The Devil in My Refrigerator

 No, the devil in my fridge is not Whit's Frozen Custard, though that stuff is temptingly close. It's a honkin' big worm! Read on...

By September 6, 2022, the hickory horned devil was walking nonstop. In nature it would be seeking soft soil it could dig down into to shed its skin and pupate.  It was time to bring the caterpillar into the house, and give it a medium it could burrow in and pupate safely. I received detailed instruction from Tami on the proper substrate. Apparently putting the caterpillar in potting soil can cause issues when perlite and peat get lodged in the exoskeleton, so clean long-fiber sphagnum is the medium of choice. I dampened it a bit with water. The caterpillar made circuits around the big plastic footlocker, tunneling through the medium. 

It had shrunken from nearly 6" to only  4, and it would continue to shrink.

Once the caterpillar starts to walk, it does little else, pausing only to curl up and sleep, and probably dream (spiders have been proven to dream, so why not devils?), then resuming its ceaseless circuit of the bin. I don't know how much ground they must cover in nature, but it's probably considerable.

Here, I briefly lift it,  then it continues to walk. 

The caterpillar was undergoing big changes inside as it walked. 

It was shrinking more and more each day. 

Yes, this is the caterpillar that once spanned my entire hand end to end. 

Here's a  photo from Tami Gingrich that highlights the size change in devils who are ready to pupate. She's gone out and plucked some examples from her mystical caterpillar farm in northern Ohio. The huge green ones are still eating,  as evidenced by the leafy twigs they're on, and the little turquoise curled ones are ready to pupate. Isn't that crazy?

Finally, the caterpillar lay still. It was time to transfer it to the plastic lunch meat container that would be its home until sometime next summer.

I could hardly believe this was the same caterpillar! A quarter for size comparison. 

The shrinking happened because it was losing water weight, and there were little droplets all over it as if it were condensing moisture, like a cold glass of ice water.  In fact, it was excreting moisture through its skin, soaking the paper towels it rested in! I kept changing them, as if it had wet its bed. It let off a strong and characteristic acrid chemical smell, which perhaps would help to protect it from being eaten, if the prickly horns and fearsome size didn't work.  It certainly didn't smell like something I'd want to eat. Even when it pupated, it kept this chemical smell. 

Here you can see the droplets it's exuding. It's going wee from every pore.

ln this photo from Sept. 11, you can see that its fabulous silk-stockinged prolegs are now just empty socklets, bits of skin. This caterpillar couldn't go anywhere now if it wanted to. Again, I wondered what it feels like to metamorphose. Does it hurt? Is it awful? Or is it like a dream state? 

The whole animal is dissolving, changing, contracting.

 Tami told me to watch for the caterpillar to turn from turquoise to olive, which would indicate it was ready to shed. This didn't happen until September 11. It seemed as good a way as any to observe Bill's and my wedding anniversary--watching a caterpillar get ready to shed its skin.  I knew the change would come soon. I hoped it wouldn't happen while I slept! 

I am pretty proud of this next video, and thankful that Tami gave me the information I needed to set myself up to catch it. On the 12th of September, 2022, the caterpillar was nearly motionless and unresponsive, as one would be with one's insides turning to goo. I set up a time-lapse with my old iPhone 6 and captured the process of shedding the caterpillar skin so the new soft pupa can emerge. Note how you can see the huge black false eyespots become part of the pupa!

Some still photos from the shedding process:

When the shedding process was complete and the pupa had darkened to mahogany brown, becoming  hard-shelled, Tami instructed me to close the pupa in its plastic sandwich container, lying on clean paper towels, and put it in the cool basement. Then, when the weather finally turned cold, I was to put it in the refrigerator. And from November to mid-May, there it would stay. Once a month, I would check on it, put two drops of water on the paper towels, and put it back in the fridge. I know I checked on it more often than that. I didn't want to forget there was a miracle going on in my basement refrigerator.

The whole process seemed so bizarre to me, so apart from nature, and I was a little uncomfortable with keeping this magnificent beast in mesh netting, albeit outdoors on a live tree; and then in a footlocker; and then in a Hillshire Farms sliced ham container. I was afraid I'd mess up somewhere along the way and doom it. At the same time, I knew I was locking it away from any number of predators and parasitic wasps and flies. I had been chosen by Fate to be the keeper of this precious gem. This was to be my quest. I had taken the insect in on August 8, when its sibling was eaten by a bird,  and I realized this one would probably die, too, unless I did something. Kept fed and safe within a mesh sleeve on my persimmon tree until September 6; watched as it walked until it pupated on September 12...then stored in my basement fridge until mid May  2023... I felt so privileged to be able to witness the caterpillar's entire life cycle and even participate in it. One caterpillar--what a gift it was; nearly a whole year of watching and waiting.

