Tags
British butterflies, butterfly, caterpillar, Painted Lady, Painted lady caterpillar, Painted lady larva, Vanessa cardui
Some of the 20-plus Painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) in yesterday’s enchanting wildflower meadow were faded so probably migrants, but many had colours that were rich and vibrant, leading me to think they were most likely locally bred and recently emerged. This new generation contains the butterflies that will migrate from Britain in the autumn, returning to the locations where their parents originated.
Perhaps due to the large numbers of Painted ladies that arrived here this year, I have, for the first time, seen many Painted lady caterpillars. My butterfly bible, Peter Eeles’s Lifecycles of British & Irish Butterflies, tells me the female lays up to 500 eggs, each singly, most often on thistles but also on burdocks, Common nettle, and mallows amongst others.
After it hatches, the larva spins itself a little web in which to live, eating away the surrounding leaf, until its food is exhausted. It them moves to a new leaf and spins another web (as the caterpillar in the photo above is doing), and so it continues for approximately four weeks when it reaches its fifth instar and is ready to pupate.
These miniature leaf-and-silk structures are quite obvious on plants like thistles; you can usually see the caterpillar inside and there is an accumulation of frass in the bottom of the structure. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to find a pupa – that is also found inside a specially spun silk tent of leaves … maybe next year.
