3 August 2023
After Wednesday’s report on the shortage of monarch butterflies in southwestern Pennsylvania, yesterday introduced happier butterfly information.
This week Donna Foyle and Betty Rowland each discovered black swallowtail caterpillars (Papilio polyxenes) on host vegetation of their gardens. Donna Foyle’s are on parsley. Betty Rowland’s are on fennel.
This success prompted a energetic dialogue of subsequent steps.
#1. Birds, bugs and spiders prey on black swallowtail caterpillars so step one is to guard them. Birds are simple to exclude. Betty Rowland put a butterfly shelter over her fennel.
#2 What if the caterpillers eat all of your host vegetation? The place are you able to get extra? Effectively, don’t purchase greens in your caterpillars! You’ll be able to’t be certain they haven’t been handled with chemical compounds. Donna Foyle will search for Queen Anne’s (not close to a highway) if it she runs out of home-grown parsley.
When the caterpillar is able to pupate it develops a considerably camouflaged chrysalis, two examples proven beneath. (The brown one was photographed in Pittsburgh by Scott Detwiler.)
As adults, black swallowtails are sexually dimorphic …
… which is beneficial for his or her mating technique.
The Papilio polyxenes demonstrates polyandry and a lek mating system, displaying no male parental care and show websites. Females are due to this fact ready to decide on males primarily based on these websites and males are the one useful resource the females discover at these websites.
For hundreds extra details about black swallowtails and images of all their levels, see Wikipedia’s black swallowtail account.
