The larvae of this species feed on plants in the Passifloraceae family, which includes the passion vines. There are many kinds of passion vine, both natural species and human made hybrids. Passion fruit, in fact, is produced by the passion vine known as Passiflora edulis. In Florida, I located eggs on an ornamental hybrid called 'Incense'. This is a cross between Passiflora incarnata and Passiflora cinnicata.
The above picture shows two eggs, one on each leave; they are the two little yellow dots. This was actually not taken in Florida, but on a previous trip to Hawai'i. These were eggs found on Passiflora edulis, the species that produces the commercially available passion fruit.
Within 3 days, both eggs hatched into tiny tiny caterpillars. They are about 2 mm long at this point and are a reddish brown. You can't really see too much detail at this point. They have a black dot for a head capsule, and if you look really hard, you can barely make out little hairs on them.
As all caterpillars do, they start eating as much as they can, as soon as they can! The caterpillar is still in the first instar, but is visibly larger. You can see that it has devoured quite a bit of leaf material for its size. I personally find these chew marks adorable. Sometimes in the wild when I'm searching for butterflies, I don't come across eggs or caterpillars, but I will come across these characteristic chew marks on the leaves of their host plants, and then I know that even if I don't see them, they are around. In such cases, all you have to do is be patient and keep searching, and eventually you'll find something.
This is a second instar caterpillar, probably close to 1 cm in length now. You no longer have to squint to see some degree of detail. The hairs on their bodies are now little black spines. However, they aren't really that sharp. You can easily pick up full grown caterpillars and the spines don't get in the way at all.
This is a third instar larva, and from this point on, as the larva grows and molts, it doesn't really change much anymore. It becomes larger, but the color pattern stays pretty much the same.
This is a fourth instar larva, still getting bigger. At this point, their poop is getting large enough that you can actually hear them dropping. When I raise butterflies, I typically keep them on the nightstand beside my bed. At night, if the caterpillars are sufficiently large, you can sometimes hear them chewing on leaves, and quite often, you can hear when they poop as well. The caterpillars in this case are on potted passion vines, and when they poop, sometimes the pellets fall on to soil, but sometimes the pellets fall on the nightstand and I hear a little "click." It's a comforting sound - I know they are eating and happy.
I stepped out of the room for just a few minutes and missed the moult! By the time I got back, it was completely out of its old skin, so I could only take a picture of this freshly moulted fifth instar caterpillar. The shed skin is that blackish crumpled up stuff just to the right of the caterpillar. After each moult, the caterpillar will usually eat the shed skin to recycle the nutrients.
This is a fully grown fifth instar larva.
Unlike some other butterfly species that crawls off its host plant and travels some distance to find a pupation site, this species will quite often pupate near or on the host plant itself. It spins a silk pad and attaches its last pair of prolegs and then hangs upside down, similar to a Monarch butterfly.
After about 14-15 hours, it will pupate.
The pupa is a mottled brown color, with irregular bumps here and there which help break up its outline. It's attempting to mimic a dried up leaf basically. After 8 days, both pupae produced adult butterflies, and both turned out to be female.
Unfortunately, both emergence events occurred in my absence, but I do remember being quite excited to see these adult butterflies. While in Florida, I also found two eggs of Papilio palamedes (Palamedes Swallowtail) on Persea palustris (Swamp Bay), but unfortunately both eggs were parasitized and they didn't make it. That was a bit sad. Maybe one day I'll encounter more of them. The third species for which I found eggs in Florida was Battus polydamas lucayus (Polydamas Swallowtail). I will be sure to write about them in another post shortly!
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