Letter no. 75: Coniatus splendidulus
The only way out is through.
Today’s Organism
Today’s featured organism is Coniatus splendidulus, the splendid tamarisk weevil. Weevil being the common name for members of the superfamily Curculionoidea, this interesting member of the above being in the family Curculionidae, the snout and bark beetles, and subfamily Hyperinae. And, of course, all weevils are beetles (but not all beetles are weevils).
C. splendidulus is native to the Mediterranean east to the Caucasus Mountains and Iraq. It eats the prickly immature leaves of introduced plant tamarisk, saltcedar, Tamarix ramosissima, whose very name I already hear my biologically-minded audience hissing at on account of its being a horrible invader of disturbed desert oases and streams. But back to the bug. Per Margarethe Brummermann: “Adult beetles hibernate in soil and litter close to the trees. In Arizona, they climb the trees by the end of March, feed on fresh shoots, mate, and begin laying their eggs in early April. […] When they are ready to pupate the larvae spin retinous web cocoons that serve as protective cages. They place them in the open at the tips of twigs, sometimes in clusters. Larvae, and then later pupae, can be seen wiggling inside through the loose mesh.” Damn.
Introduced beetle eats an introduced invasive plant. So far, so whatever/good. But! Per a personal communication to BugGuide contributor Vassili Belov from Charles O’Brien, a “pioneer in weevil taxonomy”:
A hyperine [i.e., in subfamily Hyperinae] weevil which was under consideration for release as a biocontrol agent against tamarisk. However the release was not authorized due to conflict of interest between ranchers who want the tree controlled and the conservationists (in this case birders) who want to protect the preferred nesting site of the yellow-bellied flycatcher. The USDA claims not to have released it from strict quarantine so it must have come in some other way. The tamarisk suck up the water to a great depth and kill off the other riparian trees, willow and cottonwoods for example, which are essential to the birds as they seek food among the latter. The problem is that the bird is endangered and prefers to nest in tamarisk which is not a natural community and which provides little food for the birds. It is a "Catch 22", but chance may have solved the dilemma.
Let’s break this down, shall we? Does tamarisk even outcompete native willows and cottonwoods in natural hydrological conditions? Do flycatchers “prefer” to nest in tamarisk, or merely settle for it in lieu of their native riparian-thicket habitat that has been almost extirpated in the desert Southwest? (To be fair, though, they do fucking love nesting in tamarisk, and if you take it out, you better put something nice in its place.) Does such a bird as the “yellow-bellied flycatcher” even exist? (Answer: it does, but only in the eastern U.S. The endangered riparian-reliant one we have here is the southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax trailii extimus). But I won’t fault a pioneer of weevil taxonomy for not giving a fuck about vertebrate common names, let alone birds. Pfeh. #invertebratesupremacy)
Or even more basic: Where and why was this beast introduced, even? Was it accidentally introduced in the 2000s in Arizona? (There’s Charlie O’Brien again!) Was it “accidentally” released by the USDA to avoid dealing with headaches from the tired ranchers-versus-birders stakeholder squabble? Or along the Arkansas River?? I suppose this kind of forensic entomology is futile; at this point, unless the emails are leaked, we’ll never know.
C. splendidulus is not the only tamarisk-eating beetle released in Arizona, accidentally or not. (Scornfully dismissive of Smithsonian magazine’s inability to use the actual name of this mystery organism in favor of calling it a “bio beetle.” What does that even mean? We can only assume from the Pan-Pacific Entomologist paper that the “bio beetle”’s identity is Diorhabda elongata, the Mediterranean tamarisk beetle. [No, the other Mediterranean tamarisk beetle.]) D. elongata has been depredating tamarisk stands in the arid Southwest since the ‘90s (or, by some accounts, 2001). But whether C. splendidulus will likewise destroy southwestern willow flycatcher habitat, or merely open the door for a new era of urban degrowth, water conservation, and aggressive riparian restoration (HA!), remains to be seen.
Incidentally, C. splendidulus qualifies for this newsletter off the strength of a sole 2011 sighting on the shores of Lake Hodges, a local reservoir with a failing dam; perhaps this is a state occurrence record.
I clicked through every single specimen photo on BugGuide (NBD, there were only 4 short pages) to populate for you this list of counties where C. splendidulus has been found and photographed by someone with a BugGuide account: Arizona’s Cochise, Gila, Maricopa, Mohave, Pima, Santa Cruz, and Yavapai Counties; New Mexico’s Luna and Bernalillo Counties; Texas’s Brewster, El Paso, Harris, Midland, and Presidio Counties; Oklahoma’s Payne County; Colorado’s Pueblo and Montrose Counties; Nevada’s Clark County; and California’s Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial, and our own San Diego. Here ends the tale.
Sources: BugGuide.net; Eckberg and Foster (2011), “First account of the splendid tamarisk weevil, Coniatus splendidulus Fabricius, 1781 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) in Nevada,” Pan-Pacific Entomologist; Margarethe Brummermann (2010), “A weevil for the biological control of tamarisk” (blog post with some great pics and more life-history info that I didn’t have the space to get into here); Candace Hughes, “How We Created a Monster In the American Southwest,” Smithsonian magazine; the NPS’s writeup on the southwestern willow flycatcher. And all the links you see above. You’re welcome.
