Monday 12 November 2018

Leaf Miners


Things quieten down in autumn, and its a chance to look at wildlife that is easily overlooked.  Fitting into that category are leaf miners, flies and moths which at the caterpillar stage feed and grow in the leaves of trees and other plants.  I have seen a number of postings in blogs and on Facebook (eg Plants of Skye, Raasay & the Small Isles) describing leaf miners that have retarded leaf senescence leaving green islands in an otherwise brown leaf, so I started looking in the hedge in front of my house for similar examples and this widened out into a more general search for leaf miners.  To identify them I relied on British Leaf Miners - with a heavy dependence on miners being specific to host plants - and the captions on a few examples that follow may be entirely wrong, if that dependence is misplaced.  But it's a start, and the best thing is that they are easy to find in quiet moments.
 Phyllonorcyter cerasicollela, Wild Cherry
 
Phyllonorcyter cerasicollela, Wild Cherry
Phyllonocyter hostis on Crab Apple
Phyllonocyter hostis on Crab Apple

Stigmella tityrella on Beech
Stigmella microtheriella on Hazel




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1 comment:

  1. Terry Swainbank15 November 2018 at 11:05

    Some very useful comments from Tony Davis, via Stephen Bungard. Tony is National Microlepidoptera Recorder and works for Butterfly Conservation.

    P. cerasicolella - assuming that it is Wild Cherry (as opposed to any other cherry) then this must be correct [it was Wild Cherry]

    P. hostis - this cannot be separated from P. blancardella on the basis of the mine or larva - must be bred and then dissected!

    S. tityrella - I might be but as I cannot see the frass pattern I cannot exclude hemargyrella

    S. microtheriella - the photo is zoomed in to close and I cannot see the frass pattern so I cannot really tell but I get the impression that the mine is quite broad in which case it is probably S. floslactella. [I did not take a wider angle photo]

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