- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Thank you, Mrs. Monarch.
Thank you for laying your eggs on our newly planted narrowleaf milkweed.
We planted the narrowleafed milkweed last spring, hoping we could coax you to come. We laid out a floral welcome mat for you with some of your favorite (adult) foods: a butterfly bush, Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia), and Lantana.
Then we watched. And waited. And watched. And waited.
We saw you nectaring the butterfly bush, the Tithonia and Lantana. We saw Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) chasing you. We saw territorial male sunflower bees (Melissodes aegilis) dive-bombing you. We saw female Valley carpenter bees trying to jerk you around.
You ignored our narrowleafed milkweed. Not a good-enough host plant? Too many oleander aphids for you? Too many lady beetles eating the aphids?
We went from informal to formal. Please, Mrs. Danaus plexippus, lay your eggs on the Asclepias fascicularis. Please. Do. So. Now.
This week we saw your evidence: You did it! You gave us the most beautiful caterpillars we've ever seen.
So, thank you, Mrs. Monarch.
And you, too, Mr. Monarch.
Please come again.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
--John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
Muir said it well.
Muir (1938-1914), the naturalist and conservationist known as "The Father of Our National Parks," was the driving force behind the establishment of our national parks, including Yosemite National Park.
But have you ever thought about what he said: ""When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe"?
In our yard, we are rearing Gulf Fritillary butterflies (Agraulis vanillae) on their host plant, the passionflower vine. The Gulf Frit is a bright orangish-reddish butterfly with silver-spangled underwings. It's a member of the family Nymphalidae and subfamily Heliconiinae.
We also consider it part of our family. The females and males mate, the females lay eggs on the passionflower vine, the eggs become caterpillars and the caterpillars become adults. That is, if the Western scrub jays and the praying mantids and the European paper wasps let them.
Lately, the caterpillars seem to be multiplying faster than the proverbial rabbits. The Western scrub jays are missing. They no longer sit on the fence and cherry-pick their prey. Why are they MIA? Three resident juvenile Cooper's hawks (as identified by Andrew Engilis, Jr., curator of the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology) possess an appetite for jays (among other prey). The result: too many caterpillars on our passionflower vine. The 'cats are defoliating the plant faster than we expected. In short, it's a veritable population crisis on our passionflower vine.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
We love the caterpillars. We love the butterflies. We love the praying mantids. And we are trying our best to love, or at least like, the wasps after hearing researcher Amy Toth of Iowa State University speak fondly of them at UC Davis. Read the 10 things we should like about wasps. Note that she's trying to popularize the hashtag, #wasplove.
Meanwhile, what about those hawks? It's hawk heaven here. We love seeing them cooling their toes, splashing around in our front-yard birdbath, and communicating with their siblings. It's a sign of the times. California's severe drought means an influx of critters, large and small, heading for urban birdbaths. In addition to hawks, our birdbath draws squirrels, doves, finches, woodpeckers, scrub jays, sparrows, crows, honey bees and even a passing wild turkey with a neck long enough to reach the water.
Lately, it's a hawk birdbath. The jays are gone. The caterpillars are thriving.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Visitors to the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) display in front of Briggs Hall at the 101st annual Picnic Day last Saturday at the University of California, Davis, got a close look at the Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillar.
While the visitors watched or held them, the other caterpillars kept busy, munching on the leaves of their host plant, the pipevine.
Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, has seen lots of Pipevine Swallowtails (Battus philenor) already this year. "There are plenty," he said today. "Don't eat 'em; they're quite poisonous."
Both the caterpillar and the adult are poisonous. The caterpillars of the Pipevine Swallowtail feed on the poisonous host plant, Aristolochia, also known as the pipevine, Dutchman's pipe or birthwort. It contains the lethal toxin aristolochic acid.
Nevertheless, the black caterpillars turn into beautiful adults. Found throughout North America and Central America, they are black with iridescent blue hind wings. Their wingspan can exceed three inches.
"The Pipevine Swallowtail flies from late winter (February-March) to autumn (October, occasionally November) but is much more numerous before the 4th of July than later; typically it has two large flights followed by stragglers the rest of the season, often with a 'blip' upward in August," Shapiro writes on his website. "Usually the host plant stops growing in June, and thereafter there are no sites suitable for egg-laying--unless there is a local catastrophe (usually fire, though weed-whacking will do). Then the plants regenerate rapidly, producing new growth in the off-season, and any females around at the time quickly find and make use of the new shoots. Adults routinely live a month or so."
"This species is warningly colored and inedible to vertebrate predators," Shapiro points out. "It derives its protection from the toxic aristolochic acids produced by the host, which it sequesters; females even pass these along to the eggs, which are also protected (and are brick red, laid in bunches of up to 20, and quite conspicuous)."
"Adults are eager visitors to many flowers, including Wild Radish, California Buckeye, Blue Dicks, Ithuriel's Spear, and Yerba Santa," Shapiro notes. "In summer they regularly nectar at Yellow Star Thistle when there are no native plants in bloom."
We've seen many of the Pipevine Swallowtails fluttering around in the UC Davis Arboretum and gathering nectar from butterfly bushes.
A word of warning from Shapiro: "Don't eat 'em; they're quite poisonous."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What's this?
A lady beetle, aka ladybug, sharing stories with Gulf Fritillary caterpillars?
Well, not likely.
The lady beetle (family Coccinellidae) preys mainly on aphids--it can eat about 50 aphids a day or some 5000 aphids in its lifetime. But it will devour other soft-bodied insects, including mites, scales, mealybugs, leafhoppers, and butterfly eggs and larvae (caterpillars). Butterfly caterpillars move quite slowly; they are not Indy 500 speedsters.
We spotted a lady beetle early this morning on one of our passionflower (Passiflora) seed pods, surrounded by hungry Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) caterpillars. It was somewhat like a two-peas-in-a-pod scene, but without the peas. Here were two insect species ON a pod, and both sharing the same warning color: red.
The Gulf Fritillary caterpillars are hungry. Very hungry. They've stripped the passionflower vine of all its leaves and are now eating the stems and seed pods. Actually, we planted the passionflower vine for them. But are they THAT hungry? They are. They're famished. And there are literally hundreds of them.
Sometimes we think that all of the Gulf Frit butterflies west of Mississippi are gravitating toward the plant to lay their eggs. The vine cannot support that many hungry caterpillars, despite predation by scrub jays and European paper wasps.
The lady beetle, we assume is not only eating the tiny yellow eggs of the Gulf Frit, but the tiniest of the tiny larvae. It's an exquisite buffet of tasty treats with high nutritional value.
And easy pickings.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's sort of like watching the grass grow, or the paint dry, but there's much more drama.
These, as children's book author Eric Carle writes in the children's book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillars," are very hungry caterpillars.
They're famished. They're ravenous. They could eat a horse (except they don't eat horses). And that's a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say.
If they're allowed to, these caterpillars will decimate the leaves, spin cocoons and eventually turn into spectacular reddish-orange butterflies (Agraulis vanillae).
So, you're sitting there watching the caterpillars eat. And out of the shadows, something else appears.
You think you're the only ones watching them eat? Think again.