northeast-flora-and-fauna

Dogbanes, similar to milkweeds, are considered plentiful sources of nectar, and this Painted Lady was taking full advantage of this. I can distinguish it from its American Lady cousin (from this view) by looking at the 4 small eyespots along the rear of butterfly's wing; 2 large spots would imply an American Lady instead. In flight, I personally can't distinguish between the 2 butterflies at all. This is somewhat unfortunate since I've been seeing one/both of these butterflies a fair amount this spring, but without a lot of flowers they like in bloom they've mostly been flyby sightings. (Sometimes they'll tease me for a while fluttering in my vicinity or even circling me only to fly off either without landing or landing for just a second or 2 while I fumble to spot them with my binoculars.) I'm not sure what flower this butterfly is nectaring from, but it looks like a dogbane . Similar to their milkweed relatives, dogbane is popular with the pollinators for fa...

This is a fairly common caterpillar, though this was the first one I saw this summer. It's a caterpillar of the Milkweed Tussock Moth , one of the numerous denizens of our local milkweed plants . As moths, they're a little on the plain side, but as caterpillars they look a little like an arts-and-crafts project made from pipe cleaners. Like most insects that use milkweed as a host plant, they're somewhere on the bad-tasting/poisonous side of the edibility spectrum. The caterpillar's unique look makes it easy for would-be predators to identify them as poisonous.  Since they're also considered to be poisonous as adult moths, I'm a little surprised they don't have a more distinctive look as adults. Instead of appearance, they apparently signal their unpalatability by making distinctive sounding ultrasonic clicking noises that bats recognize. They don't normally compete directly with Monarch butterfly caterpillars because while Monarch caterpillars prefer y...

Here's one of my favorite beetles, the Dogbane Leaf Beetle . If you like shiny things, you're going to love Dogbane Leaf Beetles. They're almost like jewelry for plants. These guys are one of those insects that will feed on both dogbanes and milkweeds; in fact I suspect this little fella is probably on a Common Milkweed. (The leaves look a little large for a dogbane.) Both dogbane and milkweed (two types of plants in the  Apocynaceae family ) have a sticky, poisonous latex-ish substance you can see if you break a leaf. Many insects that eat these plants end up being poisonous, or at least foul-tasting, to eat. And most of these signal their poisonousness to potential predators by flaunting red/orange coloring (e.g. Monarch Butterflies, Large and Small Milkweed Bugs). It's likely that the Dogbane Leaf Beetle accomplishes the same thing with its shininess - predators are able to distinguish them from tastier, more nutritious insects. They do look a little like an invasive...