I have these cats on my pipevines, both on A. elegans and A. gigantea. From everything I've read, they should not be eating my A. elegans and still be alive, but they have eaten it to the stems, lol and are fat cats! I know TX has more pipevine swallowtail subspecies but I don't know what these are exactly. Does anyone know what these are and if they keep eating my "bad" varieties of Aristolochia, will they die?
Here is one on the flower of A. gigantea. One can see he liked the taste of it, he ate half the flower!
Little fat cat pigs on A. elegans(the same variety in the first photo too)
They look very like the caterpillars of the Pipevine Swallowtail Battus philenor. Check out these web sites:
http://www.enature.com/fieldguide/showSpeciesSH.asp?curGroupID=2&shapeID=986&curPageNum=1&recnum=BU0659
http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/zeeb/butterflies/figs/larvae/Pap/B_philenor.jpg
Well, they are still alive. They are growing and still eating the A. elegans, so I guess it's not going to kill them. Their body is more brown/tan than black like the ones in the links. We are having a cool spell with lots of wind, poor things have to hang onto the leaves to keep from getting blown away!
