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Tag Archives: leafmine

Leafmines: Eriocrania unimaculella

22 Monday May 2023

Posted by sconzani in insects, trees

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British leafminers, British moths, Eriocrania unimaculella, leaf-mining moths, leafmine, leafmine on Birch, moth leafmines

The moth formerly known as Heringocrania unimaculella, now known as Eriocrania unimaculella – either way a tongue twister! – spends its larval stage developing within the leaves of Birch trees. And it poohs … a lot … pooh that Rob Edmunds, expert from the British Leafminers website, describes as ‘long strands of spaghetti’. There are several Eriocrania species that can be difficult to identify but Rob produced an excellent well-illustrated guide explaining how to separate them in his March 2018 newsletter (click to access). The adult moth is a tiny golden critter, which you can see on the UK Moths website.

230522 eriocrania unimaculella on birch

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Leafmines: a first for Wales!

06 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by sconzani in insects, leaves, plants

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British leafmines, Broad-leaved everlasting pea, leaf-mining fly larvae, leafmine, leafmine on everlasting pea, leafminer, Liriomyza pisivora

Back on 18 August, I noticed Rob Edmunds’ post on Twitter about his find of Liriomyza pisivora mines on the Everlasting pea in his garden, which led me to check, the next day, the plants growing at Cardiff’s Grangemoor Park. I found plenty of leafmines but my finds were inconclusive – there are several species that form similar mines so I needed to get better photos, if possible transparent images that showed the frass distribution in the mines.

210906 Liriomyza pisivora (1)

So, when I visited Grangemoor again on 28 August to look for the Wasp spiders that had been reported the previous day, I also took the opportunity to look again at the Everlasting pea plants and took several more photographs. From them, I could see that in some of the mines the frass had been deposited as thin lines alternating from one side of gallery to the other.

210906 Liriomyza pisivora (3)
210906 Liriomyza pisivora (2)

Those images were good enough for Barry Warrington, the national recorder of the Agromyzidae family of flies, to confirm that I had indeed found Liriomyza pisivora and, a splendid surprise, that this was the first ever record of these flies in Wales!

210906 Liriomyza pisivora (4)

The host plant in this instance, Broad-leaved everlasting-pea (Lathyrus latifolius), is a relatively recent arrival at Grangemoor, though it is now sprawling abundantly over bramble bushes and along scrubby hedgerows in several parts of the park. So far, I’ve only found Liriomyza pisivora mines in one relatively small area but, perhaps, in time, they will spread throughout the park.

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Leafmines 101

13 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by sconzani in insects, leaves, nature, plants, trees

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Tags

British insects, homes of insect larvae, insect larvae in leaves, leaf mine, leafmine, leafminer, mines on leaves

Leafmines and their miners are a subject I started to look at last summer but I quickly discovered that, in order to identify the miner, you had to know the plant they were mining, so I needed to improve my botanical knowledge before I could go much further. That effort has begun, and is ongoing, so I will start to look again at the miners in the coming months.

180113 leafmines (1)
180113 leafmines (2)

Firstly though, in case you don’t know, leafmines are made by the larvae of various insects. The mines are their homes and their larders – as well as providing them with some degree of protection from predators, the larvae eat the tissue of the leaves they live within, thus creating their mines. The larvae can be the immature stages of various species of flies, sawflies or moths, and, apparently, some beetles also mine leaves.

180113 leafmines (3)
180113 leafmines (4)

If you look at a mine, you will often see a tiny hole at one end, which means the creature that made it has left the premises, to pupate or to being life as an adult. Sometimes, you can still see the larva within, and you can often also see the pooh (known as frass) it has left behind as it eats and tunnels.

180113 leafmines (5)
180113 leafmines (6)

The shapes of the mines can vary considerably, from long meandering or straight lines to roundish blotches, and these shapes, plus the placement of the mine within the leaf (some occupy just the upper or lower surface, some go right through) and the identity of the plant, are the main ways to determine which creature has made the mine.

**p.s. Since posting this, I’ve been told what I thought was a leaf mine on ivy (the photo on the right in the middle) is actually caused by a fungus, possibly Phoma hedericola, the most common leaf spot of ivy. I can see these leafmines are going to be even more tricky than I anticipated!

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About me

sconzani

sconzani

I'm a writer and photographer; researcher and blogger; birder and nature lover; countryside rambler and city strider; volunteer and biodiversity recorder.

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