Thursday, 23 February 2012

Broom - adding to the confusion

I found some more mines on Broom over the weekend and, wanting to try to get a decent photo of the mine of Trifurcula immundella or Leucoptera spartifoliella, I brought one back. It's a difficult mine to photograph but you should be able to see that it starts on the uppermost right hand branch, goes down the right hand side of the main stem before moving to the front of the stem by the middle right hand branch then turning by the lower left branch to start travelling back up again. This mining down then up method is referred to immundella in some of the literature but there was no sign of an egg, even under the microscope, which means it should be spartifoliella. I decided to open the mine to make sure and the larva is clearly immundella. I would recommend that if you can't see an egg, you open the mine and have a look at the larva to confirm which species it is.



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