Hi everybody,
I am just a beginner at keeping butterflies and moths, and I would love to hear your thoughts on my setup. First I'll tell a little bit about how I started off, and the problems I have encountered in this short time allready. My experience so far is that it is easy to find facts like what the preferred foodplants of a species are, what colors every instar of a species has or how big the caterpillars get, but it is better to actually read about someones daily routine etc. so that's what I'm trying to do here. I hope to learn from any comments and tips that you guys are willing to give me, and that way maybe someone else can learn from this topic also, later on.
a rough start
So the first species I started with was Samia cynthia/ ricini. I'm not realy sure about the exact species and origin, because they were given to me as a gift. What I got was 20+ L1 caterpillars, who unfortunately all died within a period of three weeks time. Even though originally I wasn't planning on raising butterflies, I had really started to like taking care of the little caterpillars, and I was very disappointed at them all dying. So after a week I decided that I was going to give it another try.
second try
In the mean time I had allready started reading all I could about raising butterflies and found out that - even though this was probably not the reason for my caterpillars dying - Samia suffer from inbreeding depression. So when I had decided to give this hobby another try I started looking around for other suitable species to start with. I read that Actias selene was relatively easy to rear, and because I found both the caterpillars and the moths really attractive, I bought 25 eggs and waited for them to hatch.
maybe not so easy after all
after a couple of days about 7 eggs had hatched, and a day later another 8 caterpillars crawled into this world. Unfortunately that was all I got: the other eggs stayed unhatched. We have a Japanese cherry tree in our front yard so that was going to be the food that I would be rearing these caterpillars on. In the next couple of weeks I took care of the caterpillars exactly the way I had read: lay a piece of paper towel on the bottom of their container and changed it out every day. Fed them fresh leaves every day, that I carefully washed before placing it in theur container. I left the leaves a bit moistened, so that they would raise humidity in the container. I had met a couple of butterfly-enthousiasts in the mean time, and I had learned that they did not really consider Actias selene an 'easy' starterspecies. I was about to have the same experience, because in the next couple of weeks, the caterpillars started dying again, one by one, untill I only had two left...
Sometimes help comes unexpected
during a work-diner I was talking to a dear friend/colleague, and the caterpillars – of which I had already posted LOTS of pictures on my facebook – became the topic of conversation. I was surprised to hear that he had kept butterflies before, and he told me that Actias selene was one of the hardest species he had ever tried to raise. He had even gone as far as to buy a LOAD of eggs, and try a series of different setups and make notes so that he could find out what would work best for this species. His best results came when he kept the species in a container that was suspended above an open, tropical aquarium. We jokingly called it 'au-bain-marie'. This setup gave a slightly higher temperature, a nice and high humidity, and because of the mechanism of rising warm air: lots of ventilation (which is always a problem when you’r trying to keep temperature and humidity raised).
InspiringI don’t keep fish. At least, not at this time. I used to have close to 600 l. of aquariums, but that’s a whole other topic. Anyway, getting an aquarium set up so I could keep my caterpillars alive seemed a bit crazy, so I started thinking about how I could recreate something like the setup my friend had told me about and came up with whatI have right now.
My setup
I keep my caterpillars in 1 l containers that have holes drilled in the cover for ventilation. At the bottom of every container there’s a sheet of paper towel on the bottom, that gets changed every evening (sometimes twice a day, depending on the number and size of caterpillars that are kept in the container). Fresh leaves are provided every morning, and the old leaves from the day before (or what’s left of them) are taken out when changing the paper towel. That way most caterpillars will have moved to the fresh leaves on their own, and you don’t have to touch them.
The containers are all placed inside a 80 x 40 x 40 cm terrarium with a ventilated top. Every morning I place two soupbowls filled with HOT water inside the terrarium and close the terrariumwindows. The bowls raise both the temperature and humidity, and because warm air moves up, the top ventilation gives a bit of fresh air. When I get home from work I repeat this process, and when I go to bed, again I place two bowles of hot water. This last time however, I leave one of the windows open for just a cm. This way the humidity and temperature will not raise quite as much, but the rising warm air will give a great flow of ventilation through the open terrariumwindow. This has been working great for me, I don’t have any butterflies (moths) yet, but my last two caterpillars of Actias selene lasted, and started on their cocoons this week. Other species I am keeping in the same way right now (in the same terrarium actualy, but eatch species in their own containers ofcourse) are Antherina suraka and Morpho peleides.
wow, ok so this turned into quite the epistle Hoping to hear how you guys work, and if there are any tips. So, here come the pictures:
from left to right, my Actias selene in their cocoons, one container with 7 Antherina suraka caterpillars almost getting ready to pupate, and three containers of 15 L3/ L4 Morpho peleides caterpillars each.
my setup after placing the bowls of hot water, all fogged up
curious te hear what you guys think!