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
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.