This caterpillar is on a native passion flower vine on my porch and seems to be eating itself out of house and home. I'm worried that there's nothing left for it to eat. I have other passion flower vines I could move it to but they may be of a different species (but still native). Is that a bad idea?
by texbuck40
2 Comments
That one is big enough it might be looking to move to a place to pupate. You still have a little bit of leaf over there it could be eating. I find them in all sorts of weird places when they are that size and about to make a cocoon.
Yeah so this happens to me every year – we plant passiflora incarnata and caerulea for them to eat and then they show up in droves and eat it down to the stems. We play a game of musical chairs moving them from the smaller plants to the bigger plants to try to lengthen their food runway but they always run out and those left without food will end up dying. We collect them in a coffee can and take them to other vines in the neighborhood once this happens, but the vines more or less never get reestablished all summer after that initial swarming.
I wouldn’t play around with other species. They MIGHT eat passiflora edulis, but i’ve never been able to confirm this. Like the other user mentioned, this one is mature and since it ran out of food it will probably just go find a spot to hang itself. If there are any others though, you’ll probably want to move them. Btw this guy very likely killed off your next generation because they’ll eat the leaves right out from under the eggs.