Black Swallowtail update-eggs hatched!

Nature News


Black swallowtail eggs hatched!
Young caterpillars-early instars- feeding on fennel.  I don't get how such a tiny egg produced such a large caterpillar-8 mm-in such a short time.  (photo of egg in previous blog)
That white stripe is due to uric acid deposits  that are thought to protect the caterpillars from a toxic chemical (furocoumarin) found in their diet. Members of the Umbelliferae family, like fennel, dill and carrots, all of which are host plants for black swallowtail caterpillars, produce furocoumarins as a defense against micro-organisms.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moon snails' mysterious egg cases

Image
by Sue Pike 8/19/2017 The York Weekly/Portsmouth Herald/Fosters Daily Democrat and more Of the many mysterious things you can find while beachcombing, one of the most difficult to understand is (I think) the egg collar of the moon snail. These beautifully-sculpted ribbons of sand show up on our beaches this time of year. A friend recently brought me one - it had washed up above the tide line, dried out and was starting to crumble. I knew it was a moon snail egg case but had to wonder how it was crafted; I certainly couldn’t have made such a thing. The story of how the female moon snail does this is spectacular - a nice example of the myriad of solutions nature has come up with to help with the task of reproduction. Moon snails are beautiful, round, moon-shaped snails (hence the name) that live just offshore of sandy beaches and on tidal sand and mudflats. They burrow in and through the sand in search of their prey. Pick up a clam or mussel shell, even a moon snail shell, if there
Read more

Yellow-bellied sapsuckers

Image
Nature News: Yellow-bellied sapsuckers really have yellow bellies Published May 22 2019  seacoastonline.com/Portsmouth Herald/the York Weekly/Fosters Daily Female yellow-bellied sapsucker lacks red throat.  Sue Pike photo I had hummingbirds show up in my yard well before many of the flowers had bloomed - usually once the quince bloom you can count on seeing ruby-throated hummingbirds shortly thereafter. This year the hummingbirds were first. While I don’t know for sure where they were getting their sugar supply (perhaps hummingbird feeders) an interesting fun fact is that hummingbirds will often follow yellow-bellied sapsuckers in their migration north. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology” “The sapwells made by Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers attract hummingbirds, which also feed off the sap flowing from the tree. In some parts of Canada, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds rely so much on sapwells that they time their spring migration with the arrival of sapsuckers. Other birds as we
Read more
Image
NATURE NEWS 'Dead crabs' on beach are often just old exoskeletons Rock crab exuvia  Seapoint Beach Kittery Pt ME When my kids were little, one of their favorite things to do at the beach was to go crabbing - nothing official, no crab pots or bait, just their hands turning over rocks. As they got older they graduated to string with a hot dog off the dock. They’d always let the crabs go. They went crabbing because crabs are cool little animals, are fun to "race" and are a little scary to handle.  My kids learned early on the right way to pick them up to avoid getting pinched. The crab-related question I get most often is about all those dead crabs that wash up on the beach, their little bodies tangled in the wrack-line. The amazing answer to that question (at least to me) is that more often than not those aren’t dead crabs but rather their shed exoskeletons. Crabs belong to a group of invertebrates (arthropods) that have rigid exoskeletons, which provide
Read more