Red Spotted Purple Growing Up

The Red Spotted Purple, Limenitis arthemis, that I have in captivity has grown a bit since I last bothered to look at its container. It's been nibbling the same leaf in there for quite a few days now. I add a free leaf off the crab-apple tree its egg was laid upon ever few days. I also put a wadded up tissue that's soaking wet with water in the container so it doesn't dry out, though I'm not sure how necessary this is. I know ants are in danger of drying out so perhaps caterpillars have the same risk?

We're now in what I believe to be the third instar. It's no longer making a stick out of frass to hide on, which the younger instars do to escape ants. Instead more natural defenses are starting to develop. I suspect from here on, birds would be the primary predator over ants. Their coloration is starting to mimic that of bird droppings. So they've gone from hanging out on a poop stick, to looking like one! 

And of course it's now sporting a lovely set of jagged horns. My understanding is the horns are hollow and intended to break apart in the bird's throat to, ideally, puncture a hole in the crop or wind pipe killing the bird dead. This probably doesn't happen when they're this small, but I can easily see some damage being done when they're bigger. Birds don't have teeth to chew them up first.

Remember adult birds rarely eat insects as their own food sources. Seeds and berries are the fuel of most adults while protein rich insects are important for baby birds. Would you feed something covered in thorns and looked like poop to your children? (Granted they're eating it half digested as you vomit it from into their mouth, but still someone has to do the initial eating!) 

Black Swallowtail Laying Eggs on Golden Alexander

When Native Plant Gardeners decide to add Golden Alexander to their landscape, they're often disappointed to see a lack of Black Swallowtails. Perhaps Monarchs boldly laying dozens of eggs all over Milkweed and their easy to spot black and white caterpillars spoil them. A couple of things are going on here.

Firstly, Black Swallowtails are native to North America, so much so that they're sometimes referred to as the American Swallowtail. Golden Alexander was their primary host plant among a few other members of the carrot family, but when western settlers brought with them delicious Parsley, Dill, and yet more members of the carrot family, suddenly the American Swallowtail had a lot more hosts to choose from. Parsley and Dill in particular were bread for their pungent odor and flavor, and likely possess more of the chemicals in the plant Black Swallowtails use to make themselves bitter tasting. Not only do the caterpillars mimic bird shit in the first few instars, but they want to taste like it too! This is likely why Parsley and Dill tend to be heavily favored as host plants.

Monarchs are down right poisonous to consume, and they want to go out of their way to show themselves off. Causing a mother bird to throw up the contents of her crop is one less meal her baby birds will get. It's a swift lesson and birds quickly learn not to bother with black and white caterpillars.

Golden Alexander has other pest problems such as Aphids. Parsley gets aphids too but not the same kind. These aphids are better about attracting Ants, which are more than happy to consume butterfly eggs, as well as young instars caterpillars. The plant itself also excretes extra floral nectar on its leaves which ants will "nectar scrape" for food, to further get ants crawling all over the plant. Golden Alexander is also a more open, airy plant, which wasps have an easier time exploring to hunt. Some types of parsley are dense with leaves.

One thing Golden Alexander can boast though is that it's a spring ephemeral. Seen here at 2 - 3' tall it's produced almost all its foliage for the year, whereas Parsley and Dill flower in late summer and autumn, and thus have quite a bit of growing to do. So Golden Alexander is usually a better choice as a spring host plant because even nursery born Parsley and Dill are barely this tall.
 

Admittedly I can only recall two instances when a female has bothered to lay eggs on our Golden Alexander patch in the past 5 years. I'd probably do better to plant something else in the patch but I keep the plants around all the same. 

One thing I noticed was a preference to lay directly on the flower clusters as opposed to stems or leaves. There may be other reasons Golden Alexander is favored in the spring that I don't know about.

Either that or she's playing a clever game of Where's Waldo. Note the tiny egg planted among the flower buds.

More Black Swallowtails

Released three more Black Swallowtails this week, two of which emerged as a pair. I may have been wrong on my earlier assessment of gender. The female (top) seems to barely have any yellow spots at all. The male (bottom) has the yellow spots but more strongly.

Here's the first one again, which I called a female but now I see the yellow spots are somewhat in between male and female, leaning towards male. It just goes to show these traits can vary among members within a species.

I seem to recall a one of my friends who raises a huge variety of silk moths that these wing colors and patterns aren't all entirely reliable. She occasionally hatches silk moths that have wing patterns belong to the other gender but she had said only happens rarely.

Also normally the females are larger than the males. Poor food quality in the autumn, an abundance of parasites, and long harsh winters seem to cause smaller or stunted generations.

The female fluttered off before I could do much with her. The male however I was able to place and pose about to get this wonderful shot on my eastern redbud. (I don't think this butterfly wants anything to do with this tree. I'm actually not sure what flowers they go to this early in the year. Phlox maybe?)

