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.

Both of them turned out to be ovigerous females

Unfortunately today I had a meathead moment and unwittingly dumped one of the females in my yard because I thought I was holding an empty container. Felt so ashamed about it I had another mental breakdown (I do forgive myself, but still).

Also, here is a pic of the now-escaped one eating aquarium fish pellets (ingredients include fish meal + various grains and similar seeds) just for data's sake. It chewed that thing for hours. Blah blah another data point for "many detritivores love scavenging carrion", blah, etc.

Not that all detritivores are like that; Blaste oregona seems to refuse anything except some sort of unidentifiable bark dust (which is why I released the barklice a day after catching them; after the release they instantly began gorging on said dust and ceased their restlessness). Though I bet the lice'd still eat conspecifics dead of natural causes.

I have two millipedes now and they look like this

 

Long story short, I was at the Los Angeles County Arboretum looking for accidentally imported Marchantiophyta in the greenhouse and impulsively caught these pyrgodesmids(?) instead (I could not find any marchantiophytes). Or maybe they're Haplodesmidae.

I'm not really even interested in millipede husbandry any more! How does one get overexcited enough to impulse-acquire things one doesn't even slightly want? What's wrong with me?

Anyways they've been doing well in potting mix but seem annoyingly specific about what potting mix they consider acceptable. Even microwaving the one they like (and then  reinoculating the clean substrate with their presumably favored microflora) seems to induce tantrums I can only seem to stop by putting them back in the unsanitized dirt.

Update: Derek Hennen says it looks haplodesmid.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

SISYPHUS ROLLED THEIR BOULDER UP A HILL. THEIR LIFE HAD BEGUN LONG BEFORE THE MAN WHO BORE THEIR NAME - THEIR AFTERLIFE WOULD CONTINUE UNTIL THE END OF TIME OR THE END OF TYRANNY [WHICHEVER CAME FIRST]. BY NOW, THEIR FACE WAS A MANIFOLD, EVERY PIECE OF ITS FLESH THE VISAGE OF A DIFFERENT INDIVIDUAL WHO HAD CHALLENGED AND LOST TO THE NATURAL ORDER. THEIR ARMS HAD GROWN SIMILARLY MULTITUDINOUS, YET STILL THEY COULD NOT OUTWIT THE INFAMOUS STONE.

ONE OF THEIR FACEPIECES NOTICED A LICHEN UPON THE STONE. "THE ONTOLOGICAL AND ECOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS ARE FASCINATING," THOUGHT THE PIECE TO ITSELF.

BUT THE TWO HOLOBIONTS ROLLED DOWN THE SLOPE. TOGETHER.

Comparison

 

2 different localities from same county. The bottom one's near Azusa River Wilderness Park's entrance; the top, a short distance beyond the Mount Wilson Trailhead entrance. The Azusa specimen is the same one pictured on a previous post.

I'm running a common-garden experiment to see how much of their phenotype variation is genetic and how much is environmentally induced.

Edit: oh god I think the top one's apical notch has died, looks like it's time to get a new sample. 

Not that it's incapable of making new notches (but when the preexisting one dies the new ones come out on ventral branches, and I can't figure out a 100% objective way to distinguish ventral branches induced by clonal regeneration from ventral branches of a genetically different specimen that happened to have been hiding underneath as a spore or something. Sometimes two overlapping specimens are appressed + affixed to each other so tightly they look like they're part of the same flesh even though they aren't.)

Another intriguing observation

 

I discovered the drought-stress phenotype of Marchantia polymorpha (above) is uncannily similar to the normal wild phenotype of a lot of aridland Marchantiophyta. In particular, note the dying sides and unusually large fraction of dead rear here; compare to Asterella images from my previous posts.

In a way it's kinda unsurprising, but on the other hand I suppose it's pretty weird Asterella evolved to look (and possibly act) half-dead by default, know what I mean?

The ventral surface of Asterella can iridesce

 

Who knew? 

Here is its dorsum by the way (I assume the yellow crumbs are pollen from some bush or someth- edit: wait a minute, just realized the thing has macroscopic spores! I shook a sporophyte repeatedly and they kept falling out.)