Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Daily pictures #96, 1 by lepfarmer

lepfarmer wrote:
Don't get me started on Tersa Sphinx moths!! They've been a "problem" for me all year. Somehow a pair or more of them got inside my flight cage over winter when I moved some pentas inside and planted them. It was not intentional at all. Well, they reproduced so well that I've easily removed a couple of hundred of them over the last few months. Needless to say, my pentas look horrible in the flight cage! It got to the point that I removed most of the pentas and have pretty much gotten a handle on the problem now (I think!). I found these two in there a week or so ago, flaunting their reproductive destructive nature right in front of me! They were quickly removed and released outside. Tersa Sphinx in nature are not nearly so destructive. Oh, sure, they'll munch down a pentas or two, but predators keep them in check for the most part (and the plants recover). In my flight cage there were no predators. I'm just hoping that I've got them all out of there now.

Dale Clark
Dallas County Lepidopterists' Society
http://www.dallasbutterflies.com