First Black Swallowtail

The first of the Black Swallowtails I stored last autumn have finally started emerging. Just one so far, but I have a cage with somewhere close to 18 chrysalises. It's a female judging by the strong patch of blue on the wings. Males tend to have a more strongly defined row of yellow spots.

I like handling them at this stage because they're easy to pose on plants and flowers. I didn't quite do a good job here though. It's a little unrealistic that they'd be on a native plum but I suppose anything's possible.

Her wings weren't quite stiff enough to fly off so she took to being placed in the sun real well. You can get in nice and close, at least as much as my camera would allow.

I know some photographers have lenses that let you zoom in on the eyes.

More to come, though there's a possibility some might hatch out as parasitic wasps.

This year I kept them stored outside in the green house for shelter. It was left open so the temperatures didn't fool them into emerging too early as it did last year, (had them emerging in February). This year I think the timing is more correct. I'm seeing Mourning Cloaks flying about and the host plants Golden Alexander has plenty of foliage for caterpillars, (though they sure love parsley and fennel more).

Insects Take Flight

I went to the local woods last week.

Winters Ants were flying though I didn't notice any queens. It was nothing but males (pictured here caught in a spider web). The species is Prenolepis imparis and in general they produce around 200 males for every new queen. In years past I was able to find them in abundance but not so much this year. Queens arrive and are quickly taken by a few dozen males. It's unclear if more than one gets to mate with her but they certainly try.

Workers to established colonies were also out foraging. Whole lines of these ants were streaming up and down trees, collecting the earliest bits of sap pushed out by newly forming buds.

The Mourning Cloaks were also fluttering about occasionally landing to sunbath. I believe they over winter in the adult stage and mate around this time of year, just before their host plants push out the first flush of flowers and leaves. They host on Willows, Birch, Elm, Cottonwood, a few others too; generally trees you find in a mature forest.

Despite their color here, they turn almost invisible when laying among the leaves. The rich rosy copper tone seen here is more like a black when viewed from afar. The spots along the edge of the wing change from blue, to white, to pink depending on the angle they're viewed. Often the wings are closed up when resting, making them blend in with the leaves perfectly. 

This one was sun bathing and didn't seem to mind me getting up close. It did flutter away when I blocked the sun though.

Black Swallowtail Caterpillars (2014)

This year's crop of Black Swallowtail Caterpillars is shaping up to be a nice one. I have at least 15 caterpillars all coming of age to form their chrysalises. The had ignored my yard all year until a month ago, despite having 8 full clumps of parsley and a patch of Golden Alexander going strong. And it all seems to be thanks to one female flying through the yard one day.

I'm going to leave these outside in a sheltered cage for the winter. Hopefully I'll have better luck than I did two years ago when I raised them in a cold basement room. They started emerging in February and in batches every two weeks after that. I doubt they'd like to fly when there's snow on the ground.

I have read that butterflies like Gatorade and will drink it in place of nectar or rotting fruit, however I was never able to get it to work. Captive butterflies just don't seem interested in feeding, though I'm sure I was doing something wrong.

Caterpillar Season

A few days ago it was unbearably hot and humid out, but I was enjoying it nonetheless because this seemed to bring out all the ants and other bugs of interest. There were so many types of ants wondering all over my plants that I was tempted to make a video about them all but the mosquitoes got the better of me.

One thing I had to photograph was this patch of caterpillars on my Persimmon tree. My assumption was they were some type of giant silk moth but I don't believe that to be the case.

Unfortunately they were all dead the next morning. No doubt a large black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus, came along and chewed them all up into mush as there were several of those out on the tree. The whole clutch of them could have fit on a quarter, they were that tiny. I'm kicking myself for not removing the leaf and placing them into the butterfly cage.

I've no idea what they were, other than they were on Native Persimmon, they're were sort of hairy, and that I live in New Jersey. If anyone out there wants to take a crack at identifying them, be my guest. 

So I then realized this week, there are a lot of caterpillars in my yard! 


The Eastern Redbud has Fall Webworm, Hypantria cunea, which are poorly named because it's clearly the start of summer.

The tree also has treehoppers and a few aphids which are attracting ants that are supposed to help prevent insect herbivores or at least discourage and harass them onto other plants. It's not a perfect system but it does have an effect.

Fall Webworms get around this though by sticking together in a small group and forming webs around the leaves they eat for protection.

They do this until they're big enough to take on a few ants or develop other defenses. I'm not sure what they are for this species but I know long hairs, tasting bad, chemical weaponry, are a small taste of what some caterpillars do for protection. It's the early instars when the caterpillars have basically just hatched and don't have these defenses when they're picked off by everything, like the ones I found on the Persimmon tree.


