Mystery (and other) miners to watch for
(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:
(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
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