Keeping and breeding butterflies

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11.12.2005 16:28, Dr'un'a

The development of migrating hawks is affected by the length of daylight: if you keep the larvae with a long day of light (as in the middle zone in summer), the imagos turn out to be sterile, so it is written in many books. In fact, the females of these butterflies are usually full of eggs and sometimes even mate, but do not lay.
It is possible that they are capable of reproduction with a delay or something like that. I.e. in general, you should try to experiment with them, but I don't have such an opportunity yet, because the loach hawk moth is rare here.
And if you remove from the tracks, observing the light mode, there should be no problems.

Milkweed bred, no problems bred. They are not available now, but I hope they will be again soon.

11.12.2005 18:25, sealor

Interestingly, about loach. I read in some books that many migrating hawkmoth, namely the death's head, which is close to the loach, breed in those places where they fly. But the caterpillars and pupae die.
There will be an opportunity-next season I will try to let a few individuals from the nature of convolvulus, just to know how they differ. This season I caught hawkmoth with a dark color and a pronounced pattern on the flowers. And from the caterpillar, a light hawk moth hatched almost without stripes, I was told that the light one is probably a male, is that so?
And it is difficult to catch them, they are very damaged on the flower, but you can collect them when they fly into the light.

Then I will definitely try to breed euphorbias.

12.12.2005 23:41, Dr'un'a

They write all sorts of things about them. Spring stray butterflies definitely reproduce, but their offspring that grew up with a long day, according to many authors, are sterile. But it's probably not that simple, because it should make some sense... It is unlikely that pupae in nature will die so easily. Although the cold really does not tolerate.

You can catch a bindweed in the following terrible way: pick a flower like sweet tobacco, put it in the path of a flying butterfly - it will stick a 13-centimeter proboscis into it, you can pinch the flower and it will be caught. The proboscis is very strong, so there will be no harm to the hawk moth. The method is very effective and butterflies do not get stoned.

Gender is not determined by color, which can vary. Males have larger antennae, a slightly different wing pattern(more variegated), a cone-shaped abdomen that tapers smoothly to the end, and deeper male genitalia with 2 large lobes-valvae (they seem to spread them out when defending themselves from entomologists). And females are fatter with smaller antennae, without valvae, etc.

13.12.2005 12:14, sealor

"But it's probably not that simple, because it should make some sense..."
In principle, here you might think that migrating hawkmoth flying away for the purpose of settling, leave their offspring in the spring where they decided to stay. But since further seasonal changes in lighting, temperature, for some reason butterflies are not suitable, they do not want to lay eggs.

The method of capture is incredible, thank you! I have heard that sometimes a hawk moth will almost completely climb into a tobacco flower, and then it can be "slammed" there, but I did not see such moments, they always avoided even touching the flower with their paws, not to go deeper.
We have a lot of convolvulus flying in early August in flower beds with tobacco and other gramaphone-like flowers.

Regarding sex determination, if you want to breed, you need to do as little harm as possible to the butterfly, so it's good to know the external differences, thank you!
Compared caught with a mottled pattern and bred, the differences in the length of the antennae are very strong. But the female size is somehow smaller, maybe the caterpillar is underfed?

Here are pictures of caterpillars, butterflies and a brief description of pupation (~100KB) .

14.12.2005 15:07, sealor

Is it obvious that they are going back? How was this installed?
The fact that they arrive is easy to establish, but whether they fly away or die, it seems to me no longer obvious.

Interestingly, the link says that the female is larger than the male.
And my female was smaller and thinner. Most likely, this is still under-feeding the caterpillar.
What is even more interesting is that I did not see females on flowers, although I "considered" many convolvulus, as they interested me. Can't they have something similar to saturnias when the males are actively flying and the females are not? Although hawk moth feed....

And I became interested in them, because I thought that they were cingulates. Then I was told that if cingulatus gets to Europe( on ships, for example), then it does not form populations, they do not exist. Do you have any information about this?

15.12.2005 19:42, Guest

Sealor,
it's certainly not obvious, and I'm not aware of any direct evidence, but there are some articles on this topic (which I haven't read) that say they migrate south in the fall.
In general, there are some species that fly accidentally. The bindweed hawk moth is clearly not one of them, as the migrations are massive and probably purposeful. It is possible, of course, that they fly to die without leaving any offspring, but this seems unlikely to me.

Females may also be smaller, as this species generally varies greatly in size. And on the flowers, I caught butterflies of both sexes in equal numbers. They have both females and males equally active.

All I know about cingulatus is that it is periodically celebrated in Europe. Probably migrates like a bindweed, and this species, I think, is quite plastic, environmentally friendly. It may be introduced sometime... A lot is written about it on the same site, as well as on a similar site about the Eastern Palearctic hawkmoth (there is a link to it somewhere there).

Morozzz
There are no special problems. Although I can hardly tell the difference between the whiskers of some hawks, proserpine, for example...

16.12.2005 16:02, slr

"It's possible, of course, that they fly to die without leaving any offspring, but that doesn't seem very likely to me."
Well, in any case, in our country, where, although it is warmer, and the days in summer are not so long in duration and the nights in winter, but there are also usually several days with frosts up to-15C and below, sometimes up to 20C, I have not met bindweed in spring and summer. So it can be assumed that they disperse along the way, or not, all the same, their offspring die.

I read about cingulatus there, but not much is written there. There aren't even any pictures of two individuals. Obviously, less attention is paid to the packweed than to the packweed.

As for the antennae, well, on the one hand, it is clear that the male's antennae should be more developed in order to find the female's pheromones.
But it is not obvious that it is easy for everyone to draw a conclusion about the difference, and in addition to proserpine, there are also daytime hawkmoth, for example, stellatarus, which in my opinion also does not make out anything from the antennae.
In my case, the difference in the pattern is more important, since at night the antennae are seen in the field. conditions on a live butterfly - not very good however

16.12.2005 18:02, Pavel Morozov

I agree. Indeed, to accurately determine the mustache, you need to look at the series and compare it. And in the field, if you do not collect, but just observe , then it is probably difficult to pay any attention to the antennae.
Although, in addition to the antennae, which are usually at least a little thicker in males than in females, it is worth paying attention to the width of the wings and the tip of the abdomen.

But who is really difficult to make out where the female is, where the male is, so this is the bear Callimorpha dominula. (well, at least in my opinion).
By the way, this bear, like many others, tolerates captivity very well, there would be fresh nettles and a place protected from the sun. it is displayed very easily.

Likes: 1

20.12.2005 15:45, AlexRider

I read the theme that turned into hawkmoth, and I remembered a bright moment from my school years when I caught a lilac hawkmoth on the Karelian Isthmus (30 km from St. Petersburg).
We had perennial lilac bushes in our garden and on an unpainted fence next to lilac bushes in the afternoon I saw a large sitting butterfly. The front fenders were grayish, and it blended well with the gray wood of the fence. I caught it easily and put it in the jar. Upon examination, the hind wings turned out to be lilac and the abdomen was striped (lilac with gray), a beautiful butterfly, even without a determinant (they were not on sale and available at that time) from the picture in some book, I found that I came across a lilac hawk moth.
I picked lilac leaves in the jar, but the butterfly turned out to be a female and put a clutch on the leaf, from which the caterpillars hatched. Then the butterfly died, and after a while I released the caterpillars on the lilac tree (but not in our garden, but on the public garden on the street

). Since then, I have never again seen either caterpillars or butterflies of the lilac hawk moth in our nature, from which I concluded that this is a rare butterfly for the St. Petersburg region.