; you bite into its soft side, and it takes a while before you can get at the juice, but you do manage.

And it tastes good. It tastes so good. You never want to stop. You drink for hours and time speeds up and the outside world fades away. You don't even notice you are asleep by the time the sun has set, and the next day you hardly realize you are awake.

You are rudely returned to full consciousness by a dry sensation in your mouth. Evidently your tower only has so much juice to give. How? You were only there for a few moments (you had not moved from the spot in two weeks) it was hardly enough (it was more enough than you could ever remember) you do not feel well-rested at all (you were designed to never know peace).

Fortunately, there is another pipetower to the north, and the journey there is not too arduous. When you arrive you will find it to be as juicy as the first one used to be, but it will not feel satisfying either because when you are satisfied you will not feel.

yeah it molted

My suspicions were correct, it was Penestragania ivanpah

putting this thing on the strawberry clover with the Tiaja

Penestragania?

 Creeping around suspiciously at Plymouth Elementary's so-called native garden when I saw this thing on a palo verde, figured it's polyphagous enough that I could rear it to adult for ID to kill two birds with one clover (two clovers with one stone? Okay the metaphor is breaking down pretend I said nothing). Gonna release it after that probably.

2 Tiaja left

But thank God for Trifolium fragiferum.

Tiaja squeeze campaign

 With the last Xerophloea dead (a juvenile brown widow murdered it, even though I checked for brown widows a few days before that and found none) all I have left are the four Tiaja, which I've still not managed to get any eggs out of. Apparently white clovers freak out when taken indoors and gradually die from dehydration even when well watered, some quirk of the angiosperm root physiology I think.

They stay frightened for longer after handling than the Xerophloea did, sometimes freezing and then not feeding for a whole 12 hours after being moved, and since like many hoppers they don't actually know how to walk directionally towards their food it's been a headache (after the freezing wears off they tend to walk off the plant even if they were sitting on it).

Bought some more plants as potential food while I was exhibiting milkweed bugs at CalBG for their milkweed festival thingy. The hoppers didn't seem to like their new hosts much, I'm going to try feeding them an attached dodder now (previous dodder being fed was detached branches, which are more convenient to supply but cannot live long enough for eggs to hatch).

Released all adult beetles several days back

The rotten wood is doing that thing again where it gets all moldy and gross and it was stressing them out to the point they weren't sleeping, and I didn't have the energy to deal with it. Based on my observations I'm pretty sure the Megapenthes would've been pretty stressed during its waking hours even in a clean enclosure though, as even after I moved it to a clean container full of garden soil (which itself it kept spreading its elytra like it wanted to fly (but never flew; perhaps room temps too cold to flap wings)?

Anyways, guess I'll have to concentrate on sucking hoppers and plants for now. I still have 1 vial of rotten wood that never went bad and still smells nice though and I'm hoping that I can make more of whatever saproxylic microbes are responsible for the smell and mold suppression so I can inoculate other rotten-wood-making containers with them.

Well actually some of the E. lecontei larva vials are also clean-smelling, I lied.

I ignored Easter to catch beetles and emit depression

https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2526641
https://www.bugguide.net/node/view/2526642

Caught these two, will attempt to breed. Of note is that Megapenthes contains at least one species of conservation concern in Europe.

Update: Stenochidus is being difficult, it's panicking and behaving abnormally because it's in an enclosed space, will probably release once I have the time. I figured this would happen given that it seems to happen to a lot of small flying plant-dwelling beetles but wanted to test. Put it on a potted plant in the meantime to soothe it (by making it think it's not on the ground).

Elater lecontei has reproduced

Found a wireworm in its enclosure today. I was starting to worry it hadn't mated.

Also, I got to see it naturally active again. Came out around midnight, fed on blueberry until sated, walked around for like a minute or two (I suspect it was seeking damper conditions as I hadn't misted in a while) and then went back under its potsherd to sleep. Apparently it's one of those bugs that's awake only when necessary.

The grayish brown nymph I caught did turn out to be Tiaja

Molted to adulthood last night (above; probably slightly teneral in pic). I neglected to post it here when it was still a juvenile but it looked like this.

