Adventures in Caterpillar Care (2)

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My husband handled the feedings while I was in Dallas and Wichita Falls for 3 days; I left him plenty of sweet gum leaves (in the bin and in a vase to be added as needed). He managed although at one point they seemed so hungry that he thought they would run out food. The caterpillars were noticeably bigger with I returned home! I went to get fresh food the next morning…and that is when I started making some changes.

I opted to move the caterpillars to a slightly larger bin with a ruler added to hold the leaves above the coffee filters (and frass that accumulates very quickly). The fresh leaves that the old container held did not last 24 hours! I counted 40+ luna moth caterpillars and at least 3 cecropia moth caterpillars as I moved them on leaves to their new bin. It turned out that the larger bin was not big enough either since the leaves were almost all gone in 24 hours. The bigger caterpillars eat more than the newly hatched ones.

As they passed their 2-week-old mark, I moved the luna moth caterpillars to a large been with a cookie cooling rack to keep the leaves off the bottom. I have a paper towel layer there rather than coffee filters. Sometimes I can stick the twig through the metal grid so that the leaves stand up for easy caterpillar access. When I moved the luna mother caterpillars to the big bin, I counted 50 before I got sidetracked and lost the count! I’ll try to count each time I move them to a clean bin (probably every other day); they like to be under leaves so it is impossible to see most of them just looking down into the bin.

The luna moth caterpillars are now mostly green – which also makes them harder to see! How many do you see in the two pictures below?

When I moved the luna moth caterpillars to the big bin, I gave the cecropia moth caterpillars their own. There are 4 of them. They don’t grow as fast as the luna moths; they seem to like the sweet gum leaves (I tried maple leaves since some references list them as a popular food plant, but these caterpillars were already imprinted on sweet gum so they will continue to get it. The cecropia caterpillars are in the bin that I only used once for the whole group. It should work very well for them until they get very large.

Stay tuned for next week’s post about the continuing adventure.

Adventures in Caterpillar Care (1)

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On the Saturday of the Butterfly Festival at the Springfield Botanical Garden, I got a small bin of caterpillars: mostly luna moth…but a few cecropia in their too. The were tiny. The luna caterpillars had white tuffs of bristles and black stripes. The cecropia were all black and were a little bigger. They had hatched the Tuesday before. There were some sweet gum trees in the garden, so I left after adding a few fresh leaves to the bin.

I had found a sweet gum tree in my neighborhood and the family that owned it had agreed to provide leaves. The caterpillars needed more leaves the day after I got them (even though they were very small there were a lot of them and they were hungry)! I put the bin in my daughter’s old wagon (over 30 years old) and took the caterpillars with me to introduce them to the family with their favorite food tree. We moved them to a new bin with additional fresh leaves that the children of the family retrieved by climbing the sweet gum! The caterpillars began to move off the older leaves to the new ones almost immediately.

A few days later, the caterpillars were noticeably bigger. The luna caterpillars looked greener, less bristles. The cecropia caterpillars were still black. I was glad I had some extra leaves in water ready to feed them. I had gotten better at moving them to a clean bin (coffee filters in the bottom…leaves leaned again the sides to make them easier for the caterpillars to eat).

Stay tuned as the adventure continues in the coming weeks…

Filling a Day of Social Distance – 4/7/2020 – Macro Cecropia

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Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Taking pity on the red-bellied woodpecker’s contortions…..refilling the bird feeder. I noticed the woodpecker late in the day on Monday…waited for it to dry out a little yesterday morning before I refilled the feeder. The pictures are clips from our birdfeeder cam videos.

Putting away groceries. The non-perishable groceries had been sitting in the back of my car since Saturday evening. We had put them there after they were delivered….to give any coronavirus time to dry up and die before we put them away.

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Washing the plastic table covering – making a Zentangle mosaic. I’ve had the covering for over 20 years and have generally just wiped it down thoroughly. It was time it seemed grubbier than usual, so I put it in the washer with a few towels. I hung it over some deck chairs to let it dry thoroughly afterward. Then I made a mosaic of Zentangle tiles under it when I put it back on the table. Now we have new art to look at while we’re eating…during the pauses in conversation.

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Creating some face mask variations. My husband discovered that his favorite pizza place does not deliver to our area….so he will pick it up as he has done in the past. He’ll wear a face mask as recommended by the CDC. I got some hair ties (covered rubber bands) in our last grocery delivery and I have coffee filters on hand. He had some old handkerchiefs to make his. If I must go out, I’ll make mine from a bandana or washable silk scarf. We are not going out very often so it will be easy enough to launder the cloth part of the mask after each use.

