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!
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whoa, cool! @ceiseman this may possibly be of interest to you - the window feeder Caliroa lunata seems to be a bit underreported
Glad someone is paying attention to these! The known range of C. lunata (based on actual specimens) is Canada: NF, NS, ON; USA: IL, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MS, NC, NH, NY, OH, PA, TN, TX, VA, WV. This in fact extends beyond the range of bladdernut (I don't think there is any in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia), so apparently this sawfly has at least one other host. Lots more to be learned by collecting and rearing Caliroa larvae! I collected everything that is known about the North American species in this paper--if anyone wants a PDF of it, just message me:
Eiseman, Charles S., David R. Smith, and Peter Woods. 2022. Nearctic “slug” sawfly larvae of the genus Caliroa Costa (Hymenoptera: Tenthredinidae): new rearing records and a summary of hosts, descriptions, and distribution records. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington 124(2): 225–244.
@ceiseman Cool, thanks! I hadn't seen that paper. I wonder what the other host could be. It's so strange that the sawfly will feed on Staphylea trifolia and S. colchica but not S. pinnata. I'll definitely be paying closer attention to sawfly marks this year, especially if I find Staphylea.
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