Wow, it looks like she left you the mother lode there, Sherry! ;-) I think the most I ever had in a bunch was about 24. They're my very favorite caterpillar to raise. I love to put a few lengths of vine in a big storage container and watch the cats scurry along on their way to somewhere that I guess they have in mind. They always make it look like it's urgent. Ha. That's a Carolina wren for ya, building a nest in such a strange place. One year I had a pair build a nest on one of the shelves in my workshop after those little opportunists sneaked in there a few days when I had the door open and made themselves right at home. I didn't shut the door again until after the babies fledged. I have bluebird houses stacked up in our corncrib and one year the Carolina wrens made a nest in one of them even with it turned upside down. My dad had one build a nest in his fishing net one yet. Out of all of the birds that I get here, I call them the most eccentric. :) They sure are cute little things and they love the peanut butter/cornmeal/shortening mix that I put out in a log feeder for them in the winter. Cathy

"Funny Sherry I was wondering the same thing about inbreeding, never have seen any mention of it when reading about captive breeding." When I showed up here almost 7 years ago, I took some people to task about the way they were releasing large numbers of inbred giant silk moths. That went over like a lead weight so I have pretty much kept my mouth shut since then. Ladobe criticized one of our members about it last year but no one followed up on it. The quote was "Besides weakening the gene pool, forced inbreeding produces low egg viability, high malformation risk and so therefore high mortality. Not a good practice." One consequence of moth inbreeding helped cause a shift in USDA policy last month. The USDA no longer regulates interstate shipments of Bombyx mori. Those moths are so inbred they can no longer survive in the wild. I raise relatively large numbers (up to 400 of one type) of Saturniidae every year. I go to great lengths to try to make sure the wild males that my girls mate with are not the brothers or the male first cousins that I released. I also try to make sure my released males and females do not mate with each other. I do this by doing releases at least 10 miles (usually more) from my house and releasing the females and males at least 10 miles (usually more) away from each other. I used to mark my males to make sure they were not finding their way home but quit being that paranoid after years of never getting one back. I release at least 10 miles away because 7 miles seems to be the generally accepted maximum distance that a male Saturniidae can follow a female's pheromones. That said, I have seen a claim that male giant silk moths can follow female pheromones for "nearly 30" miles. YMMV I preface my next statement by saying I have no clue how this guy operates. There is a guy in Ohio that raises 3k-4k cecropias each year. I read that he has been raising them since '86. Something wiped out his cats in 2008 and he had to start over in 2009. I'm real curious if inbreeding affected his setup and I'd like to know what happens to all the moths he doesn't sell (IOW, do they get let go). As for inbreeding butterflies and affecting the gene pool, there is a lot of info/controversy on the net about it because of people raising butterflies for mass release at weddings. One related article I have posted before is linked at the end of this post. Last thought: I know of one inbred butterfly that has been studied a lot: monarchs on Hawaii. I believe around 20% of them are white now. My guess is they do alright because the favorable weather conditions don't put a lot of stress on them. They would probably have trouble with migrating to Mexico and surviving the winters there. Anyway, there is a lot of research out there about them. KC Here is a link that might be useful: All Aflutter

I'm glad you're still raising cats, Dan! There are a good many moths whose caterpillars are beautiful, while the adult moths are plain brown things, roper. Some of the slug caterpillars, like the stinging rose cats, are quite beautiful - the adults aren't. Here's a picture I made several years ago of a dagger moth cat that I thought was quite fetching - The little pipevine swallowtail caterpillars are growly rapidly, and I released my first adult PVS from the second batch of 2014 today, a female. This will be my third batch! We've had a lot of rain lately, so maybe the pipevines will be able to keep up. Sherry

I forgot to answer your question about giant swallowtail host plants. I have several wafer ashes, and that's the favorite of GSTs here. I had to cut nearly all the leaves off all of them to feed my GST cats this year, plus I used rue. They didn't lay any eggs on my orange or satsuma trees this year, so I didn't use citrus leaves. Two of my young rue plants died recently right after the heat wave we had in June, and another one has dead parts on it. I've got one rue plant that I've had for years that's still going strong. It's growing in the shade of a my Ellen's Blue butterfly bush and a rose bush, so I think they really need the shade. I'm thinking about replacing the dead rues with more wafer ash/Ptelea trifoliata. I had planted rue, because black swallowtails use it, too. So maybe I'll replace the dead rues with wafer ashes, and when they've attained some size, I'll plant some rue underneath them. And maybe I'll plant some rue in the shade of other plants, like my big orange tree. The leaves have all grown back on the wafer ashes, which is good. I've released 27 giant swallowtails so far, and there are a good many chrysalides left, so I'll probably be needing more GST host plants soon! Sherry