Antheraea polyphemus Eggs Have Begun to Hatch

Our polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus) eggs have begun to hatch. The stock originated from Pennsylvania, July 2016.

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And there we have it. Three hand-paired females and the eggs are all fertile. The eggs were first laid about 12 days ago (5/2), and this morning about 60 had hatched. These probably correspond to the 60 or so eggs laid on the first day by the first paired female, so the remaining 400 or so eggs will likely hatch over the next several days. But for now, we have plenty to handle as we need to find suitable host plants to eventually allocate all 400+ larvae when they all hatch, and thus we need to divide the 60 we have now to a variety of different hosts to see which ones they'll take.

We could just use a single host like oak (Quercus) or willow (Salix), but we likely won't have enough of any given one to support all the larvae we have, and we want to see which host the larvae perform best on. We used late season oak leaves last year, which worked perfectly fine - the species is well adapted to feeding on the tough, tannin filled leaves even in late season, but we got the sense that the larvae did not perform as well as they could have as the cocoons were decent, but not large. Hosts with higher nitrogen and water content such as willows (Salix), alder (Alnus), birch (Betula), hawthorne (Craetagus), plum (Prunus), and possibly even grape (Vitis) - though not sure if reports on this are erroneous, may fair  better. We don't know if we'll be using all these hosts in the end, but for now we split all the larva on each except oak and birch, with slightly more on willow which we will likely use as our staple because it is very abundant by the creek and is probably one of the more common hosts for polyphemus. We will probably try the oak and birch tomorrow if we have time to pick some up.

The little hatchlings are a family sight, with their large squarish brown heads and pale yellow bodies. There are black stripes all along the body and the tubercles are yellow and hairy. They are quite large already at 5 mm which is about the same size as cecropia hatchlings.

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​Authors
Alan Liang

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