I’ve been trying to find some caterpillars in order to raise them and observe their metamorphosis. However, in 6 hours spread over 2 days I found only one (sadly I scared it and it fell in the grass where I couldn’t find it again). What can I do to find more? I try to look at plants with a lot of bitemarks on them, including branches, the back sides of leaves, etc. but with no luck. I don’t know most of the plants I have seen but I also looked at some oak trees and willowherbs. Usually I am outside from 2-4 PM until 5-6.
What are the leps in your area?
Perhaps by looking at seasonality and preferred host plants and/or elevations for eggs and larva of lepidoptera species near you, you can increase your chances of encountering caterpillars.
Welcome to the forum, @miurra!
If you scroll to the bottom of this post, there are a couple of threads on this topic, filled with great tips:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/tips-for-finding-more-beetles-and-caterpillars/
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/a-quest-to-find-moth-larvae-caterpillars-any-tips/
I’m not sure how to answer this question, there are many species. I live in Moscow.
I’m trying to find caterpillars of Nymphalidae\Sphingidae\Geometridae, but really any caterpillar will do.
Thank you.
Just a word of caution that it’s not legal to collect caterpillars or any organisms in many parks with out a permit, at least here in the US. Not sure what the rules are in Russia, but it’s something to be aware of.
Right, what I meant was this:
- find a few species in your area, via range maps etc. Preferably focus on ones that are very common - you’ll likely find them easier due to sheer volume & won’t be risking anything rare/endangered/etc.
- Look up info on a few of these, re: what time of year you can find caterpillars and where they are found (high in trees like webworms? lower, on medium plants? near ground level? Exclusively on milkweeds? Are they considerend garden pests that you’d be likely to find on residential plants? etc)
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- Use what you learn on step 2 to influence where you go looking for caterpillars
Lay your coat under an oak branch or hold an umbrella upside down under a branch then give the branch a sharp whack with a stick. I’d be surprised if no caterpillars fall off. And that way you know what food plant they need. Birch and willow are also good.
Here’s a video I made about people collecting, rearing and studying caterpillars in the US. There aren’t too many process details, though.
For the past several years I have been rearing anise swallowtail butterflies. The experts advise collecting eggs instead of caterpillars because of the potential for caterpillars to have been turned into hosts for parasitoid wasps. That may be hard to tell from observation and you will be heartbroken when, instead of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, you see wasps which have been feeding on the metamorphosing caterpillar.
I was really lucky to have found a Facebook group dedicated to best-practices for rearing swallowtails and encourage others to find similar groups.
@miurra Did you watch Tony’s video?
Alternatively, you will be amazed and fascinated by the exquisite wasp which emerges when you were expecting just another butterfly.
To be fair, that would be interesting too haha.
How do I tell apart Lepidoptera eggs from other ones? I have seen one clutch of eggs, but I wasn’t sure to what species it belonged to, so I didn’t take it.
Yes, I did
In 1995, I’d just moved to the tropics and spotted every stage of a butterfly life cycle in bushes near our house. I took my 4 year old son out to give him a complete lepidopteran life history lesson in one go. I showed him eggs, eggs with holes, tiny caterpillars, bigger ones, crystallises, butterflies, and finally we took a crystallis in to the house and laid it on cotton wool in a clear plastic container with some air holes.
Two weeks later, we lifted the box down from on top of the fridge in our breakfast routine to monitor progress and await the emergence of…
Time to backpedal furiously and go out to look for the mother of the seven little parasitoid wasps which were crawling around inside the box.
I think he’s still a bit puzzled about where butterflies really come from. He’s a maths teacher now. It’s less complicated.
I just started actually tracking my own rearing, as such I’m also in a similar boat of trying to find caterpillars. I have three eggs or pupae that I got off of a weed and one larva that ended up being a western pygmy blue ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/384368241 ) but other than those I’ve not had a lot of success finding any caterpillars. I did grab some stinkbug eggs from my yard to see if I could rear them as well but they have yet to hatch.
I’d love to learn any tricks people have. I’m really just hoping to find caterpillars that utilize the plants in my yard.
Take a UV flashlight out at night and look at plants. Caterpillars glow brightly under UV light and are easy to find. Plus a lot of them feed mainly at night and are well hidden in the daytime. Here are a few examples I’ve found:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/235664045
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/239324723
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/235138701
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241584024
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241583988
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241583941
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/241584433
Some of the big brightly patterned species like monarchs are easy to find even in the daytime because they’re bad-tasting and not afraid to be seen. But most of the better-camouflaged species are right under your nose and practically invisible in the daytime, but easy to find at night with a UV light.
I suspect it’s not totally possible. You can probably narrow it down based on which lep species are known to host on the particular plant, but beyond that it may take rear the caterpillars and see what the metamorphose into.
I don’t know that there is a single rule for distinguishing lepidoptera eggs from eggs of other insect orders, as they vary a fair amount even within lepidoptera, but different families seem to have typical egg shapes and laying patterns.
@treegrow has some wonderful journal entries compiling examples of confirmed observations of invertebrate eggs, sorted taxonomically: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/eggs-egg-coverings-of-terrestrial-invertebrates/journal