The Deukmejian hoppers turned out to be a mix of Dictyobia (seemingly the regular semivitrea-looking sort, though perhaps a different cryptic species I suspect) and Dyctidea (apparently D. intermedia, though my specimen is weirdly brown so maybe not) by the way. Getting to and from Deuk is kind of a drive but I'll probably release them soon too.

I'm definitely planning to try my hand at dictys and dyctys again next year tho. Maybe even this summer, if my plants can lush up fast enough when Dictyssa adults make their summer appearance.


Down to one Xerophloea nymph after a Malva I was feeding them mysteriously wilted to death only 2-3 days while still immersed in water and thus subsequently set off a series of incidents indirectly leading to the other xerophloes dying. Not sure what happened, it had a really long taproot and all of it was wet so what the hell?

Released Dictyobia

Running short on dodder biomass, also my CalBG sunflower bushes were getting insufficiently lush and freaking the Dictyobia out. Apparently just like Croton if you don't water them enough they get droughtstressed even if the soil remains damp? I hate angiosperms sometimes.

I did get a look at their courtship behavior before the release though. Apparently when the male makes physical contact with an unmated female there's no fanfare, they just connect their genitalia. At a distance though there was some (audible! albeit faintly) singing which sounded like a zipper being zipped back and forth a few times, also when not singing the male sometimes moved its wings in a way that I can only describe as "trying to open a padlocked gate by pushing it repeatedly instead of unlocking it". Nothing too interesting happened though and the females didn't seem to react much if at all to whatever the male was doing. Honestly things like this are why I don't care about Coniontis any more. Insect courtship dances just seem kind of disappointing in general.

Also while catching more Tiaja I semiaccidentally caught and reared this thing to adulthood, since it looked like a Tiaja nymph (turns out was the same subfamily). Released it after.

bluglgh

The fat wireworm from a while ago pupated and matured while I wasn't looking. I split open the wood chunk to check up on it and saw an Athous axillaris adult. Gonna throw it in with the Elater. Probably not going to attempt to breed A. axillaris for various reasons, including my strong suspicion that Athous larvae require more animal protein than I have patience for.

All Lystridea dead despite my best efforts. Probably not going to try and catch any more this year.

Bought a bunch of generic nativeish plants from California Botanic Garden to feed the dictys, unsurprisingly the leaves were infested with various bugs and microbes. Sigh. At least my rescued skirt tetras enjoyed eating the aphids.

Intend to throw Hoplomachidea back to its habitat so I can concentrate on pest control (see above). Maybe it will have injected eggs into one of my plants by then. Some females of that species seem able to fly (most if not all males seem flighted) and I'd rather concentrate on obligately flightless bugs. Still, my intuitive guess is that they're not as insensitive to anthropogenic harm as some wing-dimorphic bugs.

Current inventory (or, more accurately, current inventory that I care to mention):

Dictyobia cf. semivitrea, many
cf. Dyctidea intermedia?, x4 I think?
Tiaja, x1 (the other one died from an indirectly aphid related incident)
cf. Uroleucon (pictured above), nativelooking aphids from a wild alate that flew to my Baccharis salicifolia one day

Elater lecontei, x1 (is it even a fertilized female?)
Athous axillaris, x1

Eleodes littoralis, x2
Phloeodes diabolicus, x1
Disabled Eleodes acuticauda, x1 (it's still alive after all this time)!

Calasterella californica, x1
Croton californicus, x3
Cuscuta subinclusa
New CalBG plants (mostly Encelia californica)
Unidentified leafy liverworts (not new, it's the ones I've posted about)
Various other things I don't care to mention




There hasn't been anything of interest to say these years (indeed, I would say most of my life has been miserable and bland) but I swear I'm an interesting person! I swear!!!

6

Single Hoplomachidea consors female acquired but I don't feel like talking about it because I'm tired and miserable. Also I missed the courtship ritual of my first Dictyobia pair by several minutes because years of chronic understimulation made me involuntarily zone out right at the crucial moment.

Freshly molted Dictyobia adult for eye candy. I wonder what the red thing inside it is, fresh nymphs have it too (so do hardened nymphs if you hold them up to the light). Lystridea also contains the red thing.

new acquisitions (part 5)

Went back to Deukmejian Wilderness Park, acquired some more grayish hoppers.

