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.

Diabolical ironclad x1 from the big stump I found the Elater in.

Lots of upright-winged hopper nymphs (prob not Dictyssa now that some of the ones are larger) 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 the place 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.

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.