Mystery Caterpillar IV: The Caterpillar Who Slept Too Long

You may remember that a while back I posted about a mystery caterpillar who turned out to be an Orange Dog caterpillar. I've been keeping tabs on him since he settled down for the winter, and I have to say: It's not looking good. The chrysalis is still there, attached to the tree, perfectly intact as far as I can tell. I don't know if he and I have different definitions of the word "spring" or if, as I rather fear, this particular bug didn't make it.

Perhaps more will come this summer. We still have the lime tree, after all, and it's gotten all of its leaves back, long since.

Chrysalis II

Isn't it beautiful? Look at all the shading there.

I am so glad the caterpillar chose to stay on the tree--apparently, they often don't because the chewed-off leaves are a sign to tell birds "Look! There's a caterpillar here!!"

Of course, the decimated branches are near the top (and slowly starting to re-leaf), and he's down near the base of the tree.

Backyard Biology

The Mystery Caterpillar has, once again, made me aware of how little I know about my own backyard.

Thanks to nature shows, I know more about the Monarch Butterfly (which does stop here) and the African Elephant (which does not) than I do about the denizens of my own, city backyard.

Loving accounts of English hedges (nowhere near here) and the New York Central Park (also somewhat distant) are fairly easy to find.

But that isn't what I'm after. What I'm wondering about is what happens in a fairly average backyard--oddly broken up, often cement paved, but with enough flowers and herbs to attract a fair amount of small folk, bees, butterflies, wasps, moths, toadstools, small brown birds, doves, the occasional small hawk (though that was more common when we had bird feeders out).

At this point, I don't even care if the animals are native or not (actually; that's not quite true; I'd really rather not have to listen to someone's indignant account of how the little brown bird I happen to be fond of doesn't belong here, really). I want to know what they are and how they react to each other. Do wasps (and were they wasps or yellow jackets? Is there a difference?) drive off bees? Does the wasps' nest account for the fact that we had far, far fewer fritillaries than normal on the passion vine? Do fritillaries prefer one kind of passion vine over another? Does the presence of regular wasps make it more or less likely that the Orange Dog caterpillar on my lime tree be parisitized? Would they be territorial toward other kinds of wasps? Would they ignore them? What sort of small hawk hovered in the area?

Where do I even start on this mess of tangled questions?

I mean, yes, I have a couple of very interesting books on butterflies out, and one on bees, but I know from past experience that authors tend to be vastly less interested in backyards than in tropical jungles; the butterfly book I just read talked a lot more about Costa Rica than California (which did get briefly mentioned as a spot the migrating Monarch might stop in, so that's something, I suppose).

Chrysalis

 

Here's my little Orange Dog caterpillar, safely tucked away for the winter.

I realized the other day that my knowledge of caterpillar metamorphosis came largely from The Very Hungry Caterpillar and exceedingly hazy memories of high school Biology, so I'm trying to do a little reading up on what it is that caterpillars do to become butterflies.

I still need to make a trip to the library, where I hope to find a really good book that details the process, but so far, net searching has given me two new facts (That is, facts that are new to me; others probably know perfectly well):

1) A cocoon is not a chrysalis, and a chrysalis is not a cocoon. Cocoons are spun from silk, the chrysalis is a layer of skin hardened; moths do cocoons, butterflies form chrysalises, so that's what this guy was doing all those days he seemed to just be sitting there shrinking.

2) Butterflies--some? all?--spend some of their time in the chrysalis as a sort of biological soup. No one is really sure how the creature gets from caterpillar to DNA soup to butterfly. That is pretty amazing!