Rewilding My Lot

When a butterfly visits a plant it is usually for one of two reasons: (male or female) to feed from flowers or (female) to lay eggs on leaves of host plants. It’s usually quite easy to tell which is happening by watching which parts of the plant are visited, for how long, and by whom.

Recently I watched a female Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae) butterfly lay eggs on the Scarletfruit Passionflower (Passiflora lanuginosa).

This butterfly was almost constantly in motion, so I wasn’t able to get good photographs. It stopped briefly at about a dozen locations on the plant and in just a few seconds was able to deposit an egg on the upper or lower surface of a leaf before moving on.

After the Gulf Fritillary had finished, I was able to see and photograph one of the eggs that it had placed. It’s a tiny dot on the left side of the leaf in this picture.

The egg laying occurred on a Wednesday. By Friday morning in the same location as the egg pictured above was the tiniest caterpillar (photo below). Apparently it had been hatched long enough to eat its egg casing, but not long enough to noticeably start eating leaves.