Ok folks, I'm back from the museum and looking through the pictures I took when I realized I took a really bizarre picture. I was trying to get a photo of the Polyphemus moth that came out earlier this week (my boss posted a pic on Facebook). So I take a not great photo because it's cloudy and everyone is hanging out up top for the most part and of course the wings are closed so you can't see how cool they are. But I look at it on my laptop (17" monitor - I like big screens!) and I see something odd beside the moth. It's laying eggs on the ceiling screen! Seriously, click on the picture to make it large and you can see it! Now, we've had them before and they've laid eggs on the screen but generally near a plant so what this one is doing, I have no idea. I posted it on Facebook and tagged my MOSI boss and her helper so they can hopefully get up there and scrape them off tomorrow. Polyphemus moths are fun caterpillars, too. I hope we get babies out of this!
In more mundane sightings, I released a Gulf Fritillary and put it on the lavender (which smells really awesome, by the way).
And there were a bunch of Zebra Longwings flying around. They fly really slow so they're kind of fun for the guests. Sometimes they will land on you but generally they try to get out of the way.
This Great Southern White is looking kind of rough!
But that's okay because we have tons of Great Southern White caterpillars about to become chrysalises.
And here's a Monarch in the flight cage. I found about a dozen Monarch cats out in the garden today.
Back home, I'm having my own Monarch crisis. I think they have cloning technology. Seriously, like two days ago I was checking out the plant in front of my house and there were two large caterpillars on it. Last night, there were five. This morning, there were eight! And they're really big! It's not like I overlooked them! And then, when I looked close the eggs have hatched and I have lots of little ones, too! I relocated some of them to other plants, but I might have to relocate a few to the museum.
This is why I don't have flowers on my host plants. This is Giant Milkweed.
This is an extreme example, but I wanted to show people how frass can be a good way to find caterpillars. If you see frass, just start looking upwards and you will probably find the caterpillar(s) in question. I used this method to find some sulphurs a few weeks ago. It helped that they had been eating the flowers so their frass was kind of yellow in color.
