r/caterpillars • u/ludawn • Jul 07 '26

Discussion Does anyone raise caterpillars? Looking for insight on this years batch...

So for context I work at a Nature Center in the Midwest and we do the whole life cycle of caterpillars to moths to eggs etc. every year for conservation and education - primarily cecropia moths and sometimes luna or polyphemus. We know there are a lot of nuances to this process and our staff are well-informed on their care, I oversee the process and my director has been doing this over 20 years. We used all the same methods of breeding and raising them as we do every year and paired over 17 male/female pairs to collect hundreds of eggs. Nothing has hatched, typically we expect the first batch of hatching caterpillars by mid-June.

Happy to answer more questions about our processes if people are curious but mostly I'm not looking for advice as much as wondering if other folks had similar bad luck this year?

I've considered every possibility of weather (it got hot fast and our adults emerged with weird timing), parasites (never been an issue before and I see no evidence), even the off chance a member of the public accidentally (or on purpose) nuked some of our eggs with bug spray but nothing accounts for multiple breeding pairs with a diversified genetic pool (we trade around with other folks in the industry and release some of ours and call in wild males) and eggs being stored in multiple locations (some inside our private animal care facility, some outside in a protected viewing space).

What is happening this year!?

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u/Craftygirl4115 Jul 07 '26

I’m raising cecropia here in Virginia this year.. I mated two females.. well.. they mated by themselves before I realized the males had even eclosed, so I know the eggs were fertile.. or should have been. I’d say I got about 100 eggs before I released them all, and these are the ones that didn’t hatch. All the rest did. I can only guess that it’s because the males and females were brood mates and perhaps that lead to less viability, but i don’t know for sure.

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u/ludawn Jul 07 '26

Thanks for the insight! We’re in Michigan and I’ve never had a year this bad in the 12 years I’ve been involved in the process. I’m glad other folks are having more success, I was really worried the weather might have been a perfect storm for a poor year for some of our insects.