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.

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.

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?