Albany, California Updates (9/3/17): Citheronia regalis Larval Rearing Finished

The last of our regal moth (Citheronia regalis) larva that have not pupated has died, ending the rearing project for this year.

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On the day that we left, there were still three regals (Citheronia regalis) that were still feeding. All three were small and far behind the rest in development with two of suspect for disease. At the time, we didn't want to over-complicate matters by having to find a way to keep them alive during the family leave and to make our mother take care of them when she got back, so we decided to simply toss the two suspect ones and hoped the last one would finish feeding quickly enough. 

By the time our mother came back on August 20 and checked on this last one, it was still alive but unfortunately was not a prepupa yet and had nothing to eat because all of the leaves had dried out. We thought that it would surely finish and pupate soon though, but it never did. Today our mother reported that it is now dead after spending a few days as a prepupa.

Now that the older, healthier ones are already done pupating and all, this really isn't a big deal to us, but it is something sort of interesting to note. We really don't know exactly went wrong, but from the pictures it's probably just disease. We have seen similar things happen in other saturniids and in sphingids during the prepupal stage. 

As for the final data on our regal pupae, we have 5.77, 5.97, 6.1, 6.24, 6.33, 6.45, 6.54, 8.12, and 8.82 (weighed August 20) and 6.6, 6.62, 6.8, 6.97, 7.00, 7.13, and 7.94 (weighed August 22). None of them were guaranteed to have been weighed within 24 hours of pupation like we usually do, so it may be slightly inaccurate in terms of control. The mean is 6.8413 (Sx = 0.8258, n = 16); the median is 6.61. We definitely hoped for bigger pupae (and bigger larva to begin with), but for this first time we are still impressed by their size. We will be sure to get some shots of these when we return home during break.

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Authors
Brian Liang

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