24. Peacocks and Ermine

Above is a Peacock butterfly Aglais io, and it did not hatch this year, this hatched last year and over wintered in my green house. Peacock butterflies are easy to recognise with the big 'eyes' on the forewings, and the slightly duller eyes on the hind wings. They're also a big butterfly, 50 - 55 mm across. All the butterflies that hibernated through winter are now mating and laying eggs, then they will die.

The males are quite territorial and will hang around a good spot, maybe a garden with a dripping outdoor tap and a buddleia plant, but they especially guard nettles, they then warn off other males and mate with single female that comes for the plants or water source, then the males die. This is called monadrous mating behaviour, monadrous butterflies have short lifespan compared to butterflies that mate with several females

  

The mated female will then have to find one of only three plants to lay her eggs on, hop Humulus lupulus, small nettle Urtica urens  or stinging nettle Urtica dioca.

The eggs are tiny about 3 mm and green laid on the underside of the leaves of the host plant, they hatch out into black spikey caterpillars which can been seen in large communes hanging heavy off nettle plants.

But this is nothing compared to a caterpillars I found down a lane in Poringland last year, so dense was the silk and and the thousands of larvae that a whole tree was being consumed.

It was Ermine moth but I wasn't sure which one. These are the pictures I took and at the time (2019), I knew about this moth but had never seen it in real life.

I think this one was probably Spindle ermine moth Yponomeuta cagnagellus, mainly because the larvae were not hairy which ruled out many ermine moth species, and from what I could tell of the host tree/shrub it was possibly Spindle, it definately wasn't hawthorn or prunus. 

Not only had these moths eaten the leaves - which I was expecting - they had also eaten the petioles (stalks) and the new growth shoots the petioles were attached to.

Not something I see in Stoke Road, Poringland often, or anyone else I suspect, because lots of cars were stopping to take snaps.

UK Moths (2020) Spindle Ermine. Available at: https://www.ukmoths.org.uk/species/yponomeuta-cagnagella/ (Accessed on; 20/03/2020)