northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a Silver-spotted Skipper I met, and it looks like it's taking advantage of the nectar from a Joe Pye Weed  wildflower. You could probably make a case for a common name of White-spotted Skipper; the large white spot on the wings inspired their name. (Admittedly "silver-spotted" sounds more prestigious than "white-spotted.) The skippers are frequently small, non-descript butterflies that probably do get mistaken for moths. The Silver-spotted Skipper is less small and less non-descript than most skippers, and are relatively common. When they're caterpillars, they spend a lot of time eating and pooping, the latter called frass . In order to prevent predators from spotting them from their frass, they're able to expel it up to 38 body lengths away. They use a variety of - but not all - legume plants as host plants when they're caterpillars. And although human agriculture grows plenty of legumes, Silver-spotted Skippers aren't considered to have...

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...