They're on plants that grow wild around here. I noticed some cats a while back. But these are large enough to ID as American Ladies. Here's one...the plants look like some kind of artimisia.
Look What I Found!
Yes good ID Linda!! Great pic too!
Does the Artemisia plant have seeds yet? If so I would like to trade.. See if you can tell which one it is on npot.org. Search Artemisia, it comes up with quite a few. Wormwood or Sagewort??
No, I haven't seen any blooming yet. I think it blooms in summer. If the plants make seeds and I can figure out what is the seeds, I'll let you know. Actually, the only one of those plants on my own property was almost completely stripped before I figured out what those cats were, but I know where there's quite a few of these nearby. In fact, I dug one up today. I took some cats in to raise, but they weren't exactly wild about the other kinds of host plants I was offering them, so I wanted to try to get them a nice live plant of that kind, if possible. Then if it survives, I'll plant it in the yard. Oh, too many species on that search engine...and it doesn't just have species that are native to Texas. I've also got some very small cats on my sunflower type plants. Wonder if those are the same kind.
Not sure but from the looks of it, your cat could morph any time. It would not starve without a host. If it eats..cool.. If it doesn't eat, the butterfly will just be a bit smaller.
A few days ago I had an American Lady here, it was the smallest I have seen.
One of the tell tale differences between American Lady and Painted Lady is the eye spots on the underside of the bottom wing. The AL has only 2 very large eyes there, the PL has 4 small ones.
Says it might be the winter form that they are small, but it is because they stop eating or run out of host. that can happen in any season. This one is paler than the ones in late summer.
Here she was resting on a sunflower leaf. It is Italian Ice SF... could that be an egg there to the right of her in this pic?
You're right. I've got two cats pupating right now. But I have more of various sizes....some securely wrapped up in their little nests.
WOW! That caterpillar looks so dark and different from the AL cats down here.
I found several cats nesting in cudweed a couple of months ago and raised them.
~ Cat
...another way to tell the difference is to look for the white dot on the forewing orange spot. I always have to use my binoculars!!! :o)
Here's one I raised.
~ Cat
What a gorgeous deep color, and a nice size too! Super pic!
Nice photos, ladies! Y'all got me interested in the PL and the AL butterflies. I have several different varieties of Sunflower growing in my garden beds. I hope one of them becomes a host plant. Those butterflies are so pretty!!!
Thanks for posting the info about them! Very helpful!