Also found a single different-looking nymph, note the smaller head and orangy brown color. I wouldn't have taken it home if I had seen it was parasitized, but the hopper was like half a cm long and I didn't realize the infection was there till I got home, so after some deliberation I popped the wasp grub. I accidentally sprained (is that even the right word?) one of the nymph's hindlegs in the process and the leg couldn't move for about 12 hours but this afternoon I was checking up on it and all the legs were functional again.

I don't normally endorse killing parasitoids because they're important to the ecosystem, equal rights for parasites, blah etc., but I really wanted to see if I could get this nymph to adulthood and make it half of a breeding pair before the season ends. I mean, a lot of flightless aridland planthoppers here are really hard to get one's hands on, remember how I was complaining about how I hadn't seen Tiaja for years?

Anyways all the new acquisitions (including the orangy brown) are feeding well on dodder. Edit: make that "are" a "have been". I think I squished the orangy nymph by accident.

Dictyobia aren't doing cool things at each other

Assembled some adults into same-sex and different-sex pairs. They pretty much ignored each other, didn't even mate. Evidently at least some of them (esp. fem, due to eclosing later) are sexually immature. I mean I was expecting some sexual immaturity since all my other hoppers had to feed for a number of days before mating, but I'm kinda disappointed there wasn't some sort of communication dance even the unripe adults would do.

Also, I observed some specimens to switch the asymmetry of which wing was raised higher than the other (not in relation to social interaction; just spontaneously, before I even housed them together).

More Dictyobia adults

Gonna stop announcing new adults now.

Of interest is that one individual seems to be "right-handed" in terms of wing-raising behavior, the others so far all seem "left-handed".





Pissonotus delicatus released, it was doing perfectly fine but I realized I was biting off more than I could chew again and needed to keep my unhealthy insect-hoarding habits in check. It was never my favorite anyway. Also I know widespread insects are said to be paradoxically in more danger than rare ones but P. delicatus strikes me more as the sort of widespread insect that'll do fine in the upcoming decades than the sort that's declining drastically. I could be wrong tho. Maybe it's extra vulnerable to climate change because it naturally lives in harsh disturbed environments and can't take any harsher a life than it's already tolerating? Still, I'm not getting many "common bug about to decline violently" vibes from it. I'm more worried about periodically-outbreaking-but-sometimes-naturally-rare taxa like Xerophloea, Vanessa, Oedemasia, & Trirhabda.

In any case I assume the pisso laid eggs inside my telegraphweed, I'll take a laissez-faire approach to its offspring if any hatch.

Matured a second dicty adult today

 It was fully hardened when I found it but when I threw it in with the first adult they seemingly ignored each other. Maybe both sexes need to be present even to induce nonsexual social interactions (since those may be an indirect method of competing for mates)?

First dicty adult eclosed last night!

Rest still nymphs, I'll be watching them carefully since females probably only mate once in their lives unless copulation is interrupted and I'd hate to miss whatever wingflapping courtship dance they do for it.

It refused the Artemisia I put it on (probably because it was producing drought foliage when I bought it) and instead began drinking from the white clover I was using to make Tiaja oviposit.

part 4

Pissonotus-generating telegraphweeds by the side of the road

Finds from Santa Fe Dam chaparral today: Pissonotus delicatus adult fem and one more presumed Lystridea nymph. Also new less hideous blog color scheme.

Kinda surprised the former were able to survive on such low-growing plants, I'm under the vague impression a lot of herbivorous bugs in my area avoid plants that're short and prostrate because it's too hot near the ground. I mean even that thing Xerophloea and co. do where they go to the base of the plant to feed doesn't mean they'll show up on juvenile plants, in nature it tends to just bring them into the shaded undergrowth of their host. I've never seen hoppers of any sort on sufficiently young Croton (or, indeed, sufficiently small individuals of almost every other plant. Santa Fe's rich diversity of annual flora hardly attracts any herbivores as far as I've seen).

