Is what eventuated.
And this from a caterpillar that hung from the branch like a dead thing for over eighteen hours. Transformed overnight.
Cocoon in the upper mid left area, quite well camouflaged.
Just lucky I didn’t tidy the whole thing away, which I didn’t do because the leafy wild lemon branches donated at the last minute had on them a very young instar.
Starting the whole cycle again.
Caterpillars, that is. I wish they would just hurry up and pupate. They’re so exposed. And they’re doing weird stuff like this … (this photo from indoors looking out)… three congregating at the top of the largely denuded bush?
The one with what turned out to be a tiny white spider moult stuck on its back, is still eating. There are maybe six whole leaves left and a few halves.
Below, photo snapped from afar, number four is still eating …
I wouldn’t have been able to get citrus leaves till tomorrow, so I told my contact don’t worry we’ll have to let nature its way. They’re still a worry.
And then there five. Caterpillars. Another one fell down and …
But managed to climb back up, slowly and laboriously, arriving much diminished. Losing about a quarter of its weight, it looks like.
Picking up some fluff on its back—I’m afraid that if I tweezer it off I’ll do it a worse injury—but after half an hour back up there with its mates, eating eating eating to make up for lost time.
I don’t know what happened to the ones missing. The Asian gecko got it? A noisy miner snuck in? The Moggy cat taste tested them? Though they must’ve been on the ground already.
With only about thirty leaves remaining and six voracious appetites still working hard to gather enough energy for the next stage, I’m starting to wonder which of them will win the race and which will fall.
Two large large, four medium large, one still black and white and looking anorexic. Fifty or thereabouts leaves remaining on the bush and it’s looking quite bedraggled.
With so much less vegetation to hide in, makes me wonder what daredevil bird will snap them up.
An unusual color … I expected their next stage to be greenish grey. Wonder if I caught them in mid transformation? But could also be due to the food supply, not their usual.
Six of these little critters are chomping down on my bolwarra bush. Not their usual food as far as I can make out.
Reading Helen Scwenke’s & Frank Jordan’s Create More Butterflies tells me that an Orchard Swallowtail will lay her eggs on any tree or bush in the citrus family.
Yet I thought I saw a large blackish butterfly in this bush. The caterpillars somewhat resemble the instars on p33 and there is a very small sandfly bush beside the bolwarra.
The caterpillars as you can see have a much closer resemblance to those of the Fuscous Swallowtail on p20. There’s only the lime berry mentioned for host plants for thst variety of swallowtail.
Here’s one doing its weird standing-up-in-the-sun move. Never seen that before.
The whole event is pretty exciting and was one of the reasons—the possibility that butterflies would visit my balcony garden—that I decided on a level two apartment rather than, say, a level seven place.
To top it all off, me getting an in house companion in the form of a cat is what made it possible for butterflies to visit. Before I got Moggy noisy miners, a pernicious sort of bird visited the balcony despite my efforts to keep them away, and clean out all insects good and bad. They even had a go at catching my fish. Moggy keeps them away and the caterpillars are safe.
Rita de Heer 