The garden is usually a place of happiness, escape and calm. This year I gave up using Roundup so there are parts that have gone rogue. I get a bit tense about them, but that's not what's got me in a funk about my garden. The despair comes from my inability to raise butterflies successfully, it's just been a hell of a summer.
Last year was over the top with monarchs, night flowers, frogs, etc... Morning visits this year turn up with dead monarch larvae and black chrysalis's. One morning I gathered 11 dead monarch caterpillars and that's when I decided that I needed to know the answer. My first thought was the parasite known as OE, which is present on a large percentage of our butterfly populations and will kill the host when their presence is so high that the caterpillar is too weak to live. For this particular problem there is little that can be done, so my funk deepened. I reached out to someone that knows all about raising monarchs and she suggested an alternative culprit - stink bugs. A few things she said started to make me a believer; they feed at night so the dead are found in the morning, they love fennel (which I have gobs of ), and the dead caterpillars have a kink in their body where the feeding tube was inserted by the stink bug to suck them dry. As I sent her photographs she confirmed the problem and suggested I go out at night with a headlamp to hunt them down. I still had some doubts (I will admit) but when I repeatedly found the stink bugs feeding I knew she was right.
For such small insects, no more than a quarter of an inch large, they have an astounding appetite. Maybe it's just a cyclical year and next year will be better. I'm certainly hoping.
Then came the inability of my monarchs to go from chrysalis to adult butterfly. This was a really big problem as I have only found one chrysalis that has successfully incubated or completed its life cycle. The tachinid fly is responsible for these deaths, a parasite of other butterflies as well, the fly egg is deposited on the caterpillar, often when it's hanging in the J position to begin the chrysalis building. The fly larvae feed on the caterpillar's blood, growing until it occupies up to half of the poor host's body. They emerge on a silky thread to drop to the ground and continue their incubation. The blackened chrysalis and hanging string are both indications of tachinid flies. I can only begin to imagine the effort involved in trying to function with something living inside of you, eating away. To make it even more unimaginable, they may have up to 6 tachinid fly larvae feeding inside!
There are other parasites as well. A very large wasp family, the ichneumon wasps will also parasitize, which leads one to wonder how can any of these caterpillars succeed?
Those 2 holes aren't peep holes, just another parasite attack. My comment to my knowledgeable friend went something like; "horror movie writers must be gardeners". I think she got a chuckle out of that, but really, wouldn't you agree?
And I know that the only alternative is to raise my butterflies inside, but that too has its own set of problems. So with each day, and my garden has at least 3 monarchs flying around at any given time, I will observe and try and teach myself enough to help where I can and not let the garden become a place of depression.
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