And the reason I've waited to tell you what happened with the caterpillar is because I needed to know how it all worked out. I didn't want to have you fall in love with this magnificent creature, only to have to tell you it ended up as a puddle of goo in my refrigerator, oops, sorry, got you all worked up for nothing. I waited to see her through. Blogging about the life of something like this is like being a press agent to a large green and blue tubular celebrity, and I take that responsibility seriously. 

Next: we wait eight months, and hope eight months. But you won't have to wait that long.

Devil on the Move

The ironweed was in bloom, and a Pleasing Picture-winged Ant Lion paused for its portrait on September 5, 2022. Fairies exist! If you ever see one fly, you'll believe it. These insects fly like they're doing it for the first time, suspended half-vertically, beating those lovely pictured wings madly...they look like someone impersonating a dragonfly, and doing it very badly. Oh they are so special! 

 If it kind of snaps your neck to go back nearly a year to September 2022, it does that to me, too. But now I have to tell  you the rest of the story of the hickory horned devil I protected in the summer of 2022.  I can't say I raised it; the persimmon tree did that; I just covered it with a huge fine mesh sleeve to keep the braconid wasps and tachinid flies from parasitizing it. Here it is, in situ, with the sleeve open for photography. You'll have to click on the photo to see it very well.

The caterpillar was undergoing some dramatic color changes as it grew, and grew, and grew. 

Let's have a close look at the amazing gripperdoodle at the stern of this beast.

It reminded me of a silicone potholder, the way it folded over the twig and fastened with something akin to Velcro, ensuring the massive caterpillar would not fall to its death. 

My caterpillar guru Tami Gingrich told me that when it turned color to a pale and vibrant turquoise, it would begin the wandering phase, and indeed it did, ceasing to eat and walking all over its enclosure. This is the stage at which most people find hickory horned devils walking around, looking for a place to dig into the earth. I was bemused to see one make the newspapers that same month. I can't think of anything more newsworthy than seeing this creature gallumphing down a sidewalk.

Figuring it was at its largest and heaviest, and knowing it would eat no more, I weighed it to see where it topped out, on September 5, 2022.

It's about 22 gm, almost an ounce. 

Let's put that in perspective. 

It weighs as much as a fat adult big brown bat (22 gm)! 

Almost twice as much as a chipping sparrow (12gm)! 

More than a junco, or an orchard oriole (both 19 gm)!

You get the idea. It's a Very Large Caterpillar.

But it is soon to become something entirely other. 

Moving Into Blue

Oh how swiftly recent memories become ancient history, especially in fall, when everything changes so fast from hour to hour. The common milkweed that was blooming like mad on September 1 has now dropped all its yellowed leaves, and I'm nursing along the very last chrysalis of summer, which should eclose any day now. Yes, those are the Three Graces in the background (thinking about how cool it would be to make a book of my photos of those trees over the years!) I like this one!

On September 1, I was pleased to find the American dittany blooming in the gasline cut t the back of the property. It's a dainty little thing with a wonderful sharp turpentiney smell when you rub the leaves. 

It won't be long before this plant will be making another kind of flower! After the first hard frost, when the tops are killed back, the plant's root's will continue pumping water through the shattered stems, making frostflowers!

Out in the meadow, the tall coreopsis was putting on an amazing show. It came up in places where I'd never seen it before, perhaps thanks to the abundant wet summer. I love how this meadow changes year to year. This year it was off the hook spectacular.

As I write on Oct. 26, it hasn't really frozen yet, which is amazing, considering how cold it got in the second week of October. I'm going to jump in the wayback machine now to show you the Hickory Horned Devil from September 1-4. 

Changes are its gargantuan size

and a notable increase in the intensity of turquoise blue in its anterior parts.

The devil is pretty implacable at this point. I'm trying to get it to open up its "eyes" by curling its head down, but fail to make it feel threatened enough to do that. It truly is a fearsome looking but utterly harmless creature, my own personal Beast.

On Sept. 2, I measured it with my hand. That's a 6.5" caterpillar, folks!

Shila came to see and photograph the beast. It dwarfs her largeish iPhone. 