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Catching up on Charles Cockell’s Life in the Universe Pandemic Series:

Noticing a Northern Flicker in the yard – next to a robin. I saw the robin first through my office window then noticed the other bird when it moved. I had on my computer glasses, so my distance vision was not great. Then I used the zoom on my camera to id the bird…and take the picture in the next second.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts  here.

And now for the first installment of macro photography with our mail-order bugs. Today I am featuring the Cecropia Moth. It’s the one pictured in the lower part of this picture – our order from The Butterfly Co.

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I used my smartphone with a clip-on macro lens for this session. The Cecropia is the largest moth in Maryland. This one is a male based on the antennae. They are somewhat feather-like in that they have a central rib…but the stems off the rib are different. The Cecropia stems seems to be in pairs and there might be tiny fibers connecting each pair. I’ll have to get more magnification with a loupe next time (and be very careful not to break the antennae off).  

A few years ago, we had the caterpillars at the Wings of Fancy exhibit at Brookside Gardens, so I am more familiar with the caterpillar than the adult moth. I didn’t unpin the specimen for this round of photographs but I know that it doesn’t have mouth parts….all the calories for the life of these moths are eaten when they are caterpillars. The adult form is only mating and laying eggs!

The wings have scales – sometimes looking like scales on butterfly wings…other times looking fur or hair-like. Another opportunity for my next round (using the loupe rather than the clip-on lens).

The downside of the loupe is that it works best sitting on the specimen…and inevitably some of the scales will come off. I am giving my husband the opportunity to photograph the bugs before I do anything that might damage them. Tomorrow’s post will be about the Luna Moth.

Blog: Insect Collection Photographs – Part II

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I remember my own experience making an insect collection during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. I used thin black pins from the local university book store and found some light green Styrofoam that I cut to fit in a rectangular box. One of my friends and I made insect nets: Netting sewn into a sock-light shape with the open end gathered onto clothesline wire that was looped and duct taped to a dowel or old broom handle. They worked reasonably well! Butterflies and moths were my favorites – but I also was very pleased with dragonflies I captured as well. I included at least 2 cicada killers but not captured with the net; I put a jar over the hole I saw them disappear into! It was a memorable experience  from the late 1960s.

I never did see a cecropia moth back then…but my son-in-law has several specimens. The one with the bushier antennae below is the male. The female is the larger of the two.

There are adult and pupae in my son-on-law’s boxes.

He even managed to preserve a caterpillar with emerging parasitoid larvae! I never developed the expertise to find and preserve anything like that.

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3 Free eBooks – April 2019

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All three picks for this month are groups of items rather than just one – two magazines and the last one a series of volumes from the late 1700s of plants and animals. So many freely available books…so little time!

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Shadowland (magazine). New York City: M. P. Publishing Company from 1919 – 1923. Most issues available from Internet Archive here. Shadowland was an American monthly magazine about art, dance, and film. I particularly enjoyed the covers by A. M. Hopfmuller. The sample image I choose to include with this post was one that reminded me of a Zentangle pattern….a very stylized ‘tree.’

Sunset (magazine). San Francisco: Southern Pacific Company. Issues from May 1898 – 1923 from Hathi Trust here. The magazine has morphed many times and continued to be published after these fully available online issues (expired copyright); check the Wikipedia info here for the history. I have perused the issues to 1904 so far. I was intrigued by the picture of oil production in Los Angeles from the year one of my grandfathers was born.

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Shaw, George. The naturalists' miscellany : or Coloured figures of natural objects. London: Nodder & Co. 1789. 24 volumes available from Internet Archive here. The sample image I am including for these books is a cecropia moth; I’ll be starting my volunteering at the Wings of Fancy exhibit at Brookside Gardens soon and hope we have cecropia caterpillars again this year!

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Brookside Wings and Wine

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Earlier this week we attended an evening event at Brookside Gardens that included wine tasting and appetizers in the non-butterfly end of the conservatory building….then watching the butterflies respond to the sun sinking to the horizon.

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When we first entered, the conservatory seemed calmer. The zebra longwings – and other butterflies – were beginning to find a roosting place in the fichus tree.

Others were on the walls or ceiling of the conservatory. I’m sure there were many that found a place in the foliage where I didn’t notice them.

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There were two flowers on the passionflower vine that is the food plant for a couple of the longwing butterflies; there were no butterflies around it.

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Just before sunset, the owl butterflies became more active – many dances through the air. I was waiting for the male cecropia moth that has emerged from its cocoon last Sunday to fly from where it had been hiding in the fichus tree all day. But it stayed where it was. These larger moths do not eat as adults so maybe there was no pheromone in the air of a female cecropia moth…and he didn’t feel the need to move!  I contented myself with a zoomed image of it through the foliage.