When fully grown, larvae burrow to the surface of the galls, where they develop their partially protruding white cocoons and pupate. This species represents one of the rare situations among gall insects where fresh galls and emergence of adults occur throughout the year, depending on location and environmental circumstances, even though there is a pulse of growth and gall activity in spring.

I’ve looked for, but so far have never found, a gall with intact pupae visible on its surface. I’ve found plenty of galls with spent exuviae, however. Here’s one I found a few weeks ago at the salt marsh:

Here’s another gall with visible exuviae. In this case, there are actually several individual galls that I assume were the result of the same egg-laying session, though they have not merged into a single gall, as they often do. I took this shot on the morning after our first good rain of the year; I think the exuviae on the left side of the large gall may have been knocked downward by raindrops:

Here’s a gall with an odd bumpy surface:

For those who don’t want to click through for the full-sized images, here’s a cropped portion of the previous shot so you can get a good look at the exuvia:

I don’t know how long pupation lasts, but I suspect it isn’t very long, or else I should have been able to find some galls with intact pupae protruding from their surfaces. Or maybe I’m misinterpreting Russo’s description of what the pupation stage looks like. Maybe the pupae are near the surface, or barely protruding, and the exuviae end up protruding as much as they do only as a result of the emergence itself.

Here’s a gall with some interesting discolored bumps. I wonder: Could those be pupation sites? If I had cut that gall open, would I have found individual larval chambers under each of those bumps?

Cell biologist Peter J. Bryant at UC Irvine has a neat page on Rhopalomyia californica on his Natural History of Orange County, California web site. Among the photos there are several showing newly emerged male and female midges, the females identifiable by their orange abdomens swollen with masses of eggs.

Although R. californica galls are found mostly in coyote brush, they also can occur in other plants. Dr. Bryant’s page shows a gall in a leaf of black sage and the midge that emerged from it; Bryant used DNA analysis to determine that it was R. californica. He also has photos of four different types of parasitoid wasp that emerged from R. californica galls.

Dr. Bryant was kind enough to correspond with me once before (concerning the bolas spider). I think I might try pestering him again to see if he would be willing to give me any pointers on rearing R. californica galls to adulthood. I don’t necessarily want to harm the insects. Could I simply keep a removed stem in water? Or would it require a living, growing plant to avoid disrupting the lifecycle of the gall’s inhabitants?

Even if I successfully raise gall midges to adulthood, it seems likely that I would be disrupting their chance to successfully breed. The adult midge only lives for a few hours; I would essentially be sacrificing its life merely to satisfy my curiosity. Am I okay with that?

As a young boy I loved Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle stories. While writing this post I suddenly remembered a passage I hadn’t read in 40 years. It turns out to have been from Doctor Doolittle’s Garden. Doolittle, after long effort, has managed to decipher the language of insects, and has become fascinated by the Ephemera — insects with very short-lived adult stages, such as mayflies (Ephemeroptera) and gall midges (Cecidomyiidae). Doolittle and his young assistant Stubbins (of whom I was always deeply envious) bring a delicate fly into the lab.

We worked on him for half an hour and our results were very meagre. He had things to say, we felt sure. But it was a language new to us. Clearly anyone who has to pack his whole life into one day must talk very fast. We soon got the impression that he was really pouring out hundreds of words a second. Only we weren’t catching them quick enough.

“Look here, Stubbins,” said the Doctor, “we are being entirely heartless. We can’t let this poor fellow spend more than half an hour talking to us. Why, half an hour out of his life is a forty-eighth part of the whole. That would be nearly eighteen months for us. What must he think of us? Imagine anyone talking to you for a year and a half without stopping! Let him go at once. We must do this on a different system. We will catch several singly and only keep them in the apparatus for five minutes at a time, If we are swift enough with our note-taking, we shall perhaps be able to gather a little from what each one says and piece it all together afterwards and make something of it.”

The more I study R. californica the more questions I have. But in answering those questions, I don’t want to harm the object of my curiosity. I’ll have to think about this more.

In early September I received an email from Shoichi Sano, a graduate student working with Prof. Akihiko Matsukuma of Kyushu University Museum. Shoichi had seen Julia’s photo on Flickr, and wanted to know if I might be able to send them a snail specimen. By examining the DNA of R. decollata from different parts of the world, they hope to learn more about how the snails are spreading.

After receiving the email I kept my eyes open at the marsh, but for a while all I could find were old, dried shells. Then in late September there was a light rain one night, and the next morning I found a group of a half-dozen decollate snails crawling near the path that parallels Ash Avenue. Here’s the one I collected:

I’ve always had something of a soft spot for snails; they seem like such peaceful, inoffensive creatures (at least if you’re not their prey, or if your garden isn’t being consumed by them). Deb Talan has a song about snails, “Angels Marching”, on her Sincerely album, and the lyrics have always resonated with me. So I felt bad about killing this snail. But I’d told Shoichi I would, and after researching how to properly preserve and mail it, I dropped the snail into an airtight aluminum pill fob filled with alcohol, wrapped that in enough paper towels to absorb any leaks, and put the whole thing in a padded envelope.