I imagine a large fraction of my readership is or has been employed by the California state government, if only in a grad-student-TA capacity. So at least some of you have undoubtedly felt the yoke of the California state-funded travel ban (RIP), instituted by state Assembly Bill 1887 just before the election in 2016, repealed by Senate Bill 447 in 2023. A fitting-slash-sickening hallmark of how far we’ve slid in seven short years.
The bill was designed to boycott states with anti-LGBT laws, such as the infamous “bathroom bills” preventing trans people from using their appropriate bathroom (remember when that was the moral panic of the moment?). No state monies were to be spent on traveling to conferences, trainings, et cetera, in states that had those laws. California state government, using its monstrous economy for good! Force them to back off on their bigoted laws if they want to receive California’s government dollars!
However, increasingly widespread anti-trans and anti-queer laws in states across the nation left the state of California over a barrel. When the bill was passed, travel was prohibited to only 4 states. Seven years later, that list had swelled to 23, almost half the states in the country. You can’t avoid them all. So they repealed it.
I’m now imagining a world in which it wasn’t repealed and the circle of states to which California civil servants are allowed to travel for their jobs chokes ever narrower as the hand of Christofascism descends upon the nation, and have to form some kind of scientific underground railroad to attend conferences on the wrong side of state lines. Philip K. Dick just came in his pants, I bet. (I first typed “her pants” by mistake, an interestingly Freudian move on my part.)
Content note: incarceration, police brutality.
In Scalawag magazine by David Annarelli, a lifelong musician on the unbearable silence of prison:
Music is often a dance with tension and release, hard and soft, loud and quiet, fast and slow. Who leads might change, and moods of tonality may follow suit or in spite of the change. This exemplifies being a musician in prison with no instrument. A bard, muted while his muse fills him with stories he is incapable of telling. The police beat me so bad that several of my fingers are now crippled, so the thought occurs: Will I ever play again?
Ironically, only music could convey these sentiments properly—with the emotional turmoil they deserve. In a prison environment, where the professed goal is rehabilitating and correcting behaviors, you might think that music would be readily available, given its studied therapeutic benefits. […] But whether or not you have a chance to make music is down to random chance and built off of private partnerships.
For most musicians on the inside, playing an instrument while incarcerated is made nearly impossible. In Virginia, there are roughly 50 prisons, and only rumors of about two or three of those prisons having musical instruments available.
[…] Ironically, it is never quiet in prison. I long for that moment when a solid snowstorm begins. The live weather maps show a raging of color, up drafts, tumultuous winds that should howl ….. outside, all things go still ….. quiet ….. silence, well-placed, screams as a whisper ….. I wish I had my bass.
Sometimes I think the overwhelming frustration would be best sounded by hitting my open strings hard—at full volume—before tuning my instrument and just letting that noise reverberate until it ends on its own accord.
Finally, some public-domain photographs of Palestine and its wild flowers:
“I could at any time fill my hand with a bouquet of flowers as rich in colour, and as varied in form, as one could gather at midsummer in a well-kept garden at home”, wrote Henry Baker Tristram in an introduction to missionary Hannah Zeller’s Wild Flowers of The Holy Land (1876). “The chief interest of the plates will lie in the fact that they represent to us the very flowers on which our Lord’s eye must so often have rested in childhood”. Tristram wasn’t alone in coupling botanical admiration and biblical fantasy. In 1899, the American reverend Harvey B. Greene published Wild Flowers from Palestine, a limited edition containing real pressed flowers, which opens within a familiar colonial register: “Palestine is a land of ruins, but the flowers of its fields are as beautiful as when they were looked upon by the Master Himself”.
These images of Palestine before the British Mandate — all from stereograph collections held by the Library of Congress and Brown University — fall into two broad categories: stereoscope cards (made by overseas companies such as Keystone View and Stereo-Travel) and photographs produced by the American Colony based in Jerusalem (who would often provide stereoscope manufacturers with scenes) [who also took the botany photos]. The vast majority of images produced by such organizations were intended to feed a “Holy Land” mania that increasingly obsessed the United States throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold books about Palestine. In addition to the rise of international tourism, this fixation was fueled by a wave of Christian thought in which Palestine was seen as a neglected Ottoman “backwater” in need of restoration, revitalization, and resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ.
Hmm, that sounds familiar.
How one views these images today will likely be colored by knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted — the huge shifts in demography and power that would prove so devastating for the Palestinian Arabs in particular, from the Nakba of 1948 to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”.
Click through for more colonial botany and stereoscopes of daily life.
This is Dr. O’Brien’s favorite weevil species, by the way.
Wouldn’t you, too?
Finally finally: I am a lifelong scholar of the Twilight-50 Shades of Grey phenomenon and have accumulated the bones of a thesis on 50 Shades of Grey that uses Anne Jamison and Francesca Coppa’s work, among other resources, to argue that E.L. James’ money- and fame-seeking act of stripping 50SOG of its fanfiction roots has both severely damaged it as a comprehensible text and served as a major agent of the cultural backlash against it. What do you think? Would you guys want to read that? I’d probably host it on my website so there’s a permalink for sharing & caring in the cybernetic kaiju future.
Stay copacetic,
🌵💋