I promised awhile ago to post pictures of the little lovelies in the lab. Unfortunately I haven't had the change to grab any good pictures yet, but I do have some pictures of little wanna-be escapees from when we were harvesting the larvae from the paper bags (yes, breeding butterflies is soo high tech...) to transfer into wooden blocks. These blocks get misted with water and then stuck in the fridge where the larvae will experience 'winter' until spring time.
I believe these are Speyeria butterflies and larvae. The other species we're working on I haven't got pictures of yet, but we've got a batch of them in the second or third instar and hopefully they'll be big and happy enough to make pupla soon. We've got the heat lamps going on full force still on timers so they think that it's high summer.
Here's one escapee that made it particularly far, he was climbing up the side of the plastic box we use to keep it all contained while we're working.
These little guys climbed out of their hole and were try to run away! Don't they know they're more protected inside? I guess not.
You can see then climbing up on the sides. This block is a little too full, we ended up transferring some into another block.
Click to zoom!
Label the blocks with information, so we know who came from which Mama Butterfly later. After a female lays her eggs, she dies, and we take her body and preserve it and sequence the DNA, so we know what these guys are supposed to look like.
Some of the little lovelies in their cloth mesh cage. At this point they're getting pretty beat up by having to stay in the cage and beating on each other. Also because of handling when we have to hand-feed, them. But the Prof just got the cyanide in, so he has started to mate some of the butterflies.
We're on the last few bags of eggs now, the ones from the butterflies we collected on Labor day should be hatching sometime soon, so all the heavy genetics and DNA work starts this week. Joy.
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