I felt a little anxious waiting in line at the post office. Would my packing job be deemed adequate? I had to fill out a customs form, which required a detailed description of what I was sending. I wrote, “Preserved snail specimen (Rumina decollata)” and handed it in. The postal clerk didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Moments later my “snail mail” was stamped and on its way.

After a few weeks I received an email from Prof. Matsukuma:

Dear Dr. Callender,

I received an animal of Rumina decollata from the Carpinteria Salt Marsh, California preserved in ethanol. Thank you very much for your kind help to obtain the animal from California.

In Japan the invasive land snail R. decollata was found first at Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka Prefecture, northern Kyushu in 1988. At present the snail dispersed in various regions of western Japan, including northern Kyushu, Shikoku, Kinki and Kanto districts. I am afraid the snail will be a serious pest for vegetables in our country near future. I believe studies of origins and migration of the snail are important.

Once again, thank you very much for your kindness.

Best regards,

Aki
Akihiko Matsukuma
Kyushu University Museum

It was flattering, if inaccurate, for him to address me as Dr. Callender; I’m not a PhD, or any kind of scientist (unless you count political science, my major in college, as a “science”, which I don’t). But it was fun to feel included, and to participate, in a small way, in doing some “citizen science.”

It had rained the night before, and was near a max high tide (+5.9), so the basin next to Ash Avenue was full of water, with lots of ducks feeding in the inundated pickleweed. There were mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), blue-winged and green-winged teal (A. discors and A. carolinensis, respectively), and a single female northern shoveler (A. clypeata). In one group of green-winged teal a male was doing a really cute courtship display for the benefit of the nearby females; I’d never seen that before.

A branch of the big arroyo willow (Salix lasiolepis) near the amphitheater had blown down in the wind during the night:

Here’s a shot I took of the Franklin Creek bridge. If you’re used to the bridge’s appearance at an average tide, it’s really noticeable how high the tide is here:

Not far away, a good-sized raccoon (Procyon lotor) had left a trail through the mud:

All in all, a really nice walk at the marsh.

I also talk about some of the things I think Carpinterians could be doing to prepare for these impacts, including:

• setting up a groundwater management plan,
• increasing our water conservation efforts, and
• exploring the idea of a front-country reservoir to save more of our winter rain for use in the summer.

Again, see Climate Change Impacts #2: Water Supplies for the details.

I was surprised to see that there were no Rhopalomyia californica bud galls on any of the plants. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s a legacy of the fire, with the gall midges taking a while to reestablish themselves. Or maybe this is typical of coyote brush stands higher up in the foothills. The Jesusita trailhead is more than three miles inland, while most of my experience with coyote brush has been at the salt marsh and the Carpinteria bluffs, right next to the ocean. Maybe R. californica is more of a coastal species?

At one point I was looking at a spindly clump of burned stems emerging from the center of an otherwise-green coyote brush, when I realized that the exposed stems had the characteristic thickening of the twisted stem gall midge, Rhopalomyia baccharis. I broke off a few of the galls and brought them home for closer examination. Here they are in my hand, to give you a sense of scale:

If you look closely at this shot, you can see the elliptical openings through which the adult midges emerge:

I think these twisted stem galls are fascinating, and I’m always looking for them, but whether it’s that they’re actually rarer, or just that they’re harder to spot in the foliage, I almost never find them. I come across dozens of terminal bud galls for every twisted stem gall I find.

Back in February I found a coyote brush at the Carpinteria salt marsh that had a lot of twisted stem galls; eight or nine at least. I was excited by the find, but I was also in something of a hurry, so I just snapped a few quick photos, intending to come back later and investigate in more detail. Here are some of the shots I got:

The next chance I had to visit the marsh was a few weeks later. I assumed I’d be able to find the plant quickly (the galls gave it a distinctive, gnarled appearance), but I ran out of time without finding it. By the time I could get back to the marsh for a more thorough search it was early April. Even looking more carefully, though, I couldn’t locate the plant. One was in the right spot, but it was much smaller than the plant I remembered, and had no visible galls, so I dismissed it quickly.

Where were the stem galls? I really had seen them; I had photos to prove it. But now they just weren’t there. I wandered back to the center of my search pattern, next to the small coyote brush, and stood there scowling.

And happened to take a closer look at the plant:

Oh.

I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had recently with Andrea, the head of the docent program, about some new workers hired by the city, with whom she’d had words about their over-zealous pruning of the native plants. The workers had seen the coyote brush with its noticeably gnarled stems, and had done what any self-respecting gardener would do: They’d pruned away the damaged branches.