2/26 edit: When I released the Pissonotus I saw a conspecific at the Dam nature center surviving in a patch of like 3 super isolated telegraphweeds under the big tree they planted. No wonder delicatus is so widespread, it's clearly one of those species that can teleport to its hosts and not die of metapopulation collapse in small habitat patches. I've never seen them fly to the telegraphweeds I'm growing in my yard tho, maybe I was just unlucky.

new acquisitions (part 3)

4 days ago I was walking around somewhat aimlessly in the Santa Fe Dam chaparral again

here to be exact

when I saw a Certain Shape sitting on a Croton californicus leaf. Instantly knew it was Tiaja. This is a small (sciarid-sized) and rarely seen endemic flightless leafhopper. I assume the wings not being vestigial-sized helps protect against abrasion?

I've been trying to catch Tiaja for 2 years straight; in 2024 I saw one on a sunflower bush and (not knowing what it was) photographed it and didn't bother to catch it. Never saw one again for the rest of twenty twenty four, nor 2025 for that matter. So you can imagine I was pretty pleased to be seeing one again, especially since the part of the chaparral it was in seems due to be cleared for some sort of """sustainable agriculture""" demonstration garden* and thus making the animal of some conservation value (I mean I'm under no delusion that smallscale rearing is gonna do much for the species but since my efforts to halt the development project directly have all failed I figure it's better than nothing).

*Which is the area currently inside the pictured fence, though since I've seen mulch being laid right outside the fence too I suspect that the farm may expand beyond its current borders, or, more likely, that the farm won't expand but the outside-fence area is gonna be cleared for agriculture-unrelated """native plant""" installations as landscaping for the trail around the farm. To be clear, I didn't trespass, the Tiaja were outside the fence, the crops were inside the fence, but I suspect the Tiaja habitat is gonna be destroyed anyway.

I missed. The individual in question was in an erect stance and didn't look like it was feeding, and from my rearings of other species I've learned that many otherwise unwary hoppers are extra nervous when they're in travelling mode. It saw me coming and got the hell out of there, I couldn't find it after it jumped. Didn't even get a photo this time.

But Tiaja is flightless, so I figured there'd be more where that came from. No luck for the rest of the day.



3 days ago I was walking around somewhat aimlessly in the Santa Fe Dam chaparral again. Same spot. Figured I'd give the bushes another eye-basting because why not. No luck for the first approximately 15 minutes. Then I caught 2 Tiaja sitting high up on Acmispon glaber, both gravid females from the looks of it. This time they really were unwary, didn't react to me approaching or even touching the plant. And that's why I have a photo of one as a header image for this post. Yeah.

...I've moved one of the specimens to a white clover plant I've been growing in advance specifically for Tiaja-related purposes, since a paper reports that they often refuse to oviposit on their native hosts but will lay eggs in clovers.

Caught some juvenile Elicini too, but they look exactly the same as the other nymphs I've posted so I'm not gonna bother posting another picture.

new acquisitions (part 2)

 

5 more hoppers that look more or less the same as the others, but this time from Deukmejian Wilderness (above and below). They seemed to be feeding on Eriodictyon crassifolium (the pale plant in focus, above) but were apparently happy to consume the dodder tendrils I've been feeding the others. Hopefully at least some of them will turn out to be the rarely seen Dyctidea intermedia (known from this locality)?

More pictures of the place:

Stone Barn Nature Center

(it's not obvious in this image because camera distorts perspective slightly but the trail was very steep and full of somewhat scenic changes in elevation)

new acquisitions

Eleodes littoralis pair (pictured) from woods near JPL; hoping that since these are relatively forest darklings they'll not do weird things low-density tenebs from featureless aridlands do. They've buried themselves and not moved (to my knowledge) in the week I've had them, not even at night.

the woods in question (note that this picture has more grass than usual for the area, though it's otherwise pretty representative)

Lots of upright-winged hopper nymphs caught at Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area (though I usually only catch 1-3 per hourlong trip; they're sparse), I have like a dozen or so now. Since like many hoppers they seem to have no ability to intentionally walk towards a host (and will starve to death if they don't walk onto one by accident) getting them to settle on the dodder stems I've provided them has been a pain. They walk towards light tho which makes it slightly less of a pain. Found them primarily on large, lush-looking Salvia mellifera and Artemisia californica. Here's some pictures of the scrublands I've been catching them at by the way, to give you an idea of what typical Santa Fe Dam chaparral looks like.

