All 4 of the other juveniles molted in sync

 

EDIT 10/10: no longer 100% sure all of them molted simultaneously, counted one recently and it still had same number of segments?

Caught the entire batch molting at the same time! I'm very relieved. In the past few weeks I'd been biting my nails because I was worried they'd be so cowardly that they'd get malnutrition and die half an inch underneath the proverbial milk and honey. Remember how that's seemingly almost what'd been happening with those Nyctoporis grubs?

The adult seems to be significantly less epigean now (but still surfaces near-daily for considerable periods because of its voracious appetite). Whereas it tended to completely surface in the past it now prefers to feed on the undersides of leaves with only its anterior end above ground (tenebrionid larva style). The highly surface-active behavior it displayed previously appears to be initially from inadequate nutrition and then (once I had figured out how to rot leaves properly) from several weeks of intensive compensatory feeding.

I guess this means the ones loose at the Arboretum are, like, somewhat constantly starving. Such is life?

Random stylish backswimmer pic

 

Buenoa sp.

I may not actually enjoy photography for its own sake but I have a feeling this photograph might come in handy for something in the near future. Going to dump it here I guess! If you're more into eye candy than I am I suggest clicking to view full image.

Also, it hates the bubbles, they make it itchy.

Edit: let me just dump these here too.

Noticed two hatchings today

Gave last post's nest a glance and saw something walking around! The second juvenile is still curled and immobile though.

It's so funny to me how juvenile millipedes start out with only a few segments/legs and grow more as they get bigger. It sounds like it ought to be a myth perpetuated by Certain Arcade Games [coughcough] but somehow it's actually true.

Another dissected nest

 

You can actually see the body outlines if you look closely!

I really seem to be getting the hang of things

 As I probably said in the past, for some reason the default state of permanently damp rotting plant matter in Los Angeles County (whether in a well-aerated compost bin or in the wilderness) always seems to involve becoming moldy and horrible-smelling, and then have the mold go away but some vestige of the horrible smell remain (or for it to change into a different and less displeasing but still unpleasant smell for the remainder of its existence).

Anyways, after some confused trial and error I seem to have inoculated the pede's soil with a blend of microorganisms that suppress the mold. Now if I drop dry leaves at a certain stage of post-death breakdown into its cage they turn deep blackish brown within two days and do not mold at all. It loves those, and while its jaws seem too weak to eat the leaf itself even in such a softened decay stage it does enjoy scraping detritivorous microorganisms off the leaf surface. I'm reasonably sure the feeding difficulties I have w it are finally over, time to spare a few of its eggs from euthanasia.

Help me

 I'm depressed so this post is way overdue but a year or two ago I'd been importing locally sourced native tenebrionids (Coelocnemis, Eleodes acuticauda, Eleodes gracilis, Eleodes osculans, possibly other Eleodes, Notibius puberulus), one mutillid fem (Dasymutilla aureola), and what I provisionally take to be Trirhabda geminata adults to Peck Road Water Conservation Park. Also dumped seeds of some esoteric native flora at a school's native garden (update from future me: Plymouth Elementary School, Monrovia. This is the same Plymouth Elementary I reference in future posts. Unfortunately the idiots who maintain the garden mulched all the seeds to probable death; they don't understand that mulch is bad for truly-native native annuals in this part of California) because the state of the art here is that native gardeners don't have much idea what they're doing. If you're some ecohistorian reading this long after I'm dead and you find some sort of distributional anomaly at Peck now you know who to blame! Edit: haven't checked up on the tenebs yet but trirhab vanished. Not sure if they're supposed to have boom/bust years if that magnitude or if Linepithema killed their larvae. The adult trirhabs I imported definitely lived a goodly while though, several were resighted by me several days later and were eating.

Peck did have Blapstinus, Metoponium, Coniontis, and Phloeodes diabolicus long before I arrived though. Was surprised to see diabolicus surviving in habitat fragments that small, considering that it can't fly (at least some Blapstinus and probably some edrotines can fly, and conions do well in super tiny crap habitats despite seemingly all lacking flight wings). I did later add some diabolicals myself from nearby areas too.

I discovered dodders can induce the green island effect while culturing what's provisionally C. californica.

