New sightings of a rarely observed sawfly?
I recently learned about American Bladdernut (Staphylea trifolia), an Eastern US native shrub with pretty cool fruits. Very nice plant, probably in my top 10. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/126169-Staphylea-trifolia I learned how to distinguish it from similar plants and started IDing them. From there, I decided to annotate them all. It took a long time, but I made it through the Research Grade and Needs ID piles. I don’t think I’ll work on the captive ones anytime soon. Maybe someday.
But while looking through Bladdernut observations, I sometimes noticed gray patches on the leaves. Was there an associated fungus or insect or something? I looked into it online and found a couple pages talking about the “Bladdernut Slug Sawfly”, Caliroa lunata, which matches with these observations perfectly. https://abouteating.com/2021/09/30/bladdernut-slug-sawfly-buggy-joe-boggs/ (This site says that the plant host for this species was unknown until 2021!) On iNat, Caliroa lunata has only 19 observations! https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/495082-Caliroa-lunata There was only 1 observation from 2023, and the most observations in a year is 6 (2020). Maybe its rare, or maybe just underobserved?
I marked all the sawfly evidence observations I could find with an observation field (32). I wasn’t marking them when I started going through the Bladdernut observations, so I probably missed some. These observations cover a wider range than the current Caliroa lunata observations on iNat, but they don’t seem to cover the whole range of American Bladdernut.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&quality_grade=needs_id,research&subview=map&taxon_id=126169&field:leaf%20miner=yes
I’m not a sawfly expert or anything, I just thought this was interesting. Maybe these observations are evidence of this sawfly, or different sawflies, or something else entirely. Let me know what you think!