Lystridea nymph x3, I had a fourth but after I changed its cutting to a fresher one it rejected the fresher one repeatedly and died from famine unusually fast compared to the other hoppers I've raised (6 hrs vs. 3-ish days), seemingly due to effects of dehydration from a thin cuticle; this may in part explain why the genus is a narrow endemic (though perhaps it may be instead that the creature became a narrow endemic first and then lost dehydration resistance due to being in a sheltered microclimate). In the wild they seem to appear primarily on large contiguous patches of the same host as the upright-wings, with the upright-wing nymphs seeming to appear primarily at the disturbed edges of said patches and the Lystridea seeming to be more common in plants at the center and not edge (microclimate buffered in center I bet). Interestingly they seem to drink xylem and not phloem sap, unlike all my other current hoppers.

Also acquired unknown wireworm species (update: it's Athous axillaris) while collecting rotten wood for beetle oviposition substrate. The wood chunks it was from smelled so good by the way, not like the usual horrible mold smell rotten logs in my area tend to have; I let a few chunks go unsterilized (though I did pound them thoroughly to squish any eggs hiding in there) in hopes that whatever microbiota live in it can make my beetle enclosures continue to smell nice. Good-smelling saproxylic microbes are sooooooooooooooooo hard to find in my area.

I also bought some sage and sagebrush from CalBG's nursery the other day. The sagebrushes were looking very dehydrated (though healthy, and not wilted) and the sages were infested with powdery mildew but I picked out the lushest ones I could find of the former and an asymptomatic specimen of the latter as emergency food just in case the cuttings get mysteriously rejected again, and also so that the hoppers would have a place to oviposit once they grow up. Tried to see if the nursery staff could do anything about the Santa Fe Dam mulching and construction work habitat destruction thing, the person I talked to was preexistingly aware of the situation but couldn't do anything about it.

List of posts that aren't just small talk, boring (albeit occasionally useful) data entry, or complaining

This is a dynamic list I hope I will remember to update. I deliberately excluded a few posts because I didn't feel like it. A bunch of those are cryptogam fails but not in an interesting way, merely because I ran out of resources or was depressed.

Also some of these posts are from a while back when I was somewhat more socially awkward, so.

Lichens are invertebrates too (lichen culture with no petri dish; see also interesting indoor lichen offhandedly mentioned here)
How to catch really large protists (slime mold ecology)
2019 desperate spring tipulid-chase (I discover crane flies apparently use their legs as antennae in flight, sorry I think the post formatting broke somehow)
The ventral surface of (Cal)asterella can iridesce
At long last, a Coniontis recording 
Orbweaver consumes fruit
The lepidopteran malnutrition post
What is it like to be a leafhopper?
Why are dodders ectoparasitic?
C's Enormous Research Literature Stash™


I can't be bothered to link the "transplant flightless and weakflying insects for habitat restoration" project commentary but suffice it to say that I've not sighted the offspring of any of them, aside from the hemipteran hoppers I've kept as free-range outdoors specimens sometimes. Well I say free-range but they hardly move at all. Cause of failure with Trirhabda seems related to hosts not being lush and wellwatered enough, no idea whether the NHMLA/Peck megadarklings/diabolicals have died off or are just secretive, and a bunch of the sunflower bush transplants at Plymouth Elementary were destroyed by their sunflower bush dying from the school improperly caring for its plants.














I also feel like mentioning the current status (last update:1/26/26) of my main personal sciprojects, I know this post is supposed to be a list of posts and not a status update but I don't care.

- Culture weedy lichens without special equipment: hypothesis formulated and ready for testing. Currently too depressed to test it, and also I can't get my hands on the lichens I most want. Hoping to resume experimentation eventually.

- Investigate ecological function of iridescence and basal senescence in Marchantiophyta and fern gametophytes: stalled from lack of resources. I do have a live Calasterella specimen right now. Hoping to resume experimentation eventually.

- Transplanting poor-dispersing invertebrates: see above. The success of my outdoor hoppers seems to be due to their being in a position where they can't fatally overheat and my watering their hosts more often than is natural, as many hoppers are known to require their hosts be lush; discovering that counts as useful experimental progress, as similar rules seem to be in effect for many non-Hemiptera here. Hoping to conduct/test additional transplants soon, perhaps with Elater lecontei if my click beetle lays any eggs. Maybe I'll make a fake tree hollow someday with damp logs in a box and put it outdoors.

