viburnum

July 19, 2009April 25, 2015

The End

No, no, no … not the end of my book draft. (Are you crazy? I’m just getting rolling with that!)

No, today marked the end of my seven weeks fostering a hummingbird clearwing moth. I found its mysterious, pearly green egg on a viburnum bush in my backyard, brought it indoors, watched it hatch into a tiny caterpillar, and then grow into a giant caterpillar, and then transform into a pupa. (You can read more and see pictures here.) Today, right here in my office, the adult moth emerged … and I am in awe.

Isn’t it beautiful!?

The lovely flew off into the woods behind my house at about 3pm this afternoon, after posing sweetly on a potted sage for close to half an hour. My office feels strange tonight … a wee bit lonely, a wee bit magical.

July 2, 2009April 25, 2015

Moth Update

I’m behind on a few things … including the story of our hummingbird clearwing moth. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, catch yourself up here.) Here is what our caterpillar–raised from a myserious egg found on our backyard viburnum bush–looked like 17 days after it hatched (this photo was taken last Wednesday):

Here’s the same caterpillar three days later:

Pupation had begun! This was exciting, and it was very, very hard not to disturb the process by peeking at our cat every twenty seconds. I was good, though; I took this one photo, covered the browning beast back up with the paper towel that it had chosen to pupate beneath, and hid my camera. Then I sat on my hands for as long as possible.

Today, I could wait no more …

So, here is our setup. On the left of the tank you can see the viburnum leaves placed in the tank for the caterpillar’s culinary pleasure. On the right, a paper towel; I put this in the tank so I could add water without making too much mud; I didn’t realize the caterpillar would use it as a shelter to pupate under. The oval-shaped dirt blob on the folded down corner of the paper towel is our pupating moth:

Need a closer view? So did we. So I lifted up the paper towel and tried to pull away the dirt mound containing the pupa. The caterpillar had spun a cocoon of sorts around itself, a mix of reddish-brown silk and dirt that had gotten hard and semi-impenetrable. If we wanted to see the pupa itself, we were going to have to go through the dirt/cocoon mound. The kids told me that I was a nut for proceeding, but notice their heads were practically in the tank as they said so:

Our first glimpse was enticing:

And I can tell you for certain our tiny pupating charge is alive. How do I know? BECAUSE IT WRIGGLED! It wriggled like a … a … forty-something mother of three trying to fit into her thirty-something genes. Serious wriggling. Here’s one last view. I should’ve put a ruler in there for you, but I was holding a wriggling nub of life and wasn’t thinking straight:

I’ve now wrapped our pupa back into its cocoon and laid the paper towel in the dirt again. I will try not to touch the tank again until I see a hummingbird clearwing moth in it …

June 19, 2009April 25, 2015

The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 4

It’s been a while since I updated readers on my no-longer-mysterious hummingbird clearwing moth caterpillars. Last you saw, they were one day old and looked like this:

Now they are twelve days old and look like this:

Amazing, eh? It won’t be long before these cats are ready to pupate. I’m not sure exactly how long, actually, so I plan to fill the bottom of the tank with dirt (they pupate underground) as soon as possible. Then I’ll watch and wait, camera at the ready.

For the record, the outdoor eggs I’ve been watching (eggs of the same moth species laid on the same plant, presumably at the same time) finally hatched, but more than a week later than the ones indoors. Can you guess why?

June 7, 2009April 25, 2015

The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 3

It’s a boy!

No, wait, it’s a girl!

Ack! Truth is, I don’t know which it is. But our mystery viburnum eggs have hatched, and the teeny tiny caterpillars (less than half a centimeter!) look just as we’d hoped: greenish with a large, dark horn on the rear end. The horn is further evidence that these are, indeed, the caterpillar of a hummingbird moth. I don’t know exactly which species, but time will tell.

They hatched sometime overnight and seem to have eaten their egg cases. I put some newly clipped viburnum leaves into the tank and am hoping the little cats will move over to those fresher leaves on their own. Sadly, I will be away from my new babies for a few days … but my human kids have promised to take good care of them. More pics soon!

* For a better view of our little cat, click on the image above; it should enlarge. The ruler is in centimeters.

June 3, 2009April 25, 2015

The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 2

Okay, two blog posts in one day has got to have one or two readers wondering what gives. This: I’m sick. I’ve tried writing (too exhausting), reading (also too exhausting) and sleeping (strangely impossible). Blogging is … just right. And so I’ve decided to fill you in on the Viburnum Mysteries.

