המועדפים של bdthomas

These were growing in moss with beech - different location than the ones I found the week prior with oak growing alongside regular trumpets. These were a bit more leggy, larger and didn’t have the white cap margin of the others. Unfortunately I didn’t save any of these to sequence or get photos in situ.

Strange fungus(?) that grew from these larvae. Larvae we’re collected on 5/3 from an open field where a good ten individuals were found in a small radius, and all larvae were found curled around the tips of grasses or leaf blades. Some larvae were larger and yellow like the ones in the last image, others were much smaller and greener (but almost certainly the same species). While these were abundant in this small area in the field, I found no more elsewhere in the field that day, so this seemed to be a localized phenomenon. The larvae were still alive (or seemed to be) on 5/3, but they did not move much when I pulled them off their grass/leaf. This afternoon (5/4) I checked on the larvae since I was hoping to rear them, and all four that I had collected were very dead and those that were touching/adjacent to the container surface were surrounded by a ring of fungus that was 1.5-2cm in diameter. One that was on a stem of Plantago was not near a wall and the stem was covered in a fine layer of dusty-looking fungus that was probably the same as the circles on the container. Fungus patch images are taken from the outside of the container, from the top down they looked like small smatterings of powder (see small clump in fifth image) and the edges of the rings had a higher relief than at the centers where the dead larvae were. Not much fungus grew directly out of the larvae, though, which was interesting.

First three images are fungus patches, fourth and fifth images are dead larvae from 5/4 after the fungus grew, and the last two images are the larvae on 5/3 when they were collected (note they were wrapped around different plant stems above the ground).

Magnification of photos: 400×, 400×, 400×, 400×, 400×, 600×, 600×, 600×, 600×
Habitat: water at near the surface of a pond, associated with Mougeotia and Tribonema. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/150796641
Photo taken with a Celestron PentaView Digital Microscope. According to their website, the FOV (i.e. the diagonal width) at 400× is 150 µm.