The Datura had a lovely flower this morning.
Sometimes called moonflowers, they open at night and close by mid-morning.
Hum, something seems to have been chewing on the leaves.
A few ants were running around on the top of the leaves, but I don’t think they are the culprits.
It’s a young hornworm caterpillar.
You can tell it is young because of the relative length of the “horn.”
Yesterday we looked at a children’s book about cute animals. So, are young hornworms cute or not?
I meant to post these photographs of flies over a month ago, but instead they’ve been sitting on my desktop, just waiting.
That’s what the flies were doing, too.
They were basking in the sun in the early morning, just waiting.
Adult flies on live for weeks, or maybe a month or so. Don’t they know that time flies?
After I wrote last week’s post about insects gathering nectar and pollen from a flowering wolfberry plant, I visited the plant once more.
It looked quite different. Rather than one or two snout butterflies here and there, there were over thirty fluttering around.
A closer view…
Can you see the long snout that gives them their common name?
The adult butterflies were only sipping nectar from the wolfberry flowers and it is not a host for them. Snouts lay their eggs on hackberry trees (Celtis sp.)
The caterpillars that hatch from the eggs are green. Butterflies and Moths of North America website has some photographs of the caterpillars. When they are done feeding, they form chrysalids that are a similar green color.
Today, the wolfberry has finished flowering. I wonder where the snout butterflies are now.
For more information, see Roberta Gibson Writes.
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