Here’s a caterpillar, and here’s a pupa.Īdults tend to sit out very hot or cloudy weather, and they spend the night perched down in the grass. Alone among all of the 275 species of North American skippers, ES’s overwinter as eggs, and the caterpillars emerge in spring. Females lay as many as 30 pale green eggs, in strands of three or four each, on grass leaves or seed heads. Males patrol, close to the ground, searching for mates. Adults nectar during the day on a variety of composites (fleabane, thistle), clovers and other mid-summer wildflowers. According to a slightly-dated entry on the Canadian Biodiversity Information website, “Even after almost a century it seems that native parasites have not yet developed a ‘taste’ for this species” (although a naturally-occurring virus can be lethal to them and is being considered where caterpillar control is needed). The caterpillar damages timothy grass by its feeding, sometimes stripping the leaves of a plant, and when a lot of caterpillars are present, by eating the seed head, too, leaving a bare stalk. It’s sometimes planted as a soil holder in road construction. It’s named after a farmer named Timothy Hanson, who played Johnny Appleseed by spreading the grass from New England to the mid-Atlantic coast by 1747. The settlers here recognized it as a good livestock food and started cultivating it (England caught on later), and it continues to be important horse and cattle fodder today (it’s also sold as food for pet rabbits and rodents). Timothy, a sun-loving grass whose seed heads look like mini-cattails, came over on the boat from England, too, probably before 1700, as a contaminant in other plant materials. Like many grass skippers, they are orange and brown, but orange (one site describes it as “pumpkin orange”) predominates both on the upper and lower surfaces of the ES’s wings.ĮS caterpillars eat timothy grass and, to a lesser extent, a few other exotic grasses. They’re a smallish butterfly with a wingspread of 1 to 1 ½ inches and the typical chubby, hairy body of a skipper. On the other side of the Pond, European Skippers are called Essex Skippers. The caterpillars may web a few grass leaves together as a shelter and feed nocturnally. Adult Grass skippers tend to perch on flowers with their wings slightly “ajar” – the forewings held closer together than the hind wings (which can make seeing the color patterns tricky) – and the host plants of their caterpillars are mostly grasses and sedges. Įuropean Skippers are in the Skipper family Hesperiidae and in the Grass skipper subfamily Hesperiinae. The record high for this species on a single North American Butterfly Association count is 55,340 and every year the highest count is well into the thousands.” says that “It is becoming the most common skipper and considered a threat to Polites peckius.”. “This species is most impressive for its occasional abundance, far greater than that of other skippers in the northern states. They are common within that range, sometimes mind-bogglingly so.
SKIPPER CATERPILLAR PLUS
They are a “cool-climate” butterfly that ranges across Canada and the northern tier of states (largely skipping the Great Plains), and throughout the Northeast, and they’re found in all sorts of grasslands, plus parks, gardens, roadsides, and wetland edges. The ES has been expanding its range ever since, both under its own power and as eggs transported in hay (in a study of hay bales, researchers found more than 5,000 ES eggs in a single bale of timothy hay, and another source referenced a range map for ESs and said that if it was more than two years old, it was out of date).
Of course, when butterflies are listed as a pest species, it’s because of the dining habits of their caterpillars.Įuropean Skippers ( Thymelicus lineola) fetched up on these shores (London, Ontario, to be exact) in 1910 – one source speculated that the eggs were carried in the seed heads of the also-alien timothy grass, possibly in dried grass that was being used, pre-“plastic peanuts,” to cushion a shipment of ceramics (a common practice in by-gone days and one that brought other alien grasses from the Old Country). What could be more benign than a butterfly? But, there’s the non-native Cabbage White butterfly (there’s even an alien orchid that’s considered invasive in some areas – read this for more about that). The BugLady has trouble wrapping her head around the idea of a non-native butterfly, especially one that’s considered a pest.
0 kommentar(er)
