August 4, 2019: meandering at night with my friend Judy, headlamps on, looking for insects and sign of insects, we explored the immediate city neighborhood but didn't expect to find much. To my surprise, we did find and collect 4 leaf mines on Wild geranium,
Geranium maculatum, which I initially thought were the micro-moth
Parectopa geraniella. Gently feeling one of the leaf mines, there was something round and of decent size, certainly not a parasitoid cocoon, an odd shape and too big for such a tiny moth. Whatever it was, each of the 4 mines had one.
Click here for more of the story:
August 10, 2019: oh my goodness, an adult beetle
At the 2009 Hill Prairie Conference, Rock Island, IL, Ted MacRae introduced me to this beetle asking if I had ever found it in Iowa. Since then I had looked as there is a large population of Wild geraniums nearby but finding nothing, not only had I given up looking for it I had forgotten about it. But here it was, finally!
Ed Freese (Thank you Ed) who works with beetles, checked his records and the literature. This is what he found:
In published records ---
by Wickham (1911) and Chamberlin (1926) they list only Iowa City and Waterloo.
The other published sources I have found just give Iowa or east to Iowa.
Specimens I have seen in Iowa collections ---
in the Iowa State insect collection (ISIC) -- two specimens -- Ames, 10th and 20th July 1925, George O. Hendrickson
in the Iowa Wesleyan University insect collection, Mt. Pleasant (IWUC) -- one specimen -- Washington Co., 25 May 1931, J. Russell