An inchworm pupates at me

prepupal larva in finished cocoon

Found this noctuid on my floor on Oct. 24, it ate a tomato leaf that night and started producing a cocoon the next morning. Currently it is a bright green pupa.

larva several hours before cocoon construction

Several bugs vanish from my inventory

Manduca sexta died several days ago. In life it kept drooling and getting leaf sludge on its face/legs when eating, and like a starving mealworm it was suspiciously shortbodied. These are highly unusual symptoms of disease, normally infected specimens begin flopping about uncoordinatedly and vomiting; mine did not show any obvious signs of distress. A few days before it died it lost most of its appetite (it did still eat hours before perishing though) and just stopped moving and eventually turned limp, but without rotting or liquefying. Also unusual. Pretty sure it caught a pathogen in the wild, because it was already short and stout when I first laid my eyes upon it.

The Nyctoporis carinata female was sent to Hisserdude. He should prolly write a blog post soon if it makes it to his house alive.

I'm also currently mailing out my male Cotinis duo.

The only specimens I currently have left are the Nyctoporis larvae, which unlike the adult are too small to be mailed.

I go into caterpillar debt

Last morning I found some Manduca sexta caterpillars on a half-dead tomato bush. "Why not play w them for a while", I thought to myself.

I played w them and dumped three of the four back onto the bush after a while.

The fourth one (which has an unusually large quantity of black stripes by the way) got its horn tip broken during handling and began leaking alarmingly large quantities of hemolymph from the injury site. I blame myself to some degree for this, I kept the caterpillars a bit too close to each other and one of the others probably bit or tore its horn accidentally. Not sure how it happened though, I had a feeling such a thing was going to happen and tried to prevent it before it even started but somehow it happened anyways.

As compensation for the unethics I am keeping it in a jar for a while, where microwasps are guaranteed not to oviposit in it and I can stuff its face with tasty tomato lumps. Although the animal seems to have difficulty sealing the leak (it has continued exuding hemolymph droplets from its horn intermittently throughout yesterday and today, especially when I am handling it during container cleaning), its health has not been significantly affected at all, which is good.

Anyways, here's the captive specimen I guess.

A pretty picture

 I'm not actually a fan of photographing pretty things for its own sake, but many of you seem to enjoy my photography a lot so here's a pic of my brownish C. mutabilis male being fashionable I guess. The less brown one fell straight into the watermelon juice (how can their motor skills be so poor, sheesh) and wouldn't hold still when it crawled out of the sugar puddle.

First N. carinata larva found!

 Need I say more?

Deformed Female presumably dies

The deformed female C. mutabilis specimen ran away a few days ago and hasn't been seen since, I blame my low sanity (and resulting lack of energy) for causing this. It's probably starved to death by now.

Since flightless mutabilis specimens seem to be perpetually sad when not busy feeding/sleeping perhaps it was better off dead anyways [sigh].