This is really a response to Rich's caterpillar crisis entry of yesterday. But I have to say something about bugs in general in the garden. There are lots of them and they are there to eat mostly. However, in over ten years of gardening in the same back yard I have yet to lose a plant to bug eating—well, not quite. Snails and slugs can consume seedlings and small plants in five minutes. And a tomato hornworm the size of a blimp can eat half a tomato plant in an afternoon. But those creatures are easy to identify and there are a million ways to deal with them (including eating THEM).
Besides the snail problem—which disappeared when the racoons and opossums began to regularly visit my garden—I have found that just about any plant-eating bug that appears is soon consumed by some bug-eating bug, or bird, or something else. My first bug crisis—spring rosebuds covered with aphids—lasted for about 3 weeks until I noticed the presence of little orange and black creatures on the same plants. At first I thought they were some alternate specie of earwig. I finally looked them up in a book and found they were actually the nymph stage of the lady bug. The lady bug nymph is a prolific consumer of aphids.
Then there were the various creatures associated with my compost bin...more on that later. I guess the moral of this story is "find out what it is before you kill it." Because it might actually be harmless or precious. I suspect that the caterpillar eating Rich's hollyhocks is some California butterfly or moth species for which the hollyhock is a host plant.
Not having my California Butterflies field guide (which has pictures of the caterpillars too) handy, I looked on the Web for a something that would help. The most useful site so far is the USGS web site.
To start, I looked for an orange and black colored butterfly like the Painted Lady. I found the West Coast Lady, in the same butterfly family, and read the entry. It seems these butterflies are very fond of many plants in the Mallow Family—of which Hollyhocks are a member.
This site had a photo of the West Coast Lady in its caterpillar forms.
Posted by briggs at November 22, 2002 11:45 AM