Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.

Wednesday 9 September 2020

Stigmella Stigmata

I nipped back down the lane this evening, and I've come home with another bag of various leaves to work through. One that I've sorted out already though is a bit of an odd one. Here are two tenanted mines on an Elm sp. leaf ....
As you can see, thanks to the red arrows, the mines are two small dark blotches - stigmata if you will. But if you look closer, you can see that the blotches are actually a set of tightly coiled circles winding out. A bit of backlighting and a closer view shows this, along with the larval culprit in situ ....

The larger of the two mines - winding out clockwise

The smaller mine - winding out anti-clockwise

Working through the key on British Leafminers as a starter, I quickly realised that this was the early mine of Stigmella lemniscella - despite looking not much like a typical Stigmella mine.

2 comments:

martinf said...

Bloody LOVE that song. Ministry is one of two bands that I never saw live that I still regret, the other is NIN. :(

Skev said...

I've not seen Ministry either, but be default I've seen some of Ministry + Skinny Puppy et al when I saw an early tour by Pigface in 1991.