BRN 9-2 (uncompressed) - Flipbook - Page 34
Egg Mass on Littleleaf Sumac
Datana perspicua - July 2025
by Bob Barnes
The masses of insect eggs shown to the right (one mass
before hatching, the other after) were photographed in
Warm Springs Wash, northeast of Hillsboro, in late July
2025. The eggs were laid on leaves of Littleleaf Sumac,
Rhus microphylla (Engelmann, 1852). The photograph at the
top right depicts a very small area, about 1 inch from top to
bottom. These eggs are little.
I liked the photographs and wanted to say something about
them. But what? I knew that the chances of identifying the
insect which laid the eggs were virtually nil.
(The story behind this article is convoluted, sometimes
strained, and humbling. I am not sure of its value. After a lot
of effort I was making no headway on this identiÞcation
issue. So I decided to write about failure and the value of
failure. At about the same time an article in Nature, on the
same topic - characterized as the Òthe publication of null
resultsÓ was issued. Unfortunately, I eventually solved the
puzzle and made the identiÞcation. I did not, however, want
to lose the work that had gone into the failure piece. So
here we go, the original as written about failure, evolving
into a species identiÞcation article.)
Nonetheless, I set out to do that and failed miserably. This is
the story of that failure.
Step One: Get into some kind of ballpark. I was not
particular, it could be the ballpark of the Baltimore Orioles
(no wait, that will not do, their name might be changed by
Executive Order). Well, a ballcourt from an ancient Mexican
civilization, that will do. In any case, try to narrow the
search. That went fairly successfully, though I found myself
in various (wrong) ballparks as I mulled search parameters
which would yield plausible results. In this process I learned
something about a few ballparks that I would never have
guessed. That is success, but not the success I was searching
for - it seemed more like I was a AAA baseball player making
the rounds to small cities across North America.
Using GoogleÕs visual search function on the top right image
I got to a bunch of reddit threads (after dismissing various
berries as a possibility) which included images of similar
eggs which participants thought were laid by some type of
stink bug. That did not seem too likely too me, but search
after search narrowed it to that ballpark - the stink bug
ballpark. I spent quite some time in this ballpark. A lot of
catching ßies and hitting singles, mostly striking out,
certainly no home runs.
What is the size of the stinkbug ballpark? BugGuide states
that there are more than 220 species, in 64 genera, in 5
subfamilies in the United States and Canada. Not terrible, I
can tell a lot of the adult forms apart. But there are pitifully
few images and little information about the nymphs which
eventually become adults and almost none on the eggs. Not
much of a setback since I did not locate any nymphs anyway.
Step Two: Could I Þnd resources which were Òegg speciÞcÓ?
BugGuide has pages of unidentiÞed pentatomid eggs and
hatchlings. Progress. IÕve learned a word I will probably
never use again. But a potential problem as well; the eggs
depicted here look more spherical than those depicted at
BugGuide. Further study seemed to consistently show that
stink bug eggs were barrel shaped, not spherical.
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