Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Mother Hubbard

Over the weekend, instead of recovering from 2 solid months of a maddening schedule, we blacklighted. Blacklit just doesn't sound right. Anyway, along with a slew of the usual suspects, we were joined by Hubbard's Small Silkmoth, Syssphinx/Sphingicampa hubbardi.



She was down in the patch of festering black widow webbing that traps unsuspecting leaf litter from the neighbor's forest - and she left us a little glob of teeeny green jellybeans on the wall. Upon clearing the webbing, she fluttered around and gave us some cooperative, if novel views. The colors may be muted but the creature is quite elegant (if poorly coordinated, when thumping into faces and shoulders).




















In the last few weeks I'd become aware that these delightful moths were flying - a classmate from SRSU had the mangled remains of one under a windshield wiper blade and another procured a much-more-intact specimen as part of her collection for Entomology. With the eggs in such a poor location, we made the decision to remove them from the wall and back step in hopes of giving the eggs more of a chance. The photo below shows just how diminutive they are! That's about 30 eggs, total. We'll make sure that as they near a hatching stage (5-6 days according to our sources) there will be plenty of tender mesquite or acacia vegetation for them to feed on. Inadvertent parenting adventure? Definitely!

No comments:

Post a Comment