#spoilers from future everwest: caterpillar had already left leaf | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lazyevaluationranch · 7 months

Text

06/05/2023 Caterpillar making Nonstandard Life Choices.

Marmara arbutiella is a tiny caterpillar that lives inside arbutus leaves. It leaves the waxy top and bottom layer of the leaf intact for shelter and eats a tunnel through the juicy middle layer, writing a gleaming silvery spiral into the flesh of the leaf.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend found this Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices living in a salal leaf instead of an arbutus lead. These eccentrics turn up occasionally in a small area that includes our island.

We know the salal-dwellers are Marmara arbutiella, because someone sent a salal leaf with a caterpillar in it to Charley Eiseman (see @lies's Charley Eiseman Appreciation Post) and he got it DNA barcoded.

But nobody has observed a salal-dweller outside the leaf. We don't know if it has morphological differences from the arbutus-dwellers as an adult moth, like maybe a new subspecies is starting to branch off here.

So we picked the leaf and put it in a jar with a little moss to hold moisture. Hopefully there's still a Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices in it, and the caterpillar will crawl out of the leaf, make a cocoon, and emerge into an adult we can send to Charley Eiseman.

The cocoon is pretty exciting too, described in the poetic words of Wagner, Loose, Fitzgerald, De Benedictis, and Davis:

The larvae exhibit a fascinating cocoon-spinning behavior which involves prolonged ornamentation of the cocoon with dozens of anally extruded compartmentalized bubbles, each of which is individually wrapped in silk and pushed through to the outer cocoon surface.

I, for one, am delighted at the prospect of a cocoon containing a moth nobody has ever seen, festively garlanded in silk-wrapped bug farts.

#daily #leaf miner #marmara arbutiella #moth #another fine post about animal poop #animals farts really but I don't have a tag for that #spoilers from future everwest: caterpillar had already left leaf #we did not get to see a fart cocoon or nonstandard life choices moth

145 notes · View notes