3 August 2023
After Wednesday’s record at the shortage of monarch butterflies in southwestern Pennsylvania, the day past introduced happier butterfly information.
This week Donna Foyle and Betty Rowland each discovered black swallowtail caterpillars (Papilio polyxenes) on host crops of their gardens. Donna Foyle’s are on parsley. Betty Rowland’s are on fennel.
This luck precipitated a full of life dialogue of subsequent steps.
#1. Birds, bugs and spiders prey on black swallowtail caterpillars so step one is to offer protection to them. Birds are simple to exclude. Betty Rowland put a butterfly safe haven over her fennel.
#2 What if the caterpillers devour your whole host crops? The place are you able to get extra? Neatly, don’t purchase vegetables on your caterpillars! You’ll be able to’t make certain they haven’t been handled with chemical substances. Donna Foyle will search for Queen Anne’s (now not close to a highway) if it she runs out of home-grown parsley.
When the caterpillar is able to pupate it develops a moderately camouflaged chrysalis, two examples proven beneath. (The brown one was once photographed in Pittsburgh through Scott Detwiler.)
As adults, black swallowtails are sexually dimorphic …
… which comes in handy for his or her mating technique.
The Papilio polyxenes demonstrates polyandry and a lek mating device, appearing no male parental care and show websites. Ladies are due to this fact ready to select men in response to those websites and men are the one useful resource the ladies in finding at those websites.
For quite a bit extra details about black swallowtails and pictures of all their phases, see Wikipedia’s black swallowtail account.