Current inventory, all IDs provisional (I recently remembered provisional was a word and provisional is generally a more accurate descriptor for my level of expertise than than tentative):

Plants I have dormant, collected from wild except the vegs:

Encelia farinosa

Lepidospartum squamosum

Salvia columbariae

Zeltnera venusta

Camissoniopsis bistorta

Cryptantha, Plagiobothrys

Crassula connata, colligata

Selaginella bigelovii

Riccia campbelliana, trichocarpa, maybe nigrella is hiding in there

Asterella californica, palmeri

Fossombronia

Domesticated hot pepper (dodder food)

Some other things I can't ID or maybe forgot

Things I currently have actively growing:

Cuscuta subinclusa

Sphaerocarpos

The two different unidentifiable gametophyte things

Mosses that show up uninvited

My haplodesmid-y thing

Too tired to tag this post properly but at least I managed to type it all out. I'm also having a bit of an aesthetics crisis over the ontology of wrinkles and marcescent leaves (I take aesthetics very seriously) so I don't think I'll bother to post pics or further pics of most of these (the marchantiophytes all get a Get Out Of Jail Free card because I actually have some idea why their basal death exists. That's... not the most well-reasoned rationale I admit, but one has to draw the line somewhere). Also yes yes I know my blog looks kinda "web 1.0" and I really hate the depressing sterile Brutalist-ish look web 1.0 sites of this sort have but I don't hate it enough to resort to the alternatives. The alternatives are worse for my intents/purposes, many make the label tag list-thing disappear. Kind of hypocritical considering how I'm not even bothering to tag this post amirite? Whatever.

Maybe I'll gain enough psyche healthpoints to add the tags in a few years. Will I even survive that long?

Ugh it eats so much

 I'm already running out of its preferred microbes again. I put it back in the unsterilized substrate vial and euthanized the four or so nestfuls of eggs it made in the microwaved substrate cup (don't want its descendants to be miserable). Each nest contained approx. 3-6 eggs, and I think it's pretty safe to say that laying eggs in small batches is normal for the species.

I seem to be getting the hang of things

 The fish food didn't fully cure its stress behaviors but apparently reinoculating the dirt/wood it was dissatisfied with with dirt it liked did (I squashed the inoculant very carefully to destroy microanimal eggs hiding in there).

Several yogurt-shaped bacterial(?) colonies that took me weeks to grow were eaten in a day or two.

Also excessive humidity seems to make it panic and stop burrowing, so I've been keeping things more lightly damp. It seemed to have made some more egg nests two days ago.

Golly gee it sure likes fish food

 Ate near-continuously for more than 12 hr, in fact I had to confiscate the pellet to prevent mold (after I put a new pellet in it resumed eating).

(I wonder if in the wild it's specialized for grazing extra-proteinaceous bacterial biofilms. I wouldn't expect a pillbug or Oxidus to act so restless when given high-quality wood without fish food).

Is it just me or is this thing an epicure?

Gave it piece of wood from park tree (well rotted dark crumbly, and with preexisting millipedes, which I of course removed before taking the chunk home and microwaving it). It seems to like eating the wood but still seems discontent. I'm getting frustrated, might release it back into the Arboretum if it proves annoying enough.

Anticlimactic egg pics as was promised

 

Here's a pic of the remaining female. You can tell how much dirt it's eating just by looking at it.

And here're its eggs inside their capsule nest (which it makes by walking in circles for several hours while somehow extruding fiber pulp it's ingested).

The capsule itself has only one dirt wall (the other wall is the plastic wall of the vial, so I don't have a decent pic of the capsule exterior because it got squashed when I tried to remove it from the vial's wall, but I swear it looked like this). Not sure if E. elegans actually "broods" as per the caption though; my specimen abandoned its nests after their completion and it's conceivable elegans may desert its eggs in the same way too.

By the way, have I mentioned on here just how boring the animal is? Whenever it isn't in substrate that makes it restless and agitated, it sits around (usually underground, though it does surface approx. once every several days) and doesn't do much except slightly adjust its position every few hours and eat things occasionally. Some animals are highly secretive but active within their shelters, but this thing doesn't even do much when buried. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I regret impulse-grabbing it during that Arboretum trip (well, not exactly regret; more like "I knew it'd bore me and I'd not even get temporary enjoyment out of it, but I did it anyways because brains are irrational and I couldn't help myself"). The other reason, of course, is that arthropods are possibly conscious and thus an ethical liability. Asterella and Sphaerocarpos may exhibit an equal lack of behavior but at least they're plants and thus unconscious. And if I ever become affluent enough to finally do some fun Deep Research, I'd honestly have no idea where to start with the millipede (which is not to say that there aren't fascinating adaptions in its physiology), whereas with the worts I've already compiled a whole list of hypotheses to test.