I raise all my butterflies outside on my front porch, Marco, but there are huge numbers of cats on my pipevines outside, raising themselves. I found a pipevine swallowtail hanging on the inside of a rocker on a rocking chair on the porch the other day - its chrysalid was on the back of the chair! This one crawled as a caterpillar from the vines in my garden to pupate. Pipevine swallowtails eat aristolochia, which apparently makes them as distasteful to predators as the books say, because they're one caterpillar that never gets touched! Pipevine swallowtails are battus philenor - I LOVE them! I don't know the answer about zebra longwings and gulf fritillaries overwintering. Don't you live in an apartment? Three GF caterpillars overwintered here for the first time this year, but it was because they were on p. caerulea, which is real cold hardy, and it kept leaves all winter. They apparently hid in the leaves, because I didn't see them until it was almost spring, and they must have either gone into some sort of suspended state on the vines or eaten just little bits at the time over the winter. We had a mild winter, but we did have a few light freezes, no colder than 30 degrees, as I recall. I had been wanting to overwinter a GF as a chrysalid, thinking that was the way to go, but the chrysalids always turned black and died. I never dreamed they'd overwinter as cats! I've never raised any zebra longwings, but I'm guessing the situation is the same, except that zebras are probably more cold sensitive than GFs. I wish I could raise some! MissSherry

Posted by feral_earthlink_net >> "aristolochia triloba (not to be confused with trilobata, they are not the same)" False. Officially accepted name is trilobata; triloba is synonym. ------ Posted by angie83 >> "I tore out all my calic vine" I dug up my tree-like A. gigantea, for same reason. Replaced with A. trilobata. ------ Posted by angie83 >> "they such pigs I never have enough pipevines" Pigs for sure. For sloppiness, not amount. Individuals consume surprisingly little. Ten times more leaf pieces, sometimes nearly entire leaves, partially cover the ground. Whenever I want to stop the devatation, I take caterpillars into captivity, feed them those remnants. Always plenty of food. ------ To larry-gene: Please add A. trilobata to Polydamas list.

Angie, I saw pictures on the web somewhere of pipevine cats on a calico. I believe the posts were from california. I do know that butterflies prefer the "cultivated" plants that are closest to the ones they use in the wild in their particular area. apparently our pipevines here are cajun. just kidding. I have a report of them using fimbriata. I just bought 2 of them from my nursery and the butterfly specialist had gone to Texas to get them. she has one she just planted this year and has 1st instar cats. I am so impatient to get so many caterpillars. I have not had the luck that so many on this forum are enjoying. I have been in this new house a little over a year and a half and have yet to see half the species of butterfly I had at my other house less than 10 miles from here.I have a virtual butterfly smorgasbord. and I am not new to gardening. I go down the road (less than a quarter mile)to a friends wild property searching for plants and cats. I came across a wandering pipevine caterpillar last year but could not locate the pipevine it must have been using. It was sick anyway- spider or wasp bites.so I know we get them here. have you seen a sign of pipevines where you are?

Yesterday on a trip to the blackland prairie my perception of Aristolochia fimbriata as a small pipevine was shattered by the sight of plants that could simply not be described as a small vine. A proper description would have been lush, vibrant, and certainly no less than a medium sized Aristolochia, but these babies were more impressive in mere foliar mass than all of my pipevines except A. gigantea. The leaves were huge, their spread was wide and dense, and the amount of foliage before my eyes coming from a single plant was in excess of all of my pipevines excluding A. gigantea. Greater than that of the A. tomentosa, A. californica, A. serpentaria, A. elegans, and the A. fimbriata growing upon my grounds. The gardener who over saw these spectacular specimens had free range chickens roaming about whom de caterpillared the host plants. This could be the reason that these plants attained such great size along with the fertilization by manure. My plants have always been eaten to the ground by pipevine or goldrim swallowtails several times a year. Also these received a good bit more sun than all of mine. Well, I am going to plant some A. fimbriata in a very sunny spot up at the woods property.