Update on eggs from hops
Following up on my post from May 7th about the Question Mark or Comma eggs: before I left for my mom’s I cut off two leaves which each had an egg on it – just in case they hatched before I got back. Well, on Monday those two hatched (after I was back home!)! One leaf was from the hops vine, the other the pipevine. Anyway, those two little guys (or girls) are doing just fine! I was concerned about getting them the leaf they were on quickly. The hops leaf was starting to dry up a bit, and of course pipevine is the wrong host plant and likely the caterpillar would have died if it had eaten any of it. I had to use a paintbrush to move one of them, but had no problems with it.
And no, I don’t have a picture of them. As mentioned before, my digital camera doesn’t have a good enough macro function to get a picture. I will have to take one with the film camera. I’ll post the pictures when I get them back.
Another detail worth mentioning – I said before that the eggs were laid on top of the leaves although I had read they lay them on the underside. Well, both of the eggs I could find that were laid on the hops leaves were on the top, but the two I found on the pipevine were actually laid on the underside of the leaf.
Oh – and one other thing – both caterpillars crawled over to the underside of the leaf right away to feed, and stayed there. One of the things that really fascinates me about these guys is how their is sometimes very predictable and obviously programmed into their genes. That fascinates me! Exactly how is behavior like that programmed into their genes and expressed like that?
