The misery did not actually end

 I completed a semi-formal research study on Asterella californica around last month, but I still did not obtain access to any scanning electron microscopes or other desired science machines so it was boring. Cue continued daily mental breakdowns.

Also, I went and grabbed a bunch of these from Franklin Canyon in early December (killing one in the process; it had somehow been smashed under a piece of wood I thought was too lightweight to smash millipedes. Oh god). Hoping to breed them for restoration/conservation reasons.

They're likely native Macrosternodesmidae, but, again, will probably need that SEM to identify them. They're eating unsweetened cheerios, carrots, and plant detritus, though I've had trouble obtaining plant detritus they seem to enjoy as they seem to dislike the wood I provided. Fortunately the cheerios seem to be well-accepted. Of course, I could feed them the leaves the Cylindrodesmus(?) are currently thriving on, but I don't want any microbes from that container to hypothetically get in. I've recently learned some microbes are bad at dispersal and therefore are both prone to becoming invasive spp. and not necessarily requiring aseptic conditions to prevent containment breach)

Due to the death, it's likely I'll have to go all the way back to Franklin to get a safer chance of having both males/females (the three macrosternos I currently have belong to two morphospecies; I do not know if they are different species, for obvious reasons). My knees are not looking forward to any of this.

Also, I've determined that the restless stereotyped pacing many aridland tenebrionids are prone to in captivity is correlated at least in part with light pollution. I kept a Helops confluens(?) adult for a while (it has now been released back into its wild habitat) and noted that (as with Coniontis I had previously kept) its pacing was invariably confined to the brightest two or three inches of its enclosure at night, even when the light was extremely dim. I shall refuse to keep live tenebrionids (aside from mmmmmaybe Zophobas atratus, which is pretty immune to such behavioral pathologies and behaves very normally in captivity) for the foreseeable future. Not that I desire Zophobas. Lays too many eggs for its own good, and I have no predators I can feed off the excess to. Going to separate the sexes in the unlikely event I do somehow end up with some superworms.

Addendum: before I forget, here are all my currently nondormant plants:

- Iridescent unknown gametophyte (still doing well)

- Noniridescent unknown gametophyte (ailing, may be dying from cyanobacterial competition; attempts to save it have so far been fails because it seems picky about what dirt it likes)

- Sphaerocarpos (namely, the descendants of this; they survived the summer unscathed, in case I didn't mention it)

- Various mosses that I don't particularly care about

- Cuscuta subinclusa (feeding on weedy nightshade of some sort)

Addendum 2: My C. californica(?) was able to induce the formation of a green island on a dying chili pepper's stem which remained fleshy/green even as the rest of the stem dried out (this does not appear to be a known ability that dodders have), but I have not noticed this ability in C. subinclusa on dying hosts. Note that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence; perhaps the green islands are only induced in some circumstances and not others. Time will tell.

Addendum 3: I'm also micromanaging some wild Oncopeltus nymphs that were likely the eggs laid by a dispersing adult I helped find a host for. Like their parent they're boring and mostly just sit in place drinking seeds all day (and when they do walk around I've seen many examples of irrational foraging and (almost) no evidence of intelligent behavior, though I know they're definitely smarter than they seem.) Hopefully the population sustains itself long enough for me to give them a locally-native milkweed genotype. Gotta provide habitat for native bugs, etc.

Addendum 4: my yellow slime mold dried up cause I forgot to water it. I also have a pink one (dry) that appears to be ripe fruits of Lycogala. Will rehydrate them in an estimated year or two (if I even manage to live that long) and see if they're still alive.

Trivial updates

 Slime still alive, has taken yeast pellets. Often moves away from food for no apparent reason.

Millipedes still overpopulating. I have thought up some tactics to encourage Original Adult (it still seems to be alive) to lay its eggs on the surface. By the way, for the record I am well aware that its life doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things and that arthropods are possibly all unconscious anyways, but I shall nevertheless attempt to commit ethics at it for some reason.

Anyways, the juveniles grow quite rapidly. Here is the exterior of an egg nest and a nearly adult juvenile:

All juveniles I have are white. It seems very likely they do not become visibly colored until shortly after (or during the premolt/molt to) adulthood. So far it appears that none of the immatures have reached full size yet.

The misery is finally ending

 I am currently doing an ambitious project on Asterella californica's ecology! Somehow I'm even going to get electron microscope permissions, wew!

Right now I'm still in the "boring phase" of the experiment, but I did conclude that its absence from a Certain Restoration Site is in large part because the soil is too loose or has too many leaves (causes it to be smothered). The restoration staff adding so much mulch (again, fatal smothering) sure isn't helping the thing either.

Californian native gardeners in general use so much mulch and it pretty much kills cryptogams and tiny angiosperms wholesale. I've never seen natural mulches occupying any appreciably large areas in my area, even in log piles most of the litter is leaves instead of wood fragments.

I have kidnapped a slime mold from the woods

 

I am surprised the thing did not die on me.

Current inventory (excepting dormant specimens)

Most of these IDs are (as usual) provisional but almost surely correct. The remainder are undoubtedly correct.

Cryptogams:

Iridescent gametophyte (due to its low-light-tolerance it is basically immune to the cyanobacteria mentioned below)

Noniridescent gametophyte (seems to be slowly dying from cyanobacterial allelopathy)

Asterella californica

Sphaerocarpos

Invertebrates:

That unidentified millipede species I've been posting about (it's visually identical to Cylindrodesmus hirsutus, if I haven't said so here already)

Angiosperms:

Crassula connata (most are dormant seeds, the three that germinated in the summer are growing very slowly due to chronic neglect; admittedly I'm favoritism-ing the Asterella)

Cuscuta californica(?)

Cuscuta subinclusa

Several potatoes and weeds (for feeding dodders)

Sorry, not going to post dodder/Crassula pics here, see previous commentary on marcescent leaves aesthetics crisis (I know dodders have nonexistent or barely visible leaves but I am also suffering from a floral abscission scar aesthetics crisis).

In case I haven't mentioned it subinclusa turns green in low light just like californica(?), and when grown side by side the vegetative parts of the two look noticeably different (subinclusa is thicker on average, able to turn greener, has leaves(?) that are consistently larger, and has little prickles like a cucumber on parts of its stem near the haustoria). I'm going to assume the fleshiness is because subinclusa is a taxon of less arid microhabitats than californica(?), no idea what the prickles do though.

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?