Sigh. My quest for twisted stem galls continues.

I traded docent shifts with Rob Denholtz this month, so I was there on the third Saturday in July, rather than my usual second Saturday. No one showed up for the tour, though, so I took a stroll through the marsh myself, and was rewarded by a breathtaking profusion of purple flowers.

I’m on record as having a crush on coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis). Linda attended a recent talk by Carol Bornstein, author of Reimagining the California Lawn, and Linda told me coyote brush was among the plants Bornstein discussed.

Bornstein wrote in her book about coyote brush’s “utilitarian” character, and Linda said she called it “fairly drab” during her talk, which of course makes me want to rise to its defense. But I admit that its flowers are not the showiest.

Chaparral mallow is another story. If I have a crush on coyote brush, I felt a temporary transfer of affections to chaparral mallow as I walked past the wall of flowers at the marsh. You really should visit while they’re in bloom.

Among the things I talk about on the new sea-level rise page are a report prepared for the California Energy Commission in 2009 called The Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the California Coast. It includes this chart:

There’s a lot more detail on the page, including discussion of beach loss and the ways we might respond to it. I make the argument that defending against sea level rise by building dikes and seawalls is likely to be an expensive and problematic strategy, while a managed retreat, if we start early enough, could be relatively cheap and effective.

I’m interested in what people think about this.

Again, see Climate Change Impacts #1: Sea-level Rise for more detail.

The focus on adaptation is a marked shift for cities such as Newport Beach that just a few years ago had made few preparations for the effects of climate change or were focusing on reducing their carbon footprints. Even as the California Legislature passed a landmark law in 2006 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, few coastal cities had any plans to confront rising waters on their own shores.

“The state of preparedness was close to zero in terms of looking forward to climate change and what it’s going to bring,” said Susanne Moser, a social science researcher at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, who has surveyed coastal cities and counties about planning for rising sea levels. “Since then there’s been an explosion of interest on the local level.”

I mentioned the article during the “items raised by commissioners” section of last night’s Planning Commission meeting, along with mentioning some of the other adaptation resources I’ve been reading lately. In response, Jackie Campbell, the city’s Director of Community Development, talked about some of the activities that Carpinteria is already engaged in on climate change (membership in ICLEI, participation at SBCAG in setting greenhouse gas reduction targets). She also pointed out that the city’s budget is really tight these days in terms of being able to to pay for the kind of consulting services that other cities have used to pursue adaptation initiatives.

I pretty much expected that response, having corresponded with her already about the issue. I understand where she’s coming from, and don’t expect her to just drop everything and jump on the bandwagon. This is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s a long road ahead in terms of building awareness and support in Carpinteria before we’ll be ready to take the kinds of actions that effective adaptation will require.

It felt good to get the information out there, though. Now I need to keep the pressure on to make sure the right people are looking at it.

Update: Here are my comments from the March 7 meeting:

…and here is Jackie Campbell’s director’s report:

Another recent article from the Times was not concerned with climate change directly, but was interesting in its own right, and did contain an interesting fact about local sea level rise: Archaeologists find evidence of early maritime explorers.

Archaeologists generally agree that one group of hunters migrated from northern Asia across the land bridge that connected Asia and North America through the region known as Beringia, slaughtering large mammals with spears and arrows fitted with characteristic stone tips known as Clovis points.

But a slowly growing body of evidence hints that a separate group of people, who originated perhaps in Japan, sailed along the coasts of both continents, traveling as far south as Tierra del Fuego and migrating as far inland as the glacial lakes of the Pacific Northwest.

The problem with proving it is that the ocean level was about 200 feet lower then. As sea levels have risen, they have inundated most of the coastal sites where the ancient seafarers may have lived.

To get around the problem, archaeologist Jon M. Erlandson of the University of Oregon and his colleagues studied caves on the Channel Islands that remained above the rising waters. They reported this week in the journal Science that they had discovered middens — garbage disposal areas — containing many bones and tools.

One of the important points to realize in planning for sea level rise is that the ocean’s level really isn’t constant, certainly not on geologic timescales. Even without human-induced climate change, the level of the ocean is constantly rising and falling, and does so by what feels like really large amounts from our short-lived human perspective.

The California Climate Adaptation Strategy talks about four and a half feet of sea level rise by 2100, and that much and more again in the century that follows, even if we get greenhouse gas emissions under control practically overnight (which seems unlikely), and even without including the effect of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica (which seem likely to add to the total). I can imagine a Carpinteria that looks pretty much like the Carp of today with four and a half feet of sea level rise, and with a little more effort I can imagine ways of dealing with nine feet. But beyond that my mind starts to boggle.

But the ocean doesn’t care about my bogglement. It will have no problem at all with going on rising for centuries, or even millennia.