#leaf miner

Red and yellow leaf miner moth, Macarostola miniella, Gracillariidae

Found on the North Island of New Zealand

Happy gall week to all who celebrate, go out and find your own too

Most of these aren't wasp galls but thog dont caare

And because I have miners on my nails I need to include some too

06/05/2023 Caterpillar making Nonstandard Life Choices.

Marmara arbutiella is a tiny caterpillar that lives inside arbutus leaves. It leaves the waxy top and bottom layer of the leaf intact for shelter and eats a tunnel through the juicy middle layer, writing a gleaming silvery spiral into the flesh of the leaf.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend found this Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices living in a salal leaf instead of an arbutus lead. These eccentrics turn up occasionally in a small area that includes our island.

We know the salal-dwellers are Marmara arbutiella, because someone sent a salal leaf with a caterpillar in it to Charley Eiseman (see @lies's Charley Eiseman Appreciation Post) and he got it DNA barcoded.

But nobody has observed a salal-dweller outside the leaf. We don't know if it has morphological differences from the arbutus-dwellers as an adult moth, like maybe a new subspecies is starting to branch off here.

So we picked the leaf and put it in a jar with a little moss to hold moisture. Hopefully there's still a Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices in it, and the caterpillar will crawl out of the leaf, make a cocoon, and emerge into an adult we can send to Charley Eiseman.

The cocoon is pretty exciting too, described in the poetic words of Wagner, Loose, Fitzgerald, De Benedictis, and Davis:

The larvae exhibit a fascinating cocoon-spinning behavior which involves prolonged ornamentation of the cocoon with dozens of anally extruded compartmentalized bubbles, each of which is individually wrapped in silk and pushed through to the outer cocoon surface.

Another shore fly species, but this one is endemic to New Zealand. The first hostplant for the species was only identified in 2012, but the text of that paper is behind a paywall.

There are more than 240 described species in the genus. Some Hydrellia species are being investigated as biocontrols of Hydrilla verticillata in Florida - two native and one each from Pakistan and Australia. Hydrilla verticillata is a horrendously invasive aquatic plant, but success with the flies has so far been limited - possibly because the flies are themselves being parasitised by a native wasp.

I’ve seen plenty of leaf miner remains, but I’ve never seen a caterpillar before Ö Or at least I think it’s a caterpillar, looking at it now, it could be a pupae.