Results from pet moth hatching

A few weeks ago I found a small green caterpillar on my rose bush. It might have well have had a label attached to it saying "generic green caterpillar" since it seemed completely average. It had no distinguishing marks at all really. The only thing I could do was to keep it as a pet, feed it and wait and see what it turned into. Did you know that for the majority of butterflies and moths in this country we do not know what the caterpillar stage looks like? There are just too many species and it is difficult to nurture some caterpillars successfully. By keeping this little dude, and photographing it, I could then match the caterpillar with the moth on Wild About Britain and potentially fill in a blank in human knowledge.
What did the caterpillar do next? Well, in the wild it was doing something typically moth like. It was making a den out of leaves. Using silk it glued the surrounding leaves into a protective shell and then hid during the daytime. This I suppose is to protect it from predators that would use sight to hunt it, such as birds. This protection also helped prevent it being found by ichneumon wasps that would use it as a host for its parasitic young. When in the jar on my desk it continued to do this leaf rolling and fed at night when it was dark.

Then on the 16th of August it spun a more secure cocoon out of sink and began to undergo metamorphosis. Its chrysalis is pictured above. Then it was just a waiting game.

Then 9 days later this pretty brown moth emerged. It was a Light Brown Apple Moth (Epiphyas postvittana). It turned out not to be scientifically significant as this is a well documented species. In the 1930s this moth was accidentally introduced to Cornwall and now is one of the most dangerous threats to the UK fruit industry. Because of this its life cycle is well known and photographed.

So all this time I was rearing a pest, but one of these days I may rear something previously un photographed. That would be really exciting.