I was cutting down part of a huge sunflower when I came across these. Then I kept finding more and more, and more. I'm quite sure it won't be something I want since there are so many, but am wondering what they are. Ideas?
Eating a large sunflower
Oh my, I might be excited! I just found pics of Bordered Patch cats and learned that they are gregarious and do eat sunflowers!
Just in case, I'm going outside at 1am to put that bowl of caterpillars inside in a bug hut! Oh, gotta get some leaves too.
Kenya, you have mentioned Chlosyne butterflies several times recently. (I learned Chlosyne from you) What do you think?
recent visitor...
Hi Paige,
Yes, your above pics are of one of the species of Chlosyne cats and an adult Chlosyne. Sunflowers and cow-pen daisies (Verbesina encelioides--see Josephine's thread in Texas Gardening) are two of the hosts. The cats are voracious eaters, especially when found in large numbers like you mention you have, so it will take a large and constant supply of leaves to keep a group of these cats going. I wish you much success!
Kenya
For those interested, here's a link to Josephine's thread on Verbesina:
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/623247/
Thank you Kenya!! I am very excited to have a new caterpillar to raise. I went out last night and got the ones I put in a bowl and a few leaves for them. By morning it was skeletonized so I went to get more and saw the other batch of them had already gone thru a few more leaves.
Wow! You are so right that they will need A LOT of food! These babies are going to eat more than Monarchs! It's a good thing this is a huge sunflower. I'll be grabbing some of those leaves I just cut off last night to use too.
My son is going to be excited since they are on his sunflower!
Congrats!!! I found some of those a couple of years ago. Gobs of cats just all over the leaves!
Yes, GOBS is a good word! The larger butterfly species in my area don't lay so many eggs and aren't gregarious so I really didn't know there was a butterfly that did. I just knew of moths being like that.
I was sure they were going to be some nasty pest cats so I was pleasantly surprised when I did some Googling! I've got a batch of them in an aquarium now and leaving the others outside for right now.
I've got 3 large sunflowers to feed them, another one in a vacant yard next door and a field of them down the street. I'm glad it's a plant that grows wild and I won't have to stress over having enough.
Oo those are the little buggers that ate my new coneflowers to the ground!!!
Oh no, that's not good! My coneflowers are NOT on the menu!
They're such small cats! I was more used to the larger kinds of cats when I first had those on my Zexmenia last year. I brought most of them in and it kept me busy supplying them with more food all the time. Lucky for me that Zexmenia grows wild on my property. Some of them died and of course I felt bad. But outside on the plant spiders and other predators had been picking them off right and left from what I could see, so I just told myself they were better off inside.
wow lucky you KK. I have never had them on my sunflowers before
They are very small compared to what I normally see. I wasn't really thinking about their size at first, just how many there were. When I started Googling I realized that they could be this small butterflie's cats because of their size. So much better than having army worms etc.!
There are gobs of them on the plant so I'm not going to attempt to bring more in yet. I'm going to see how well these do in a cage.
I put some fresh branches in a vase and put them in my wooden cage so they could climb. Some of them climbed onto the plexiglass side in little groups. I'm not sure if they are going thru an instar or waiting for the right time to try and escape.
I'll take a pic of the group and the ones on the sunflower tomorrow.
Wow . . . really neat . . . and some pretty nice photos also . . . can't wait to see & hear more :)
Gest of luck,
GD
Here are a few more pics. This one is just one leaf with a part of the group that I found the other day.
This is a different leaf where I found smaller cats. You can see their size compared to the milkweed seed that is stuck on the right side.
I didn't notice until now that in the background is another leaf full of more cats.
heck yeah . . . they're loaded up for sure :D . . . great pics, thanks for share'n! :)