Hyalophora cecropia Eggs Have Begun to Hatch

Our cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia) eggs have finally begun to hatch. . These originated as eggs from New York, June 2016.

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It's been a long 19 days since our first cecropia eggs were laid (4/21), but today some finally hatched - 50 to be exact.  That's about the same amount of eggs that were deposited on the first day which makes sense. The little neonate larvae began crawling out of their shells starting early in the morning, and by noon most that hatched today had done so. 

The newborn larvae are a familiar site but nonetheless interesting, hatching grey with flaccid yellow tubercles at first and later becoming completely black with small but erect, haired tubercles. They measure about 5 mm in length, though there is some variation in size at birth. They already resemble the all too familiar mature larvae, just black with different anatomical proportions, notably the tubercle size. 

Anyway, on to the rearing. Since this year we have so many larvae and many more to hatch, we will definitely be sleeving a good majority of them on our two apple trees (Malus sp.) and plum tree (Prunus cerasifera). For the 50 we have so far, we decided to put them on one of the apple trees, all to one sleeve for now. The sleeves are 5-gal paint strainers that can be bought in bulk at a reasonable price online; the material is quite fine and soft and provides good ventilation. So far the larvae have aggregated into small loose groups of mostly 2-4 and have fed a little. It's going to be a cool week so we don't expect them to grow at a very fast rate for now, but hopefully they will at least settle down and start feeding by tomorrow. 

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Authors
Alan Liang

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