ceiseman 的日誌

(The text below is copied from a public post I just made on my Patreon page. Since I can't add attachments here, to access those you'll have to visit this link.)

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, I have a spreadsheet of over 1000 mystery leafminers, which I have organized by host plant, but it can easily be sorted by geography and phenology to come up with a list of mines to look for in a given time and place. For those of you who don't already have it, I'm attaching the latest version here, along with versions I recently made that are whittled down to just the mines that have been found in California and Florida. I'm hoping some of you will be inspired to look for some of these mystery miners to collect and rear.

I'm beginning to make codes for these mystery miners on iNaturalist, to make it easier to keep track of them. Here, for instance, are observations of the mystery Marmara on balsam fir:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:CSE%20leafminer%20code=marmara-abies-balsamea

(Incidentally, over the next few weeks is the perfect time for those of us in the northern US and Canada to find mature larvae and cocoons of bark-mining Marmara species.) I will add links like this one to the spreadsheet as I revise the relevant chapters.

There is a growing number of mystery eriocraniid moth mines out there, and spring is the time to look for them. It's possible that those of you in, say, Pennsylvania might still have a chance to find larvae of the one on hickory, but it may already be too late to look for the ones on currant and cherry in the Pacific Northwest.

One that has been bugging me for a long time is the mystery Agromyza on Holodiscus (oceanspray), which should be appearing right about now. Mines can be found anywhere from British Columbia to New Mexico, so please keep an eye out!

Also, in the next month or so, I'm hoping that those of you with native buckeyes in your area can keep an eye out for mines of Cameraria aesculisella. Fresh material is needed for DNA analysis; reared adults would be excellent, but preserved larvae or pupae could work too. And relatedly, last year a Cameraria mine was photographed on horse chestnut in British Columbia. There is a small chance that C. aesculisella somehow made it to the West Coast and found horse chestnut to be a suitable host, but I think it's much more likely that this is the first North American record for C. ohridella. So if you are in the Pacific Northwest and know where any horse chestnut trees are, please watch for mines on them and collect any you see.

Okay, that's all for now!

Charley

I've just created a new project to collect observations of things that feed on ferns, and all are welcome to join! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/feasting-on-ferns

It may seem like not much eats ferns, but many insects and other animals do, either casually or exclusively--including sawfly larvae, moth caterpillars, agromyzid and anthomyiid fly larvae, leafhoppers, foliar nematodes, deer, moose, humans, and rust fungi, to name a few. I'm always interested to see something new nibbling on a fern, and in particular I would love to solve the mystery of who is leaving this distinctive pattern on interrupted and sensitive ferns just after they unfurl in the spring:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/216683206
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/216683596
This is something I've been noticing for a few years now, and I have yet to catch the culprit in the act!

There are two types of agromyzid mines that are very commonly observed, and it would be fantastic if people could rear as many adults as possible to clarify taxonomy.

On Cornus spp. (dogwoods and bunchberries), there are the linear mines identified as Phytomyza agromyzina. The problem is that I have reared another species, P. notopleuralis, from identical mines. Its host was previously unknown, and the few known adults are very similar to P. agromyzina. I suspect that if more specimens can be reared, there will be intermediate individuals--or maybe even mixed batches of both "species" from the same collections of mines--which will allow us to synonymize P. notopleuralis with P. agromyzina. Alternatively, additional specimens could solidify the status of P. notopleuralis as a distinct species, in which case we'd have to identify these mines only to species group/complex level, at least in areas where both species are known to occur.

There is a similar situation with the linear mines on Symphyotrichum asters with frass in large, widely spaced lumps, which we have been identifying as Ophiomyia parda. Another species that was described from a single specimen with unknown larval biology, O. quinta, turns out to make identical mines. As with the dogwood miners, these two species are very similar and my hope is that additional specimens will show they are really two points in a continuum of forms, which will allow us to synonymize O. parda with O. quinta (a little bit sad since the type specimen of O. parda came from my front yard!).
If you click on the link above, you'll see that "O. parda" is strictly eastern, with the exception of one outlier in eastern British Columbia. A few somewhat similar mines have also been found in California, which very likely represent a related but distinct, undescribed species: one that @silversea_starsong found on S. bracteolatum, and one that @chilipossum found on "aster".
In Florida, similar mines have also been found on Ampelaster carolinianus. These could be another new species, or maybe they are the same as O. parda/quinta; we won't know until some adults are reared.

Some notes about rearing these: the dogwood-mining Phytomyza species typically exit their mines to pupate, but sometimes the puparium is formed at the end of the mine. The Ophiomyia species on Asteraceae all pupate within the leaf, but the puparium is hidden on the underside (typically right at the edge), so the completed mine appears empty when viewed from above.