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?
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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.
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Promethea
Moth Pair
Photographed
by Tim Dyson
For
the Peterborough Examiner
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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.