On Sunday my kids and I found several mysterious creatures on our viburnum bushes. We suspect the pearly green, roundish ones are the eggs of a super interesting species of moth, but can’t be sure until they hatch. To ensure we don’t miss the blessed event, we’ve moved two of the eggs indoors. How? Well, I’ll tell you …

I clipped a stem with several leaves—including the leaf supporting the egg—and placed it in a plastic stem holder. You know, the sort you get when you buy a flower arrangement? They are usually green in color and conical in shape., florists fill the plastic base with water and slip a stem through a hole in the rubber cover in order to keep stems alive longer. Here’s a picture:

As you can see, I placed these stem holders into a yogurt container to keep them upright. (Before you decide to skip a step and place the stems directly into a large container of water, realize this: caterpillars cannot swim!) I then put the yogurt container and stems into an old fish tank. The tank is here in my office where I can check on the eggs regularlyconstantly.

I left a few eggs outside on the viburnum bush … I call these my control group. Will moving eggs indoors prevent them from hatching? Or slow down hatching? I’m not sure. But keeping an eye on my outdoor control eggs as well as my indoor eggs will help me answer these questions. In a stroke of brilliance that hit me only after I spent an extremely long time trying to find my outdoor control eggs this morning, I’ve tied ribbons around the relevant viburnum stems to make locating the eggs easier:

Can you see the black ribbon? And the little green egg? They are both in the picture, honest.

After three days of waiting and watching, I can’t tell you much. My indoor eggs and my outdoor eggs are quiet and nothing visible to the naked eye—or even a magnifying-glassed eye—is happening. Sort of makes me wish I had a microscope; then I might be seeing this.

Anyway, stay tuned …

June 1, 2009April 25, 2015

The Viburnum Mysteries, Part 1

Most of this past weekend was sunny and warm here in Massachusetts, so I spent a lot of time in the yard. I was supposed to be weeding, but I kept finding interesting things to photograph. During one of my photography breaks I noticed our three Viburnum bushes looked a little, er, chomped:

It didn’t take long to find the chompers:

There were hundreds of them! Even though they were probably not good for my Viburnum bushes, I have to admit feeling a little jazzed at the idea of some butterfly or moth leaving us a giant brood of caterpillars to watch and enjoy. I took lots of photos so that I could properly identify the species later.

Excitement mounted when my sharp-eyed assistant spotted this on an un-chomped Viburnum leaf:

An egg! Look on the top leaf, just right of the center vein at about the center of the leaf. That is an egg! What kind of egg? I’m not sure. But it fed our butterfly dreams. Before the sun set we’d added this clue to our pile of study images:

Certain species of wasp lay their eggs in the safety and relative abundance of a caterpillar body. The eggs hatch and the wasp larvae actually feed on the caterpillar, slowly eating it alive. Gross, I know. But I wouldn’t mind seeing the spectacle once, and it looked as we might have a chance. Plus? This larger caterpillar would surely help us identify the species of insect we were dealing with.

Later, armed with our photographs, several insect field guides, and high-speed internet access, we set out to discover what was living in our Viburnum. It took several hours, mostly because I assumed that all the species we’d found were related. They are not. (Not to self: stop making assumptions!) It seems we are dealing with two species; let’s get the bad news over with first, shall we?

This is the larvae of the recently imported and truly nasty Viburnum Leaf Beetle. Ick. They eat their fill of Viburnum leaves, then crawl down to the base of the plant and pupate in the soil. The adult beetle eventually emerges, flies into the bush and continues to feed on Viburnum leaves. The final insult comes in the fall, when females lay hundreds of Viburnum Leaf Beetle eggs in the woody stems of the shrub … completing the life cycle and setting my poor Viburnums up for an even nastier spring next year.

(The silver lining here is that there is actually a citizen science project tracking the spread of Viburnum Leaf Beetles. And I am now an official contributor! Funny how things work sometimes, eh?)

The truly good news? The eggs we found are not Viburnum Leaf Beetle eggs. And we could find only a few butterfly or moth species that lay eggs on Viburnum leaves in the Northeast. It is possible that we have found eggs that will hatch caterpillars that will eventually pupate into this:

And we Burnses intend to find out for sure:

Stay tuned!