During the early 1980s it was not uncommon to find the large and brightly coloured caterpillar of the Emperor moth on moorland in South Yorkshire. It is a bright green with thin yellow or pink rings which have small tufts of dark hairs. I would find them during excursions to pick bilberries on the moors near Stocksbridge. (Such visits would always subsequently turn into caterpillar hunting outings!) After one particularly prolific visit I came home with about five really nice big caterpillars - not a very ecologically friendly thing to do but I was only about 14 at the time. I put them in a box with plenty of the plant on which we had found them - probably bilberries I think. It was probably only a couple of weeks before I noticed a couple of rather curious brown hairy cocoons - not a regular chrysalis at all. I think they all pupated successfully like this, but the next spring only one moth hatched out - however it was a beautiful specimen, as this picture shows. I had seen a picture of an Emperor Moth before, but the real thing is much more vivid. Look at the stripes on the body, and the red tips on the wings. I'm not sure whether this is a male or a female.
Once it hatched out we were keen for it to thrive (probably a somewhat forlorn hope in the centre of an industrial town) and set about trying to get it to feed, without success. Some time later we discovered in a book that the adult moth does not feed at all and doesn't even have a mouth! This was one of my first glimpses of the rather weird world of insects. Our conventional notion of an "adult" does not apply in the case of the Emperor Moth, or many other species in fact, where the vast majority of the insect's life is spent as a juvenile, eating. The adult is simply the form in which reproduction can take place.
Anyway, despite still visiting the same places over the years, I now no longer see the emperor moth caterpillars - does anyone else out there have recent sightings? I have never seen one of the moths since this one - and this one was in 1983! A question - what causes the different colouration of the rings on the caterpillars? Why do some have orangey yellow rings and others have pink? Is it age, sex or something else?
The photograph was taken with a Pentax MV camera, using Fujichrome 100 film.
Once it hatched out we were keen for it to thrive (probably a somewhat forlorn hope in the centre of an industrial town) and set about trying to get it to feed, without success. Some time later we discovered in a book that the adult moth does not feed at all and doesn't even have a mouth! This was one of my first glimpses of the rather weird world of insects. Our conventional notion of an "adult" does not apply in the case of the Emperor Moth, or many other species in fact, where the vast majority of the insect's life is spent as a juvenile, eating. The adult is simply the form in which reproduction can take place.
Anyway, despite still visiting the same places over the years, I now no longer see the emperor moth caterpillars - does anyone else out there have recent sightings? I have never seen one of the moths since this one - and this one was in 1983! A question - what causes the different colouration of the rings on the caterpillars? Why do some have orangey yellow rings and others have pink? Is it age, sex or something else?
The photograph was taken with a Pentax MV camera, using Fujichrome 100 film.
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