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Photo#1948916
Another sighting of Contarinia zauschneriae - Contarinia zauschneriae

Another sighting of Contarinia zauschneriae - Contarinia zauschneriae
Rocks Ranch, San Juan Bautista, San Benito County, California, USA
March 13, 2021
I was quite happy to see a large number of these galls during a recent botanical survey. I'd been on the lookout for these for years, after a first intriguing encounter with them in the company of Joyce Gross & Diane Erwin at Del Puerto Canyon in 2013:

 

This time the galls were much more abundant, though they were mostly withered old remains. Just a very few appeared freshly reddish...and perhaps currently occupied by the cecidomyiid gall inducer and/or inquilines. As before, the galls were distributed on the apical and axial flowering buds of stems of Epilobium canum (formerly Zauschneria californica). Many Epilobium plants (perhaps 30 or more) had been infested, with numerous galls per plant. The plants were sparsely scattered on a wide, grassy ridge-top...and many seemed rather ragged & largely leafless.

Back in 2013 we had puzzled over the ID, and Joyce had observed some larvae and tried unsuccessfully to rear adults. We'd settled on a putative candidate ID of Contarinia zauschneriae...later verified by Raymond Gagné based on specimens successfully reared by David Headrick in 2019. But we were still quite curious about the general distribution of this cecidomyiid gall midge...and hoping we and/or others would find more stations to improve knowledge of its range. Up to recently the only stations I was aware of were:

A) the type locality in the "Puente hills back of Whittier, Cal." (see under the basionym Thecodiplosis zauschneriae in Felt(1912));
B) Sightings on Santa Cruz Island off the Santa Barbara/Ventura coast by:
*) Marc Kummel on 7/28/2007 in Pozo Canyon (see here);
*) David Headrick on 11/10/2019 (see here); and
C) our sighting on 9/1/13 in Del Puerto Canyon
However, after just checking iNaturalist I was happy to see 8 further observations (two of which are, again, from Santa Cruz Island). Those observations were, in chronological order, from:

1) Ojai area of Ventura Co. on 5/15/16 by silversea_starsong;
2) southern Santa Margarita Mnts of San Diego Co. on 12/15/17 by naturenate;
3) southeast of San Jose of Santa Clara Co. on 4/13/19 by rockybajada;
4) Chatsworth area of Los Angeles Co. on 4/29/19 by dlbowls;
5) southern San Benito Co. on 4/20/20 by leptonia;
6) Santa Cruz Island, Santa Barbara Co. on 7/30/20 by ljbrenner;
7) Santa Cruz Island, Santa Barbara Co. on 2/6/21 by leptonia;
8) Silver Peak area of southern Big Sur, Monterey Co. on 3/7/21 by paulexcoff;
Although adults were only reared and expertly verified for David Headrick's post, the galls share Epilobium canum as their host and appear quite similar in habitus and apical & axial bud position. Assuming most if not all are indeed Contarinia zauschneriae, they now give a much better hypothesis for the geographic distribution of that species...which at present appears to include coastal adjacent mountains from the southern San Francisco Bay area to northern San Diego County. It will be interesting to see how much further north, south, and inland the species extends as more iNat, BugGuide, and other records accumulate.

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Another sighting of Contarinia zauschneriae - Contarinia zauschneriae Another sighting of Contarinia zauschneriae - Contarinia zauschneriae