Bladderpod is a very hardy shrub that grows about 1-2 meters tall and thrives from the coast to the desert. It blooms year-round and has unremarkable yellow flowers but memorable fruits that come in three morphological variants. The two specimens I show here come from a chaparral habitat and a windy, high-elevation coastal environment. The arborea variant is said to have obovoid fruits as opposed to fusiform or spherical fruit shapes, as is amply demonstrated in this video. Bladderpod flowers all year long, and some species of beetles live their entire lives just fine on this one plant. I read that Bladderpod is a common chaparral plant that grows up to 1350 m in elevation but I have not seen particularly many of these in the hills I frequently drive by. Perhaps that is just due to a local population skew but I will keep an eye out to see how common this bush is. Bladderpod is a California native plant species.
Towards the end of the video is an ornate beetle that I had never seen before. In the coastal hills the wind was blowing so fiercely that I had to stabilized the branch to videotape the beetle; once I had done so, it started moving around on the flowers, whereas before it was in a struggle to stay still and not get shaken off.
