As y'all may know, I let most of my pipevine swallowtail caterpillars raise themselves outside on my pipevines. I've been lucky that wasps don't like them, which is always the big predator around here. I've seen stink bugs eat small GST caterpillars, which is one reason I'm raising so many of them myself in cages. I noticed a group of dark colored bugs about a ?week ago on my oldest cassia bicapsularis - they were all clustered together. Then a few days ago, I found several dead pipevine swallowtail cats on the pipevines on the east fence in my garden. One of these dark colored bugs was eating one of them, so naturally I squished it, also several others that I found on the pipevine leaves. To make a long story short, they've killed just about all the cats on that group of pipevines. I've managed to kill quite a few of them today, but there are still more out there, so I brought in 15 late instar cats from my southwest vines to a cage on my porch - I'm so worried about my other cats! I've got about 75 giant swallowtail cats taking up most of my cage space. The pipevine swallowtail cats that I raised on Virginia snakeroot are all chrysalids, safely in a small cage, but there's enough room I could put a few more cats in there, also some more with the 15 I brought in this evening.

Remember when I found those two big clear eggs on my cassia bicapsularis, and Cat posted a picture of some she found just like them and the predatory insect that hatched out of them? I wonder if these bugs came out of more of those eggs that were on my cassia that I just didn't see - maybe the two types of bugs are related, and that's why their eggs are similar.

I'll be hunting them down to kill as many as I can find tomorrow, also I'll bring in more cats to protect them, as many as I can manage.

These bugs were almost totally black all over when I first saw them, but now, as they've grown (on PVS cats!) they've gotten more colorful. Here's a picture of a bigger one - anybody know what they are?

{{gwi:478358}}
MissSherry