A few days ago my Granddaughter and I were in the kitchen when she exclaimed "Gross! There is a disgusting bug on the window"! I turned around to see a big American Dagger Moth on the outside screen--not long ago I had seen the Fuzzy Yellow Caterpillar that would eventually become a moth and it started me wondering, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Since caterpillars can "over winter" in a cocoon stage, I didn't really think that this moth could have come from that particular caterpillar so quickly, but did that mean that this moth emerged from the cocoon in the spring? Some research on the Internet told me that adult moths lay eggs, which "hatch" to become a caterpillar which will later cocoon and emerge as the moth and the cycle starts all over again--but how could I see a caterpillar in late August or September and a few weeks later see the adult moth?The answer is more complicated that I imagined, can vary by species and even within a species--it can also be affected by latitude, the time of the year and weather conditions and to make it even a little more bewildering, there can be one or more "flights" (a generation of adults), a spring flight and a summer flight--a summer flight can "overwinter" and emerge in the spring!! I think that this moth was from a summer flight, but then??? I am not sure! The more I looked at the information I found on an Internet search, the less sure I became!
While all this is not very important given the state of our world, it reassuring to know (with a little caution) that you can find the answers to just about anything you want to know just by typing a question or word or statement into a search engine--I am not even going to relate what I found out about the sex life of the Dragonfly! Let's just say that 50 Shades of Grey has nothing on the Dragonfly--
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