Catching up with unidentified specimens from the past year this week I was given an unexpected surprise:
Upon dissection this turned out to be Stigmella carpinella. Since my garden has loads of the larval foodplant in it (Hornbeam) the surprise was that I had not seen it before.
However, it seems not many people have. I believe it has been identified in Bucks before, but I'm not too sure how many times. In the south-east of Bucks, I am 150 metres from Hertfordshire, where it has been registered once (an hour away in the far east) and several websites have it down as a proposed red data book species.
Well well.
Hi Andy,
ReplyDeleteSo far as I'm aware there is just a single prior record of carpinella for Bucks, of an adult from the RIS trap at Burnham Beeches in 2018 which was dissected by Peter Hall, so your example is quite an exciting find! Your next challenge will be to try and find the mines (images on the Dutch leaf-mine site). We have a hornbeam hedge and a couple of young trees here in the garden at Westcott but the only Nep I've ever found on them is microtheriella, not even floslactella of which the mine looks quite similar to that of carpinella.
Wow, well done Andy, what a great record. I find lots of Stigmella mines on Hornbeam at Aston Rowant and elsewhere, but have failed to breed any so far, fresh encouragement! I think I there are a couple of Berks records too, published in Ent Rec Vol 122 pt 4 by Ian Sims who bred them from mines found at Bear Wood (Wokingham) and Old Pond Cops (Reading) in June 2000 and September 1998 respectively.
ReplyDeleteWell, the problems with finding the mines are that Hornbeams are trees and most of the leaves are out of reach! Plus it is a fairly underwhelming mine, to be honest, being similar to floslactella. But the big question is why is this moth so scarce? (Maybe it just lives in the tree tops). Andy.
ReplyDeleteWhile trying to classify Stigmella-type mines on hornbeam (and also failing to breed these through), I noted that the Dutch website mentioned by Dave (https://bladmineerders.nl/) had the following comment about the distinction of floslactella vs. carpinella: "(floslactella) Only rarely on Carpinus (Johansson ea, 1990a); van Nieukerken (2021a) even questions whether all floslactella’s on Carpinus might actually concern misidentifications of St. carpinella."
ReplyDelete