Bugfolks

Mike and I found a beautiful big caterpillar crawling across the driveway a few days ago.  It's a Giant Leopard Moth caterpillar (Ecpantheria scribonia).

It's very striking - about 2 1/2 inches long, with shiny black bristles and bright red bands and spiracles.

It rolls up into a tight circle when I disturb it.

It will spend the winter as an almost grown caterpillar, and make its cocoon in the spring.  I kept it in a cage for a few days and it happily ate lilac leaves.  But I decided I didn't want to risk trying to keep over the winter, so I released it.

One of my slug caterpillars made a cocoon.  It's either the Jeweled Tailed Slug caterpillar, or the Yellow Shouldered Slug caterpillar.  When I looked through the leaves where they were hanging out, they had both disappeared, and I found one cocoon.  It's quite small - about 1/2 an inch long.  Hopefully I'll be able to watch it next spring and see what comes out.

My Giant Swallowtail caterpillars are continuing to grow.  It's a race to see if they can finish their caterpillar stages before the leaves of the prickly ash drop off.

This is one of the bigger ones - it's about 2 inches long.

I've got them in separate cages now - ice cream buckets with lids cut open and lined with plastic screening.

I thought I would show you what my caterpillar raising set up looks like.  This is on our screened porch, so they're exposed to outside temperatures.

The small cages on the shelves are for smaller caterpillars, the large ones on the floor are mostly Giant Silk Moths - Lunas, Polyphemus and Cecropias. I'd love to see other people's set ups.  I'm outgrowing my space, and I'd like to get some other ideas.

Marcie

I’ve included one non-bug – a snail. I don’t know anything about snails, and this is the first one I’ve found on our property. MJ thinks it's in the Succineidae - Amber Snails, because of the amber color of many of their shells. She thinks it's probably Succinea sp. I found it in a wet area under some Alder shrubs, crawling on a leaf of Bittersweet Nightshade (Solanum dulcamara).

In the same area I found a bright colored Katydid.  Mike Reese identified it as a Black-sided Meadow Katydid (Conocephalus nigropleurum).

I found several bright blue beetles on our willow trees. I found out that it’s an introduced pest on willow trees called an Imported Willow Leaf Beetle. (Plagiodera versicolora) They eat both willow and poplar leaves, but don’t seem to be causing too many problems in the Midwest because they’re sensitive to our cold winters, and because there’s an imported pupal parasite that helps to keep them in check.

Here’s a Tussock Moth caterpillar on willow. MJ identified this as a Banded Tussock Moth Caterpillar (Halysidota tessellaris).  They eat many different kinds of tree leaves, and are quite common.  I think it's the same species as the one I found a few weeks ago eating lilac leaves.

I’ve been seeing lots of wooly bear caterpillars in the last few weeks. Wooly Bear Caterpillars are the larvae of Isabella Tiger Moths but I’ve never seen one of the adults. The late instar caterpillars overwinter under leaf litter and logs. They emerge from their hiding places on warm winter days, and I find them crawling across the snow along the driveway.

Wagner says that Wooly Bear caterpillars will eat almost anything, and I’ve seen several on Blazing Star (Liatris aspera). This one was chewing away on the flowers.

This is another one eating Blazing Star flowers – the little pink hairs on the caterpillar are the pappus bristles from the flowers.

The flowers that weren’t being eaten were being visited by some Green Metallic Bees.  I think they're Agapostemon sp.  They're in the subfamily Halictinae, the bees that are called sweat bees.

Here’s a bumble bee on New England Aster - covered with pollen.

I took a picture of this Stink Bug and realized later that it had just molted, and was sitting next to its old skin.

This is a Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton) caterpillar nest on Turtlehead (Chelone glabra), with a few caterpillars crawling around the outside. The caterpillars will spend the winter together in their nest, and then wander off in the spring to feed independently on a much wider range of foods.

Here’s one of my Cecropia caterpillars - the biggest one I’ve ever seen. It looks ready to make it’s cocoon any second.

Marcie

I found three more interesting caterpillars right after I finished my last post.

One is the strangest caterpillar I've ever seen.  It's called a Monkey Slug Caterpillar (Phobetron pithecium).  The adult is called a Hag Moth.  Wagner says that the female adult moths resemble a bee, and the male adults resemble a wasp.  He also speculates that the caterpillar mimics the look of a tarantula.  So this one moth mimics three different species!

This is the caterpillar.

It's about 15mm long, and it's eating oak leaves.  The left side is the head (the only way I can tell is to watch the way it moves).  Here's a photo of the underside, while it's eating.  (The head is at the top - it's nibbling on the top part of the leaf, right at the big vein.)

Its body is transparent, and when I look between the hairy projections on the top, I can see down into the inside of its body.  What an amazing creature!

The other two caterpillars are Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus), and they're eating lilac.  I've never found Tiger Swallowtail caterpillars before, and I never knew they ate lilac leaves.  (James Scott's book does list it as a food plant.)  These two were on some of the lilac branches that I brought in to feed my cecropias.  They're an early instar - they still look like bird droppings.

I also found three small fuzzy bumps on oak leaves, that I think are wasp galls.  (I decided that wasps and caterpillars don't mix well, so I didn't keep them to see the wasps hatch.)  I think they must be three different species.

(All of these creatures are very small - I'm learning to take photos through my dissecting microscope.)

Marcie - from the farm