- Coniontis courtship vibration project: deliberately abandoned. After having watched many non-coni bugs with complex courtship behavior, I've come to the conclusion that complex courtship behavior in bugs tends not to be complex enough to be interesting to me. I saw some Phaneroptera mate and it was boring, but don't get me wrong I'm sure that there's plenty of cool insect courtship and sexual-conflict stuff to be studying despite its relative rarity. Most of the coolest ones need expensive equipment to study though...

- Entomological outreach public campaign: deliberately abandoned, I've come to the conclusion that trying to convince the general public not to be afraid of bugs through reason is too hard because irrational people are generally unable to be convinced by valid arguments, and through emotional appeal is backfiring dangerously (via "give a man a fish without teaching him to fish" logic) despite the latter being a strategy of choice for museums and sci outreach experts. I've decided for now to only talk about bug outreach on a small scale and to people who're receptive to reason-based arguments. Also worth looking into: how the UK seems to have a weirdly healthy ento subculture (which I still don't fully understand).

- Nonflight functions of wings in Elicini: hoping to investigate this once my current hoppers reach adulthood.

- Stop Santa Fe Dam scrublands from being mulched to death by irresponsible conservationists: stalled due to irresponsible conservationists being too powerful (they're county-backed). I have, however, gotten the Invertebrate Club of Southern California on the case, although it seems not to be making any progress either. Message me if you want "blackmail" material btw.

wow

 Had insomnia, checked up on my click beetle at 4 AM. Asleep. I swear to God, as long as there's food ad libitum that thing's awake for, like, what, less than a fourth of each night? Still haven't seen it awake on its own terms yet.

Previous checkups at midnight and 2 AM also revealed no activity. It does not move during the daylight hours unless disturbed.

phew

Are my post titles just going to be various noises now?

Anyways, one thing I've noticed with the upright winged hopper nymphs and Xerophloea is that different individuals don't always have the same food preferences or same tolerances to bad food. I wouldn't exactly call this a "personality" since sucking hoppers don't ever seem to locomote or do any other behavior besides feeding as long as they're unstressed and in no need for reproductive behavior, but it's not particularly surprising since personalities are known to exist in many insect species, including well studied model organisms like Drosophila (see: rover-sitter polymorphism).

Some of my uprightwing nymphs were getting stressy and feeding only restlessly on the dodder I provided (others fed very well and even molted repeatedly), so I moved the cranky individuals to a ventilated cage with some white sage (Salvia leucophylla or one of the hybrids/cultivars that look like it; not S. apiana) cuttings I took from Plymouth Elementary's not-actually-locally-native native plants garden, and they started feeding contentedly. Moving them was a huge chore tho since they kept jumping everywhere (and they don't know how to move towards food, so if they don't walk onto the plant they could starve to death) but I moved them all with no casualties.


I'm down to 1 Xerophloea again unfortunately, due to the feeding-related polymorphisms killing off specimens less tolerant of uprooted weedy Malva in water jars and because I took them away from Croton (which they seem to slightly prefer over Malva) to give the Croton time to rest and heal from previous feeding damage. Apparently Malva begins verrrrry slowly dying of dehydration if even a few centimeters of the upper root aren't fully immersed in water (a fate which evaporation rapidly encourages to happen), and Xerophloea hate that (especially the adults; nymphs are more tolerant because they're flightless and thus dispersal is more risky for non-adults in the wild) so the less tolerant individuals jump around restlessly until they starve to death (they eventually attempt to feed again if starving, but, again, they seem to have no ability to detect and move towards their food, so frequently starve to death once off the plant due to their inability to relocate it except by accident). I feel less bad about getting them killed than with other bugs because since they inject eggs into plant tissue (and every individual lays countless eggs) there's no realistic way of controlling their population ethically anyway. Still, though, this is not good, since among other things I've gotten all the males killed (males obviously laying no eggs and thus being more ethically relevant). I've kinda gotten into the habit of compulsively acquiring new bugs in the name of habitat restoration in a fruitless attempt to compensate for being chronically without interesting things to do in my life, and I'm self-aware enough to have known all along this sorta thing would happen. Don't judge me ok? Sometimes one succumbs to the overcollecting temptation despite one's best efforts.
Anyways, the last remaining X. is a fertilized female and it has already laid plenty of eggs on my plants.

