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.
No comments:
Post a Comment