                                        

Sept. 3 saw it still eating like there was no tomorrow. Still, it didn't make an appreciable dent on the young persimmon tree. I knew how big they could get, and was a bit worried, but I never had to move the nylon netting once it was installed. I probably could have raised a bunch on that same tree without compromising the tree. 

 I had fun looking at its legs, wrapped securely around the twig. 

Sept. 4: My hand for scale. 

Gripperdoodle/potholder clamped, check!

And look at those wonderfully ooky two-toned prolegs, all wrapped around the twig! 

Sept. 4--the turquoise is blooming! And we know what that means. The bluer it gets, the closer it is to its next phase of development--walkabout! 

I couldn't get enough of this otherworldly shade, especially in contrast to the orange horns.

Neither could Liam. We visited it daily. 

I'll leave you with a video that mesmerizes me: the caterpillar, turning on a twig. Look how careful it is. See how the gripperdoodle is its best insurance against falling; how it doesn't release the orange potholders until it has a firm grip with the true legs by its head. I had been wondering where the poop chute is: it's between the gripperdoodle potholders. So it must have to release the mechanism to poop. I wish I'd seen that. 

Enjoy the amazing coordination of its many legs, the surety of its movements. I sure did. 

 

Countershading and Caterpillars--Hickory Horned Devil, August 27-31

I know it's been awhile since I posted a Hickory Horned Devil installment. Whoa it's been a busy fall! Thank goodness I took a few days to gather, edit, and upload all these photos so I could write the posts later. It takes forever to get them to load on my LTE-based Internet. Anyway, enough yangin'. I've got power and Internet, and that's a lot more than about a million Floridians have after that SOB Ian hit them.

This post covers a four-day span when the Devilworm was growing into its long silk stockings, getting more colorful by the day--even by the hour! 

27 August, 4:10 pm

Its face on 28 August. I love the little true legs clasped up under its chin like Dr. Evil!

The Alice in Wonderland comparison is apt. All this worm needs is a big amanita to sit on, and a hookah. Why didn't I arrange that?

People have been sending me newspaper clippings about people finding hickory horned devils. I love that. I think it reflects a growing awareness of caterpillars and just how cool they are. Would that have made the newspaper ten years ago? Doubting it. 

30 August--the dorsal zone is turning pale turquoise. This fifth instar is really a gas, with the psychedelic colors coming in. 

And here is where the Devil name comes from--the Ray-Bans on the dorsal surface of its thorax. The caterpillar has to be kind of annoyed to expose them. When it's feeling threatened, the caterpillar tucks its head against its underside, stretching the thorax to display the black "eyes." I love this look so much.

Just the best smile, don't you think? Or some say it's a Dali mustache. To me it looks like a devil with an orange crown, slightly askew. 

The caterpillar is so used to me I have a hard time getting it to expose the black spots I love to photograph. This is what the Ray-Ban's look like, closed up. I'm trying to get the bug to bow its head but nothing doing. Look how pale the dorsum, or back, of the animal is in this photo. Stay tuned for the reason.

Some mega-frass from the fifth instar devil. I open the sleeve and shake it to the ground daily to keep things clean in there. They look enough like grenades that I'm worried they'll blow up. The frass reflects the shape of the gut. That's a lot of absorptive surface!

Countershading is a fascinating natural phenomenon, and it is employed  by invertebrates and ungulates, fish and birds, to name a few. Check out the elegant countershading on these impala kids I photographed grooming each other in the Kruger of South Africa. Just where the belly starts to turn under and would be thrown into shadow in strong light, the local color of the animal lightens. And it goes to pure white on the underbelly. The net effect is that the animal's form loses its apparent shape and is flattened out, making the impala harder to see at a distance. They melt into the grass. 

This is called countershading, because the paler local color of the belly counteracts natural shadows. 

So when you've got a large, tasty caterpillar that habitually hangs upside down under twigs, the countershading is applied backward! With the HHD, its underside is darker than its dorsum, or top side. 

So it's hard to discern the creature as a rounded form--it dissolves into a patchwork of patterns, flattens out, and is really hard to see. The pale chevrons further break up its form. Perfect camouflage!

This is the sleeve. The caterpillar is about a third of the way down. Its camouflage is terrific. Sometimes I spent many minutes looking for it before I could see it. I knew it couldn't get out of the sleeve with the rope tightly wrapped at both ends, but I still sometimes concluded it had escaped before I finally saw it.

The pale chevrons on its flanks perfectly mimic the sun striking leaf edges, as you can see in this photo.

