Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: DAILY BUTTERFLIES Page 12, 1 by debnes_dfw_tx

debnes_dfw_tx wrote:
It was a good dry run Suzy! You are ready, thats the main thing. I think that really is a Tussock, A Milkweed Tussock..
http://www.giffbeaton.com/Caterpillars/Milkweed Tussock Cate...

Oh I feel what your all experiencing folks! I nearly gave up too when the wasps descended upon my BSTs and My ONLY TSTs this year. Right before my eyes a bug was sucking the life out of the 1 3 day old cat. This was another predator that I couldn't ID back then. (I have a little more info on them now, that I will show ya in next paragraph with pic.) At the time all I had was a bad blurry pic of the bug. It had befell an untimely accident with my finger emmediatly after it killed the wee TST cat.. I was so depressed.. so many predators!! Becky, it serves that when we attract all of our wonderful butterflies, we create an environment for all the other kinds of cats that are not so host particular as the ones we raise. It would follow that there would be more of their enemies, and more species of them. They sniff your butterfly garden out to eat/syphon out the cats, just like butterflies do when finding a mate. The only thing that I could do is make those small gadware containers, and it brought my joy back. I wish I had done that with the Tigers, :-

Now for this bug I observed killing the lil Tiger ST.. After it's accident, it was slightly deformed.. All I could get on an ID was that it was some 3rd instar soldier bug larvae. So it remained unsolved.
The other day I spotted something bizzare on my Milkweed.. It was like some half inch blob of a moving trashpile. I scooped it up into a container to bring it to a good look through the magnifying glass. What I saw was a bunch of collected insect carcasses stuck to the back of the bug. It has pinshers which it uses to attach the carcasses on its back. It appears that the bug siphons a small bug/cat/or egg, then glues it to it's back as a trophy, and a cammoflague.

Here is the blob>