This morning I was devastated to find that our larva had died overnight–as we said in the previous post, we were hoping to raise them, and I had also become a little attached. My grief didn’t last very long, though, because I found two larva wreaking havoc in my second head of the day! Emma and I quickly repopulated our petri dish with wriggly pink bugs.
When a seed head has a larva, we can expect a good number of the achenes to have holes burrowed in their sides. Today, we finally caught a larva in the act! This little guy was found with the front half of its body inside an achene. It’s good to have conclusive evidence for what precisely is going on around these seeds…
Other exciting updates: we’ve officially passed the half-way point on cleaning our 110 seed heads. At closing, we’re working on #61. Woo for progress!
Ta ta for now,
Mikaela
The perpetrator (image quality fuzzy to better convey shadiness)
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