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John Pinto might know? profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/pro...

Bee Rider Two weeks ago I was driving past a spot where I knew there was a population of rare orchids that blooms in early June, so I stopped by to have a look.  I found a few of them, and the flowers had mo…

Now you need to find a triangulin! bugtracks.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/b...

Winged and Once-winged Insects (Subclass Pterygota) Winged and Once-winged Insects from Ranga Reddy, IN-TG, IN on June 6, 2025 at 07:01 AM by Pavansai. Observed this on a bark of a tree

Anybody know about these square eggs in India? www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Identifier Profile: @ceiseman This is the twenty-ninth entry in an ongoing series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist. An iNaturalist observation records an encounter between an observer and an organism or recent evid...

Profile of @ceiseman.bsky.social's leafminer work. #inaturalist #leafminers #insects #moths #flies #sawflies #beetles #entomology www.inaturalist.org/blog/124811

Taxonomy Although I have essentially no formal entomological training, I have been involved in the describing and naming of many new insect species with various taxonomist collaborators, and I have recently…

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/

Leaf Blotch Miner Moths (Family Gracillariidae) Leaf Blotch Miner Moths from 美兰区, 海口市, 海南省, CN on February 7, 2026 at 09:12 AM by chifangli

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!

United States Vs. One Moon Rock Having a moon rock may not be illegal, but getting one almost certainly is.

I learned this on the podcast Criminal: there was a court case about moon rock theft called “United States vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch By Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque”. The lucite ball, truly the US' most fearsome enemy www.forbes.com/2010/07/08/l...

Telamoptilia malvavisci Telamoptilia malvavisci is a species of insects with 16 observations

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): 699–707.

Telamoptilia malvavisci Telamoptilia malvavisci from 1246 Lakeside Blvd, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA on February 22, 2021 at 06:47 PM by David Jeffrey Ringer. Telamoptilia cf. hibiscivora per Charley Eiseman. Reared from a m...

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 Agromyza torta from Laurinburg, NC 28352, USA on April 10, 2025 by tracysfeldman. miner on Sugar Hackberry

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.

Agromyza parca - Agromyza dichanthelii An online resource devoted to North American insects, spiders and their kin, offering identification, images, and information.

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...

lateral - Agromyza celtitexana An online resource devoted to North American insects, spiders and their kin, offering identification, images, and information.

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...

Thirty-three new species of Agromyzidae (Diptera) from the United States and Canada, with new host and distribution records for 154 additional species | Zootaxa

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...

Sticktoitiveness Thanks to the fact that I have a searchable email account, and never delete any emails, I was able to quickly reconstruct this timeline just now: On August 1, 2007, I got a reply from Mark Allison,…

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.