“The beautiful egg-shell remains erect, the form being unchanged.
There is a ragged hole in it, but it is scarcely noticeable, and
appears hardly large enough for the egress of the caterpillar.”
THE CATERPILLAR
“The newly emerged larva does not venture far from the egg-shell and
does not move about much for the first five or six hours. It sometimes
devours the shell, but this is not usually the case. At the age of six
hours it appears darker, and the black spots from which the hairlike
spines protrude have become more conspicuous. Has not eaten any of the
leaf, and has increased in size very little if at all.”
“At the age of twenty-seven hours the larva attains a length of 2.3
mm. and has eaten several small holes in the center of a large leaf,
gnawing through the leaf to the transparent epidermis on the opposite
side, which is left intact. Usually works from the upper side, but by
no means invariably.”
“These smaller larvae seem to be always attached to the leaf with silk,
although the threads are very few and fine. More mature larvae feed
differently; they grip the petiole with the prolegs, and eat from the
edge inward and forward, swinging the head toward the midrib, with
practically no lateral motion.”
“The caterpillar is cylindrical and bears six rows of black, branching
spines, twelve in each row. As regards color, there are besides the
reddish, newly hatched creature described above, two well-defined
types: the orange-drab and the drab-orange. In the first the body
appears orange with three narrow drab stripes, and a very narrow
lateral line just above the prolegs. In the second the drab markings
become very much more prominent, so that the body now appears drab with
four narrow orange stripes. The narrow drab dorsal line of the younger
caterpillar becomes very conspicuous in the mature larva, separating
the dorsal surface into two distinct orange areas. As the orange-drab
type seems to embrace all of the smaller larvae, and as all those about
to pupate belong to the drab-orange type, I have assumed that the color
change is a matter of maturity.”
MOULTING
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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