Australian Leaf Miners

Hi everyone,

We now have over 1,900 observations, how amazing!

It has been over a year since the last journal post for this project (last post was June, 2024)… I hope to be a bit more frequent with these posts in the future. My plan is to highlight some interesting observations and discussions from this project. For today's post I am sharing some recent project-relevant developments.

About the new “Leafmine” Annotation

iNaturalist has put out some new options for the “Evidence of Presence” Annotation, including one for “Leafmines”. This makes looking for leaf mine records much easier on iNat.

I’ve had a think about what the new Annotation means for this project. This project was originally meant to help find leaf mine observations, as there was no way to actually find them before.. but now there is! With the Annotation! There are other projects out there, which automatically suck up Observations that fulfill certain criteria, such as the Australian Gall projects. For that project, as long as the record was in Australia and it is Annotated as a gall, the observation will be automatically included in the Australian Galls project.

This is different from THIS project. For this project, as you will all know, Observations must be added manually. This has been a bit of a pain in terms of getting new records, as it’s really about word of mouth. However, the new Annotation field makes finding records Annotated with “Leafmine” easy to find.

Which brings me to this project. I think this project is still super valuable as it is. The requirement for input of a Host Plant ID means that IDs of leaf miners becomes more possible – many leaf miners are specialists.

Therefore, for now this project will run as it is. I hope that if you see wild leaf mine observations, you continue to add them to this project. Continue using the “Leafmine” Annotation, but know that it will not add the observation to this project automatically – it will still have to be added manually.
I will personally monitor the “Leafmine” Annotation for observations not added here and add them where possible. As of today I’ve already checked every single observation that was from Australia and Annotated with “Leafmine”.

I would appreciate if people still added Observations to this project manually. Behind the scenes the dataset from this project is being tapped into for research, and if things are annotated with the Host Plant and in this project - this makes exporting this data and sorting it much easier.

Rearing

You may have noticed some adult leaf miners appearing in the project. I'm happy for them to be hear WHEN they are linked to leaf mine records, i.e. have been reared out.

Whilst I'm actually finishing up on my Gracillariidae research project, a new project on Heliozelidae is on the horizon. I think any reared leaf miners (or parasitoids) are valuable, so if you're interested in rearing out leaf miners and want to contribute to research on the group, please get in contact with me and I can provide you more information. I hope to write about some success stories in the next post here.

Ian F.B. Common’s Rearing Notes

Recently I was looking through the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) and found some of Ian F.B. Common’s rearing notes. He was one of the lepidopterists based at the ANIC, and was one of the foremost Australian lepidopterists. I don’t have the time to do an in-depth analysis of his rearing notes, but only to say if there are future leaf mining moth researchers out there, try get access to his notes, they are a treasure trove.

I’ve gone through some uploads from this project and given them tentative IDs where possible. Ian himself didn’t know the identity of many of the leaf miners, but where possible I’ve tried to link a leaf mine to what is known to mine it. This is why providing an accurate or close to accurate host plant ID is super important. I filtered all the observations according to host plant and went through each observation. As of today, I have done this for the following plant species:

Elaeocarpus obovatus
Glochidion ferdinandi

I don’t know if I’ll have time to do more – at least until ANIC is able to digitize the records. My intention is to one day do a whole lot of cross referencing with literature and the observations here.. although that is a giant task.

Happy hunting,

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