After an excellent paper by Will Langdon in the splendidly named Entomologist's Record and Journal of Variation a number of us started looking seriously for the larvae of Phyllonorycter ulicicolella, which Will had signalled was not as rare as has been thought.
It is, however, formidably well hidden, mining, as it does, the younger stems of Gorse. The mines are difficult to spot and there can be a lot of false hopes and stabbed fingers checking them out. Much more difficult than simply finding mines is finding tenanted ones.
It seems he is right, with three sites out of three checked in Herts last week giving positive results, (last record 1966). And my first attempt in Bucks - Stoke Common - proves the same. This is one of two caterpillars from Stoke, on the 12th:
Hi Andy,
ReplyDeleteVery well done on finding ulicicolella! I think that's the second record for Bucks now after Will found a mine at Burnham Beeches.
I spent an hour or two at Calvert Jubilee a couple of weeks ago searching the gorse there specifically for this species after seeing an internet post by Rob Edmunds, who had managed to find mines in Norfolk. I was armed with a pair of leather gauntlets, very important equipment when dealing with such a nasty host plant! Maybe it is just my eyesight, but at a site which has so much gorse and where the moth must be present, I was disappointed at how difficult it was to find even some vaguely possible signs of mining and in the end came home with just six pieces of stem to have a closer look at. Once I pulled them apart - not an easy task in itself - only two had what might be considered a mine of some sort (a hollow chamber at any rate) but I found no sign of larvae or even frass so no records for me yet!
Yes. As far I can tell, the mines seem to consist of a hollowed-out section and another section packed with mid-brown frass. To further 'muddy the waters' I found two larvae belonging to orders different from Lepidoptera - probably Diptera/Hymenoptera, but certainly not Leps. Perhaps parasites. I did find a couple of larval 'skins', with head capsules and, since no other moth mines Gorse, they had to be ulicicolella.
DeleteTo be clear and not confuse people there are other Lepidopteran larvae on Gorse, just not mining the stems.