The Eight-Spotted Forester is a day-flying moth (not quite a butterfly) that hosts on grape vines. The adult has black wings and eight cream/white or pail blue spots on the wings, hence the name.

Caterpillars are somewhat colorful looking and are in the habit of jumping ship upon disturbance, often leaving a silk lasso behind so they can climb back up. Grape Vines are very aggressive growing and often the caterpillars don't effect the yield of the crop.

Now I tried looking up what young Eight-Spotted Foresters look like, and I don't think these are them. What interests me is that the grape vine doesn't have any pores that produce extra floral nectar or attract aphids and other insects to do that for the plant. So that means the only ants walking over the plant are simply foraging for the sake of it, meaning fewer ants compared to a plant that's gushing out food to encourage them. So I'm curious to see how far these guys get.

And lastly the False Indigo Bush, Amorpha fruticosa, has not only eggs but fully grown caterpillars on it.

Silver Spotted Skippers, Epargyreus clarus, forage at night, making them hard to spot. During the day they stay inside a small "shed" of leaves they've woven together to hide from birds. Smaller caterpillars simply chew a section of a single leaf and fold it over with silk.

This is another case of the plant not attracting ants, other than letting them steal nectar from the flowers, but even this isn't a popular practice compared to other plants.

The caterpillars are a decent size and employ an additional tactic to hide from ants. One of the things ants look when hunting is insect frass; when they find it they know an insect can't be far. In this case though the caterpillars actually launch their frass pellets several feet away from them. They also lay silk down on just about everything they walk on to discourage ants from following them.

2013 Best of Butterflies

From the previous year, my butterfly season started with a series of Black Swallowtail Chrysalises over wintering in a cage I kept down in my basement. Well one emerged prematurely which lead to this shot.

And then about 8 more which eventually lead to shit shot. I tried to care for them as best I could but found they weren't drinking or really doing much of anything. Some even died sadly.

Over the next three months as they hatched out, I did start letting them go. Despite this though I am sad to report that ended my experience with Black Swallowtails for the year. While I'm sure some of them survived, none of them returned to my garden to lay eggs or even pay me a visit.

Now I don't think I did anything particularly bad. Even around carrot farms this species is not considered a pest. For whatever reason they just don't spread dramatically in huge numbers.

I found this Silver Spotted Skipper Caterpillar nestled on my False Indigo tree. It's a new plant I'm trying out, which will hopefully flower this year. Sadly I think a bird ate this little guy.

Hummingbird Moth laying eggs on my Coral Honeysuckle.

A Pandorus Sphinx nibbling on Virginia Creeper. I had no idea these caterpillars were this enormous.

I don't know the name of this one but if I recall right they can spray acid if you disturb them.

A Spicebush Swallowtail sipping at some Hairy Swamp Milkweed. Note the missing orange spot under the wing, how it's replaced with just the blue smear. This species mimics the Pipevine Swallowtail which is poisonous for birds to eat. Despite this ability, it seems the Pipevine Swallowtail doesn't need to be around to have decent Spicebush Swallowtail populations. I'm told though when the Pipevine Swallowtail is around that it benefits all the other species of black butterflies that mimic them.

There were about six of them zooming around this milkweed patch.

One of these days I need to figure out which of the random grasses in my yard is supporting the skipper population.

Every autumn, I'm suddenly blessed with droves and droves of skippers.

And they absolutely loved the Rudbeckia of all things!

New England Asters I'd have expected to be the bigger hit, as it was with everything else. But not the skippers, they worked the Rudbeckia until it stopped blooming. Very strange. Any who this is a Tiger Swallowtail, male judging from the lack of blue along what I call the tramp stamp.

Monarchs! This was an awful year for them. Years ago when I started doing this (back in 2008 maybe?) I planted Swamp Milkweed and with in a few weeks there were Monarchs, not only having sex on the lawn but laying eggs all over the milkweed patch. I had caterpillars all summer long, and witnessed one emerging from its chrysalis. It's actually that moment that brought me tears that I was really hooked on this whole native plant thing. But this year tragically I didn't see a single one in my garden.

It wasn't until I took a trip to Cape May with a few friends that I really saw them this year. There were stands of Seaside Goldenrod planted all along the beach specifically to help the Monarch migration. While I saw a few dozen flying around it really wasn't enough to give me any sort of hope that their population was doing well at all.

I know that they're by no means endangered. It's simply that the population that migrates through the eastern half of North America will be lost. They're doing okay out in California, apparently there's a population that migrates through South America as well, but what a shame it would be to never see the butterfly that inspired me to garden to ever flutter through my yard again.

Smarter Every Day, THIS IS A BUTTERFLY!

One Last Black Swallowtail Emerges

Well that's it for Black Swallowtails I think. This is but one chrysalis left but I'm not sure if it's alive, or waiting until next year to emerge. Whatever the case I'll be putting the last one out in the garden.