Majestic Moths 5

I once raised promethea moths. Here is my story.

I was disking a field on what my father called the “farm south of town” The land in Indiana was so near what had been the prairie that it was flat and had almost no trees. There was a tiny tree, a wild cherry, in the northern fencerow. When my tractor pulled alongside it, I could not believe my eyes. Could they really be cocoons? I hopped down from the tractor and strode over to the tree for a closer look. Sure enough! There were seven promethea cocoons tied lightly to the branches with silk. Each cocoon had adhered to a waxy amber leaf in such a way that predators would see leaves, not cocoons. How had the mother moth found the wild cherry so far from any other trees? … and how had so many larvae lived to the pupal stage of their metamorphosis?

Female Promethea Moth

Photographed by Tom Peterson, Fermilab

With Marking Like a Human Profile on Underside of Wing

I collected them all and took them home. Within a few days of one another, all seven cocoons “hatched,” if you will. The adult moths mated, and I provided branches from another wild cherry tree for one of the females to lay her eggs on leaves. (The others were released.) I never dreamed what a job I had just given myself! When the eggs hatched, I had to supply fresh leaves of the wild cherry on which the larvae dined. I had some ninety larvae, and, as they grew larger and entered into successive instars, or periods of development culminating in the shedding of their larval exoskeletons, they required more and more leaves. The box in which I kept them also had to be replaced by ever larger boxes. Toward the end, I was harvesting armloads of wild cherry leaves twice a day! Many of the larvae failed to survive—most of them perishing during an instar transition that did not go well. Eventually, I had thirty-three new cocoons. I vowed I would not repeat the experiment of raising promethea moths, and I kept my vow. When the second brood of adults emerged from the cocoons, I released all of them.

Promethea Moth Pair

Photographed by Tim Dyson

For the Peterborough Examiner

The scientific name of the moth is Callosamia promethea. Like all the moths I have described in these blogs thus far, the promethea is a silk moth in the family Saturniidae. It shares dimorphism with the io moth: the wings of the males are a velvety purplish brown with pale yellow edges while the wings of the females are reminiscent of the cecropia—only more tan than gray. Measured in inches, the wingspan can reach three and three-quarters. Beneath the wings of both females and males are markings that I see as profiles of human faces!

The moth is named for Prometheus, the well-known Titan in Greek myth who, as the creator of human beings and as an advocate for his creations, stole fire from the gods on Mount Olympus. In the strange ways that the Saturniidae moths become the topics of spiritual musings, I might ask if, quite by accident, the moth might have been named for a long-forgotten goddess named Promethea.