Anybody know about these square eggs in India? www.inaturalist.org/observations...
28.02.2026 09:04
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Anybody know about these square eggs in India? www.inaturalist.org/observations...
Profile of @ceiseman.bsky.social's leafminer work. #inaturalist #leafminers #insects #moths #flies #sawflies #beetles #entomology www.inaturalist.org/blog/124811
In case anyone's keeping track (I had lost track until just now), I've now helped name 115 new insect species, 95 of them being agromyzid flies described with Owen Lonsdale. You can find them all here: bugtracks.wordpress.com/taxonomy/
These "frothy bubbles" on cocoons are made by three different subfamilies of Gracillariidae. Here's an observation of an acrocercopine larva in China in the process of decorating its cocoon. The bubbles are white in most species, but in this one they are yellow: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
Cocoon of a leaf-mining moth ornamented with bubbles excreted by the caterpillar
This greenbriar leafminer, Marmara smilacisella, adorned its cocoon with clusters of pearlescent bubbles. I wish my holiday decorations were so neat!
I learned this on the podcast Criminal: there was a court case about moon rock theft called βUnited States vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch By Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaqueβ. The lucite ball, truly the US' most fearsome enemy www.forbes.com/2010/07/08/l...
Telamoptilia malvavisci is known from a single adult specimen, but there are several observations of leaf mines on @inaturalist.bsky.social: www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1660314...
Eiseman, Charles S., David Jeffrey Ringer, and Tracy S. Feldman. 2025. New records of Telamoptilia Kumata and Kuroko (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae: Acrocercopinae) from the USA, with the description of a new species. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington 127(4): 699β707.
The "October 2025" journal issue just showed up in my mailbox, so I guess my new species name is validly published at this point, even though @bioone.bsky.social still hasn't gotten its act together: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
Looks to me like these are all indirect registers of normal cat tracks (i.e., hind feed landing approximately, but not precisely, where the front feet stepped).
Agromyza torta is the first agromyzid known to roll leaves. The rolling is apparently induced during oviposition, and then the larva mines in the rolled leaf. This can be considered a gall, and the hackberry gall inducer A. deserta is a close relative. www.inaturalist.org/observations...
No, have you reared it / do you have specimens / photos of the mines? The only anacua leafminers I know about are moths--Dialectica cordiella (Gracillariidae) and a Bucculatrix that I'm about to describe.
And a paratype of Agromyza dichanthelii, which feeds on deertongue grass and other Dichanthelium spp. (the holotype came from my front yard in Massachusetts): bugguide.net/node/view/11...
Here's the holotype of Agromyza celtitexana (reared by John Schneider from hackberry, in Texas): bugguide.net/node/view/24...
And a paratype of Agromyza dichanthelii, which feeds on deertongue grass and other Dichanthelium spp. (the holotype came from my front yard): bugguide.net/node/view/11...
Finally published! "Thirty-three new species of Agromyzidae (Diptera) from the United States and Canada, with new host and distribution records for 154 additional species." Now I've got some updating to do on BugGuide and iNaturalist...
Here's a tiny trichogrammatid wasp stuck to a gall midge larva, which is pretty tiny itself... Check out my blog post for more about this midge species (I'm afraid I don't have much to say about how the wasp came to be stuck to it).
Huh. No image preview? Well, here's one:
New study: backyard mosquito sprays lead to insecticide levels high enough to kill pollinators, and sprays travel easily into neighboring yards. stacksjournal.org/article/ande...
Not related to the "NJ" specimens I was looking at, but definitely of interest since recent literature states this moth was probably introduced in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s, and this note clearly documents its presence in Washington by 1893 (apparently introduced from Massachusetts).
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.
You've never heard of it mining in early instars, have you? Seems to feed exclusively as a leaftier and on buds, as far as I can tell.
It's possible someone sent her some host material from which she reared the specimens. As far as I can tell she didn't publish anything about this species (which at the time was known as Rhopobota vacciniana).
Rhopobota naevana. I'm doing a review/revision of the North American species--the others are all Ilex specialists, mostly starting out as leafminers.
Okay, another one from the same series, which mysteriously has the same date but clearly "90" rather than "91"... but my main question is, cranberry *what*? Oh, I see--"Tortrix."
There is another specimen with the same Murtfeldt label, and it unambiguously says "NJ." It also clearly says "8/20.91", which makes me think the first one says "8/24.91" and not "6/24.91" as I originally thought.
What do we think, does that say "N.J." at the top? No other labels on this moth specimen. Mary Murtfeldt was born in NYC but every publication of hers I've seen involves observations from Missouri, which is definitely where she was based in 1891.
I love those guys. I've found them wandering around inside leaf mines a couple of times!
Interesting idea. I've never seen anything like this before in the thousands of Cameraria mines I've looked at, so I suspect it's something else. These look very much like the exit slits that some leaf-mining larvae make when leaving their mines, but Cameraria larvae all pupate within their mines.