Pipevine Swallowtail

Battus philenor
Pipevine Swallowtail

Here's the story of our new children. We finally got a Swallowtail to visit our patch of Aristolochia californica, California Pipevine after 9 years of waiting and it's been fun following their trials an tribulations. At least 17 larvae have been seen, 14 eggs that I saw and another three caterpillars from a second batch before the cat chased the butterfly away.

Here's "Momma". She flew back & forth, around in circles looking for the right place to lay these eggs for quite a while before committing. It seems she wanted a protected location with a bit of afternoon sun.

Isn't he/she a lovely child?

They like to chomp off the tips of branches and chew them down a bit.

Here's a couple chewing on a seed pod.

When the kids were young, they were very gregarious, eating in groups. Their first feast was a branch tip like the previous picture with all 14 of them chewing in unison, then they broke up into lines of 5 chomping away at leaves. Even at an inch & a half, they are still a few couples sticking together although we saw one couple picking on each other competing for a particularly juicy tip.

When you poke them, some will stick out their forked yellow jelly tongue to make a fuss.

A less extended tongue wag.

Another handsome child. We just love to go out every afternoon and watch them.

This individual is getting ready to shed his/her skin. You can tell it's tight. See the last pictures for the skin shedding.

Another lovely child!.

They are messy eaters, cutting only as much as 2/3 of the leaf, leaving ragged leftovers and often dropping big scraps on the ground. They make poops bigger than their eggs now.

You can actually hear them eating! "snap, snap, snap"

Boo!

Interesting detail of a backlit leaf.

A couple. Keeping a competitive distance but still gregarious.

This guy is resting before molting. They assume this position (scrunched up with shoulder raised like a chrysalis) before shedding their skin and proceeding to the next 'instar'. The resting peiod seems to last a day and occur after a couple days of eating

You can see that he/she has lighter yellow spikes after molting (the skin is on his/her rear end in this photo). They puff themselves up with air after molting to stretch the new skin and make room for growth as shown in this picture. The stretched skin then shrinks down giving a velvety look.

A freshly shed skin on the backside of a leaf (not much to it).

One person said that the chemicals in the vine actually kill some of the larvae as a defense for the vine being too badly damaged while it tries to recover, the new growth is especially rich some other poisonous plants. We discovered that they do eat things other than Pipevine, including Thimbleberry [Rubus] and Ninebark [Physocapus] (the most available options). We wonder if this is why Momma was so careful placing the eggs so that they would not eat the wrong plants and would not get a yummy flavor so the birds could not safely eat them. They do eat mostly Pipevine but more than a nibble of these other plants. We were really worried when they were young, some of them were not eating properly and seemed to spend too much time resting. There is a big difference in size between siblings, as much as double. It does appear that most of the puny ones have survived though. There is still tons of vine for them to eat.

The eggs were layed on 6-29 and hatched on 7-11-03 (our ten year wedding anniversary).