Caterpillars are eating machines. If they could eat any plant they wanted, our Costa Rica biome would probably be reduced to twigs. Luckily, most butterflies are very host specific, and the caterpillars will only eat the leaves of a few select species of plants, often from just a single genus. We generally avoid planting any of the host plants of the butterflies that we keep. Occasionally I will discover that some species of butterfly has found a newly added plant as an acceptable host plant.

     Passion vine is the host plant of several species of longwing butterflies in our exhibit. For the past few weeks, there have been several passion vines placed on the learning cart in Costa Rica, so visitors are able to see the butterflies laying eggs. The passion vines attract dozens of butterflies and allow the visitors to really see them up close.

     You can also see how much damage the caterpillars do as they munch away all the leaves.  I had to start rotating passion vines onto the cart after the caterpillars completely defoliated the first couple of plants put out. If we were to breed our own butterflies, it would take a whole lot of greenhouse space simply devoted to growing host plants and would be much more costly. As it is, our butterfly pupas come from breeders in tropical countries. They are able to grow host plants much quicker and without the use of greenhouses.  

     The butterflies were so excited to start laying eggs on a fresh passion vine that I had put out, that one of them made a mistake and laid an egg right on my shirt.

- Nate Tschaenn

Tags: Butterflies, caterpillars, eggs, flower, host, Longwing, Nate Tschaenn, Passion, Passion vine, tropical

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Animals and Insects, Nate Tschaenn, Tropical Plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.