End of Euryalus & Future Plans

Alas, our final Ceanothus caterpillar passed away today, ending our Ceanothus brood this year that began on 6/10. Here we discuss some of the hardships with this species and future plans regarding the rearing of this species.

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Today, with disappointment but little surprise, we found the last third instar Ceanothus caterpillar limp on the bottom of the rearing sleeve. It had been feeding yesterday, but it seems there was never any hope left for it from the start and death was to be expected sooner or later. It has been in the third instar ever since the onset of the disease which broke out in 6/28, so clearly there has been something drastically wrong with it as well as the other "growth-less" caterpillars, because it should have molted into fourth instar a month ago. 

Rearing this species has been very rough over the months, struggling endlessly with the disease that broke out on 6/28 just as they were beginning to molt in third instar. ​We took painstaking measures in order to save them -- from isolating each caterpillar, to transferring them onto cuttings outside of closed containers, and finally moving them  onto a live plant outdoors, but nothing had any affect. One by one, every caterpillar fell dead, most very clearly from disease, while others for no apparent reason. Finally, the last caterpillar dropped (below), marking the end of our Ceanothus brood which began on 6/10 and ended 8/7 (today).

Though we had a very rough time with this species this year, we are still considering trying this species again next year if offered again on the Insect Classifieds. If we do, then we will rear them at a lower humidity than we did this year, rearing the first and possibly second instars in petri dishes and transferring them onto the live Ceanothus plant for later instars which should minimize risk for disease. Alternatively, we could try a different host plant such as willow (Salix) which might give different (hopefully better) results. Anyways, we are still hopeful that we will someday rear this species successfully and are not discouraged with our failure this year since according to several hobbyists, the Hyalophoras are very disease prone, often dying out in the third or first instar, and are a hit and miss species to rear even for the experienced. Thus, in retrospect, it was not extremely surprising that we failed to raise them as this was our first time with this species.

- Alan