northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a baby (caterpillar would be more conventional terms) Cloudless Sulphur . I took this picture over 4 years ago and didn't know what it was. This morning when I logged into iNaturalist, it had an ID of Cloudless Sulphur. I then looked that up in my Caterpillars of Eastern North America , and agreed that this was indeed a Cloudless Sulphur caterpillar. You might ask why I didn't just use my caterpillar field guide in the first place: I'm not sure I owned the field guide back in 2016. I wasn't sure this was a caterpillar. Some of the larvae of flies and wasps look pretty similar to moth/butterfly caterpillars. My field guide has over 400 pages of caterpillar species in it, and flipping through them all is either a very slow process or a fairly error-prone process. Despite all those caterpillars in the field guide, it's not complete.  My field guide did show me a picture of the Clouded Sulphur caterpillar, so I was able to rule that out as a candidate. It did...

Here's the second Monarch Butterfly I got a picture in 2020, spotted about a half hour after the first. Yesterday I talked mostly about what Monarchs eat; today I'm going to go over their complicated life cycle. All Monarchs begin life as an egg. Their mother will lay an egg on a milkweed plant. I think they usually lay a single egg on the underside of a milkweed leaf. This probably helps protect the egg from rain, and maybe excessive sunlight. This probably also helps hide the egg from predators and parasites. (Though Monarchs eventually become poisonous through eating the poisonous milkweed, the egg hasn't eaten anything yet.) The mother Monarch can lay anywhere from 300-1100 eggs all told, though she lays her eggs one at a time and almost certainly avoids laying multiple eggs on the same leaf to prevent her kids from competing against each other. After hanging out on the leaf for 3-8 days, the egg hatches and a very small translucent green caterpillar emerges and begins...