More May Finds, & a Hemipteran Mystery Solved! (sorta)

Whilst looking out for Tenebs yesterday in the field by my house, (specifically Eleodes extricata females), I found many neat animals, including a nearly two foot garter snake, (which while quite docile, musked me upon capture pretty good), some more Eleodes obscura, (I'm up to 5 females now), as well as many many Eleodes hispilabris, Eleodes sp. (subgenus Blapylis), Apsena sp., and some Eleodes nigrina males. Overall nothing too crazy, besides the obscura females, I didn't collect any of those species.

However, I found individuals of one small Tenebrionid I've not seen in this neighborhood yet, Blapstinus. I've bred this particular species in the past, but with little effort to provide a proper pupation environment, and in my "experimental" Teneb breeding phase... (when I knew little about proper husbandry methodologies for smaller Tenebrionids). Thus, I had little success in establishing stable colonies.

I'm going to give these guys another chance, this time with a more proper setup, similar to how I set up my Apsena sp. "Kuna", (which I found side by side with these Blapstinus incidentally). I believe I caught one male and two females, so fingers crossed I can breed them successfully!

Here are some pictures of them:

With any luck they'll lay for me soon, getting eggs and rearing larvae isn't that difficult, I just never kept them in conditions optimal for pupation, and thus the amount of captive reared adults I got was often less than what I had collected from the wild.

It would be nice to get an ID for this species, I'll ask around, but I don't know if these will ever be identified down to species.

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Now, for the conclusion of our little "Hemipteran Mystery"... The eggs "hatched" a few days ago, though what came out of them was quite unexpected... Evidently my sister was not the first to find these eggs, a tiny parasitic wasp, or several tiny parasitic wasps beat her to them, and appear to have eaten all the developing Hemipterans within! 😂

I've submitted images to Bugguide for an ID, and currently it seems that these are most likely some species of Trissolcus. Here are the images of one of the cuties that emerged:

These images are of a female, I did not see a male emerge before I put the eggs back outside yesterday, (in a more suitable, undisturbed habitat than the mound of dirt they were originally found on BTW).

So yeah, I guess we'll never know what species of Hemipteran came from these eggs, though I know it was some sort of Pentatomidae species... Oh well, I'm still glad I kept these eggs, this little project took quite the unexpected turn! I feel like I got a little taste of the BugTracks experience! 😜

Well, that's gonna do it for this post everyone, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed, stay safe, and I'll see you all next time! 😉