A collection leaf miner tracks I discovered yesterday. All are unidentified, but I personally believe that they were all caused by Lepidopteran larva.

Those who have been on nature walks with me lately may have seen me more frequently photographing apparently bare leaves. In fact I'm documenting the weird lines and glyphs etched in the leaves, evidence of a particular type of feeding behavior. These are leaf mines, sandwiched between the top and bottom layer of a leaf. An insect egg was deposited in the thin flesh of a leaf, and a tiny larva hatched and began eating. Snug in the confines of the upper and lower epidermis, the larva munched and gulped its way along through the green, leaving an ever widening whitish line or blotch behind it. Some species of leaf miners also deposit a line of frass (insect poop) behind them, which can be distinctive to the type of insect that produced it. In this case the mine is a very broad and light-colored one. The leaf was from a species of campion--a group of plants that produce a bladder-like flower. Knowing the plant species will get you most of the way toward knowing the species of the insect within. In this case, the leaf-miner involved has uncommonly broad tastes, having been documented from at least 2 dozen species of plants including beets, spinach, chickweeds, campions, carnations, and lamb's quarters. These records come mostly from England and elsewhere in Europe where this leaf-miner presumably originates. If the larva successfully reaches adulthood, it becomes a 2 millimeter-long fly, with a dark body and yellowish face (accurately reflected in its scientific name). In North America the fly is found mostly on the east coast, as one would expect, with a single straggler iNaturalist observation from San Jose, California. That leaf mine was in Sweet-William (Dianthus barbatus), a pretty Old World garden plant with blossoms of bicolored flowers. The bountiful European flora now found in North America provides ample habitat for Amauromyza flavifrons. Amauromyza flavifrons on Bugguide Photo of the adult fly, by Charley Eiseman, of course Amauromyza flavifrons description from British leaf-miner website Identify your own leaf miners with Charley Eiseman's books.

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.

got curious about leaf miners after making a silly reblog about tree stumps and we're relieved to see that weevil larvae can plausibly be leaf miners - but also we love wikipedia compilers for having fun like the above