THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. o33 



CURIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF EUOAMUS PYLADES LARVA. 



BY H. H. LYMAN, MONTREAL. 



When out on ca short visit to Ausable Chasm, June 29th to July ist, 

 I noticed, on June 30th, a female of this species ovipositing, and secured 

 three eggs. These eggs hatched in due course, one about a day in 

 advance of the two others. The first larva was placed on a clover leaf in 

 a tin-topped jelly glass, but refused to feed and dried up. I then 

 arranged a homeopathic vial of water in a wine glass, with earth to steady 

 it. and a few leaves of clover passing through a hole in the cork into the 

 water, and placed the two other newly hatched larva? upon the leaves. 

 One immediately set to work constructing its nest, but the other seemed 

 lazy and not inclined to make a nest for itself, or share in the construc- 

 tion of the other. The nest was soon complete, and the occupants 

 hidden from view. What tragedy took place within that nest I know 

 not, but at the first moult only one caterpillar remained, and I thought 

 that possibly the energetic one had lost all patience with his lazy brother, 

 and had eaten him up. The dates of the first three moults were not 

 recorded, but the fourth one occurred on 3rd of August. The caterpillar 

 was apparently mature by the 12th or 13th, and had left the food plant 

 and spun some silk on the gauze top of the glass cylinder which I had 

 placed over the wine glass, stretching several strands of silk from the 

 gauze to the glass. I was leaving home on the 14th for a holiday at the 

 seaside, and as I had a whole menagerie of other larvse to take with me, 

 and thought that this caterpillar was just going to spin its cocoon, and 

 that disturbing it to take it with me would be a mistake, I left it behind. 

 On my return, twenty-two days later, I found it apparently in exactly the 

 same place as I had left it, though, of course, it may have crawled all 

 over the cylinder during my absence, and it was still alive, though some- 

 what shrunken from its long fast. I immediately supplied fresh leaves in 

 the small vial of water, and, taking the gauze from the top of the cylinder, 

 arranged it so that the back of the larva was resting on the clover 

 leaves, but it would not feed, and so, after a day or two, I replaced 

 the gauze on the cylinder. The caterpillar then crav/led down to a posi- 

 tion near the base of the cylinder, where it rested for two or three days 

 longer, and then was found dead on the window-sill, on which the 

 cylinder was standing, having lived without food for fully four weeks in 

 warm summer weather. 



