INVERTEBRATE ALERT
This blog provides an informal forum for terrestrial invertebrate watchers to post recent sightings of interesting observations in the southern Vancouver Island region. Please send your sightings by email to Jeremy Tatum (tatumjb352@gmail.com). Be sure to include your name, phone number, the species name (common or scientific) of the invertebrate you saw, location, date, and number of individuals. If you have a photograph you are willing to share, please send it along. Click on the title above for an index of past sightings.The index is updated most days.

April 3

2017 April 3

 

   Charlene Wood, who joined yesterday’s Butterfly Walk, gives us more details and photographs of the ciid (sic!) beetle that she found yesterday, as well as identifying for us two of Ian Cruickshank’s recent invertebrates.  One of these was the beetle Necrophilus hydrophiloides (for details scroll to March 3), and the other was a most unusual creature known as a Bristly Millipede (for details scroll to March 18).

 

 Charlene writes, of the beetle she found yesterday,:  The beetle I collected yesterday from Turkey Tail fungus (Trametes versicolor) during our walk along Lochside trail/Blenkinsop Lake is a "Minute Tree Fungus Beetle" Cis sp. (Family Ciidae). If I find time to run further through keys I’ll update you with a species-level ID. Both adults and larvae obligately live in and feed on the persistent fruiting bodies of wood-rotting polypores or bracket fungi.

 


Cis sp. (Col.: Ciidae)  Charlene Wood

 

Cis sp. (Col.: Ciidae)  Charlene Wood

 

 

 

   Steven Roias sends a picture of a small moth from his back deck in Saanich.   Jeremy Tatum writes:  Pending a more expert opinion, I’m tentatively labelling this one Chionodes mediofuscella.

 

Probably Chionodes mediofuscella (Lep.: Gelechiidae)  Steven Roias