(Reprinted from the July 13, 2001 Suburban News)
My twin granddaughters finally found an insect they didn’t want to handle. It was a caterpillar that was jet black with little red dots on the back and white dots on the sides and covered with many sharp black barbs.
These caterpillars are the larvae stage of the mourning cloak butterfly. These butterflies are common throughout the year from the Arctic Circle to the middle-Atlantic states. They have a wingspan of three and a third inches. Their wings are a dark maroon with a straw-yellow border and blue spots on the upper surface. The underside of the wings are almost jet black.
Food for the larvae stage consists of the leaves of poplar, elm and willow. They will eat the leaves of other trees but only to a small extent. Though not considered a pest, they sometimes injure a tree by stripping its foliage.
As an adult, it lives on nectar. An interesting fact is how butterflies sip nectar. They do it the same way you would enjoy a milkshake, through a straw. The straw is a specialized feeding tube called a probiscus. It is located under the head and is tightly coiled when not in use. This straw-like appendage allows all butterflies to reach deep inside flowers for the nectar.
Although all butterflies use this straw or tube to suck up the nectar, not all feed on flowers. Some sip nutrients from rotting fruit or honeydew secreted by aphids.
The mourning cloak hibernates as an adult and makes its appearance early in the spring. It lays its dark, barrel-shaped eggs on twigs of its favorite trees. One way of controlling their population is to pick and destroy their eggs in early May.
By the way, most caterpillars have only true six true legs but have from four to ten unjointed false legs on their abdomen. A few have irritating hairs or spines over their body. There are over 7,000 species of moths and caterpillars in North America alone.
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