Butterfly Autumn

We see loads and loads of butterflies this time of year.  They're doing the last minute egg laying thing and it's pretty common to find little caterpillars in the garden.

If you're interested in hatching your own butterflies, then look for caterpillars on the parsley, fennel and dill plants in the garden.  That's where the swallowtail caterpillars hang out.  If you're near fields, then check milkweed, too, for monarch caterpillars.  Look for chewing damage, holes in leaves and frass [poop].    The larger the caterpillar, the faster you'll see a butterfly.

Check this post for how we raised swallowtail caterpillars. This post is about how they turned into chrysalises. This post is about how we stabilized the chrysalises.  And this post is about how they emerged into butterflies.

Tent Caterpillars Revisited

Remember the tent caterpillars I talked about a couple of weeks ago?   Kind of eww, kind of cool.


We've got rather a lot of them this year.  They've emerged from their tents and are eating everything in their path.    These guys are on a chokecherry tree. 

All that was left were a few blooms on the tips of the branches.  The caterpillars had eaten every leaf.   Look at the pic above again.   See what I mean?

Then they dropped to the ground where they gathered by the hundreds [at least] on the multiflora roses.   The roses are pests, too and heaven knows there's enough of them to share, but it's still kind of eww to see that many munching crunching caterpillars all over them.

You can hear the munching and crunching. [shudder]  At which point the eww factor far exceeds the cool factor. 

Mystery Chrysalis

Sometimes we find caterpillars and chrysalises around here.

Science is everywhere.  Remember when we did the black swallowtails last fall?    It's fun to be doing it again.

K2 found this chrysalis on an oak leaf in her garden last weekend.

It's kind of distinctive, with the black and the bumps and all.

This could be a Great Spangled Fritillary or a Pipevine.

We think it's a pipevine swallowtail chrysalis because the caterpillars look sort of black with orange bumps.

We get a lot of pipevine swallowtails around here, so it wouldn't be surprising if it were.

But, you know, those caterpillars could surprise us.  You never know what it is until they're done.




So we kept the leaf with the chrysalis and taped the leaf to the inside of a gallon jug.

I heart scotch tape.

And now we'll wait and see what it is when it comes out.

Turns out it was a Great Spangled Fritillary. or an Aphrodite. 

Black Caterpillars, part 2

Our black caterpillars have turned into chrysalises!  

They ate up the fennel and we worried about what to feed them next.  Turns out they like stuff in the carrot/parsley family and we have loads of queen anne's lace.   It took a few hours of adjustment, but the caterpillars transitioned just fine and ate themselves huge.

Then, one morning, we saw one, then another find a quiet place in the jar and start spinning an anchor line from its head to the jar [or stem] upon which it was clinging.  

Black Swallowtail butterflies metamorphose upside right.   Monarchs hang upside down and metamorphose.  It was cool to see the difference.  

Here is #1, who found a place to anchor on the side of the jar. 

















And #2.  















A couple days later, this is what we have:


#1.... Notice the split skin hanging just below him.  And if you look really closely, you can see all the fine threads anchoring him to the jar.











And here's #2.



They'll sit for about 2 weeks, then emerge.   

Since two of them are clinging to fresh greens, we're going to clip their part of the stem off and glue it to a stick. 





Note:   These guys are green because they're clinging to green stuff.   If they had chosen a stick, they'd have turned brown.  Camouflage is cool.  

Black Mystery Caterpillars

Black Swallowtail caterpillar: 3rd instar

 When I brought the last of the fennel in, I cut the greens and put them in vases.   They're pretty, feathery things and look great with other cut flowers.

The other flowers got old and died and we noticed three little visitors happily munching on the fennel.  

These black caterpillars had hatched after we brought the greens into the house.  

Black Swallowtail caterpillar: 2nd instar

We decided to raise them until they turn into butterflies.   We've done it many times with monarch caterpillars, but it's been a few years.  

Of course, we wanted to know what they were, so we turned to our favorite ID site:  http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?guide=Caterpillars

We searched and searched and couldn't find a match.  

So K2 insisted that we do a google search for caterpillars that eat fennel.

It was a smart tactic.   There is only ONE type of caterpillar that eats fennel.  Black swallowtails.   Unfortunately,   none of the pics we found of black swallowtails matched our little guys.    So we looked up the Wiki and discovered that this little guy really changes color as he grows.   

As caterpillars grow, they get too big for their skin and the shed it.   Each of these stages is called an 'instar'.    Black swallowtails look like our guys until the 5th instar, then they look a lot whiter and greener and stripier.  

At the end of the last instar, they curl up, anchor themselves and metamorphose into a chrysalis.  After a few weeks, they'll split that skin and out comes the butterfly.    Miraculous!

Moth caterpillars do not turn into chrysalises.    They spin a cocoon around themselves and metamorphose in that. 

Mystery Caterpillar

K1 found this the other day.    We took the pics so we could identify it later.

There are a couple of good ways to ID a mystery caterpillar like this. 






 First, you need to make a list of what you know for sure:

• It's yellow
• It has black spikey lashes
• black face
• very hairy [probably a moth]

Then we went to http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?guide=Caterpillars first.   They have a great ID site!   They use process of elimination and you can combine features to narrow things down.   Great pictures!   However, our caterpillar wasn't there.

We found some close matches, but there were significant differences.   So then we turned to Google and did a search for 'Hairy yellow caterpillar...' and lo and behold it popped up the rest of the phrase: 'hairy yellow caterpillar black spikes'.    

Perfect!   

We did the search and found this site: http://plantsnrocks.blogspot.com/2007/08/yellow-hairy-caterpillar-with-few-black.html   which had a pic of the same thing and had identified it as an American Dagger Moth.

We went back to the discoverlife site and plugged in the name:  American dagger moth.   They had the list, but no pics at all.   Maybe they'll want ours.  I'm going to try to find a way to submit photos to them.

More mystery caterpillars tomorrow!