They and the countershading of the pale dorsum and dark underside make it simply disappear. Click on the photo to enlarge it for a better look--I'm going to bet you have a really hard time finding it in the small form.

And then there's the fascination of watching it demolish persimmon leaves. 

31 August,  7:22 pm . Enjoy your meal! 

Meet the Hickory Horned Devil

Well, you never, ever know what you're going to get into around here. Who could have known that one person's overnight visit here on August 10, 2022, would set me on a road of discovery, thought, and effort

that is only winding up now, September 12? 

But that's inspiration, and that's life when the Muse leads. And Heather was the conduit to the Muse.

A spiky, spiny, colorful, crazy Muse.

August 10, 7 pm. Heather is taking it all in. She's coming back from Chicago,

stopping to reconnect and rest.

There's so much to see and photograph and discover!

And Indigo Hill is showing well, the skies piled with huge thunderheads. 

We walked out the orchard slowly. At the end I showed her one of my littlest persimmon trees. And she looked up into its leaves and said, "Well, what's this?"

August 10, 7:14 pm. My life changed. I didn't know it yet; I just knew I was tremendously excited 

to see my second hickory horned devil on the sanctuary. And such a small one! It was barely two inches long. I hadn't even known they'd eat persimmon leaves, but the caterpillar couldn't be wrong. Heather began Googling madly on the good LTE reception we get in the orchard, and found that hickory horned devils eat a wide array of trees**, but they grow best on persimmon!

** Ash, butternut, cherry, cotton, hickory, lilac, pecan, sumac, sweet gum, sycamore, walnut...Persimmon!

Heather had to leave the morning of August 11. We went out to enjoy the better light and get some good pictures of her find. This was taken at 9:21 am. What a handsome caterpillar!

 On the morning of August 12, I walked out to visit the caterpillar and found it hanging high in the tree.

 Then I promptly found a second one! It was much smaller and lower in the tree. I couldn't believe my good luck!

By August 12, the big one was hanging sort of limply, looking like it was ready to shed. I think it was at this point I began to worry about the caterpillars. That state of worry would not abate until September 12.

You see, I didn't know that they go through periods of anorexia and inactivity before they shed their skins, and they do this four times in their caterpillar life. Like, they don't eat for a couple of days. They just hang there, looking like they've contracted something awful. (My too-informed tortured mind at work here). 

Aug 15 8:16 am--the big one has shed, and looks new and smart with white zags along its sides!

It's eating again, too, whew.

This is my last photo of the big one, from 15August, at 8:36am.

I love the red horns and the side markings. You can also see black spots on the upper back. More on those later. 

By the next morning, the big caterpillar had disappeared. 

I could find only the little one. 

15Aug 8:36am--little one.

I kept thinking I'd see the big one again, but it never happened. There were so many yellow-billed cuckoos in the orchard at that time, I had to conclude something had grabbed and eaten the big one. And that would be right in character for a YBCU. 

16 August, 8:25 AM.  I worried more with each passing day that this one would meet the same fate, spikes and horns and all. That's nothing to a cuckoo. 

The fields were turning gold, and September was doing her best, but I kept thinking about the opportunity that would be lost if I didn't do something about this. 

Lined orbweaver in its tilted web.

Day after day went by and somehow it was still there to greet me each morning, though it seemed to spend most of its time hanging upside down doing nothing. 

By 10 am on August 19, it was eating and looked snappy--must have shed its skin in there somewhere.

The caterpillar became more precious to me with each passing day. Watching it change fascinated me. I knew I had something very special in it, and I also knew that could all be snatched away with one click of a cuckoo's bill. I wrestled with myself about whether to take it in. I wanted so badly for it to realize its life in the wild. But I also wanted to witness it, and to avoid the seemingly inevitable abrupt end to our budding relationship. 

I so enjoyed my pilgrimages out to the end of the orchard to find it each morning. I would miss that!

But by the evening of August 22 I had decided to take it in. 

I got Liam to come with me to embolden me to do this thing I had thought and fought so hard and long to do.

Aug 22, 2022, 7:04 pm. The little one is now the size of the big one when it was eaten. Something about saving it felt right now. It was just too plump and tempting a target. I had to intervene.

Liam snapped this of me as we walked back from the end of the orchard. Just a woman and her 

foster worm.

I had bought a zip-up laundry basket I could keep it in, I thought. I clipped some persimmon branches and put them in water.

But as always, Nature led me down another path--the right one. 

To be continued...