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.