Also gonna be releasing the Coelocnemis magna, which have inexplicably started running around in a stressed looking manner and refusing to hide in their cardboard tubes any longer. I knew they wouldn't die tho and that they would be prone to the stressy-looking running, I acquired them only as an experiment to see if I could make them stop doing it somehow. Too tired to keep experimenting, I'm going to give them a few extra snacks and then put them into the big Santa Fe nature center log that I know the wild ones breed in occasionally.

The diabolical and Elater lecontei are both doing ok. Latter is somewhat plumper, hopefully with eggs? I've never seen the Elater ever stop sleeping but I'm reasonably sure it's doing well because when I miss a feeding the creature flies(?) to the cage ceiling and I haven't missed any feedings lately. It's not running around stressily either, because I have it in solitary confinement in a little open-top cage inside a big closed cage in a way that if it were running around stressily while I was asleep it'd fall out of the little cage and not be able to get back in there without my assistance.




Long story short, things are doing relatively good despite Xerophloea dieoff. I'm also gradually albeit unreliably getting less mentally ill for various reasons.

ow

early instar

Gradually catching additional C. magna for use in saproxylic program, plus diabolicals, upright-winged planthopper nymphs, and also a (hopefully female) Elater lecontei I found wedged into a piece of wood. The European E. ferrugineus is described as being easy to rear under artificial conditions but also painfully slow-growing (2-7 years for larval maturation, but apparently able to mature without carnivory and tolerates poor hygiene well) and under severe conservation danger due to its need for large-diameter rotten wood, and while American Elater are apparently poorly studied I found mine in an enormous stump so it's probably of conservation value too. Gonna be a useful asset for my "make habitat for saproxylic insects and then put the insects in them" project, especially because E. ferrugineus is said to be so dispersal-limited that it affects genetic structure.



Interestingly the stump in question is that big burnt oak(?) at Santa Fe Dam Nature Center, presumably planted as an ornamental, and oaks are not locally native to that habitat (they avoid the soft chaparral due to its drier nature, they're more of a hard chaparral [although I have seen drier hard chaparrals with no oaks] and arid sclerophyll forest thing here if you ask me), so I'm a bit concerned my specimen may have anthropogenically microevolved in a problematic direction, but the long generation times of lecontei, general absence of large human-sourced deadwood in soft chaparrals here (thus less ability for microevo to happen), and the fact that I could probably water down the unwanted genes with sclerophyll forest genotypes should I ever find a second individual means I've decided I'm going to keep this specimen for now.

Also shaking my head at a few papers that're like "E. ferrugineus adult doesn't feed!" even though it's pretty well documented to fly to fermented sweet baits (my own Elater was likewise happy to drink sugar and chew fruit). Geez, when will people stop slapping "aphagous" arbitrarily on random bugs?

Finally some wilderness action

Now that the recent heavy rains have rained themselves I'm finally seeing the Santa Fe Dam soft chaparral spring back to life. Detectable insect biomass is still pretty sparse and rare right now but the upright-winged hoppers have started hatching, I've bagged 3 early instars so far (1-2 per hour, which is the usual encounter rate for upright-winged hoppers and most other soft chaparral bugs on a good day's hunting). They were feeding on Salvia mellifera and Artemisia californica but I've moved them to pieces of Cuscuta subinclusa since dodders (by virtue of being fast-growing and parasitic) are highly nutritious.

Gonna tag them as Dictyssa obliqua for now because based on locational context from last summer's adults that's probably what they are, even though they're probably physically unidentifiable till adulthood. Edit: some of them have grown too large to be that species. Untagged.
Edit 2: Dictyobia.

blugh

 Vomited the shoulderbands back into their (at risk of being renovated) rock pile due to my poor mental health making it too hard to care for them (they're too hungry and their feces are way more prone to gross bacteria than a lot of other saproxylic bugs', but letting them go dormant carries mortality risk). Dumped a generic yellow slime mold I never posted about back to its habitat too, as it was cowardly and bad at foraging and would end up having its bag filled with rotting food half the time.

Replaced them with a Coelocnemis magna specimen I scooped up off the side of the Santa Fe Dam nature trail. It went under a tube and fell asleep for three days. See? Low maintenance.