Yesterday I detailed the discovery of two cocoons of the giant Promethea silkmoth. Our household has lots of experience raising monarch butterflies from egg to flyaway, but we had never before encountered a silkmoth cocoon. With the monarchs one can tell when the butterfly will emerge from the chrysalis, because it turns transparent and one can see the orange/black wings inside the evening before the eclosion (emergence). These cocoons were opaque and mysterious, so we put then in a terrarium on the screen porch and waited. We didn't have long to wait...
The first clue occurred when we noticed the curious and anomalous occurrence of an abundance of very large black/brown moths hovering around our windows. A quick check of the terrarium revealed a beautiful female Promethea that had hatched the night before. I've embedded three photos above. The top two show her resting on a stick in the terrarium; in the third she's resting on my hand in direct sunlight for a better appreciation of her immense size and her reddish-brown coloration.
The females of this species emit their pheromones at the unusual time of about 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., so the males fly in daylight toward the females. Our female had probably drawn her suitors from a radius of several miles (the males are capable of traversing 20+ miles).
The successful suitor had to traverse a much shorter distance. As it turned out, the second cocoon in the terrarium was that of a male. I'll present him - and the result of their courtship - tomorrow.
All the photos enlarge to wallpaper size with a click.