Simple magnificence

The seeds I bought were aristolochia tagala as Adam has mentioned. A funny story goes with my first effort. I had about 50 small plants that were only about 6 inches tall when I got my first 4 ova. I had a feeling that I would not have enough plant to feed even 4 larvae as they get very large. In the end I had to sacrifice 2 larvae to ensure I didn't run out of food for the remaining two. And as luck would have it (bad luck I mean), both of the emerging adults were female. And by the end of my first effort, all 50 plants were eaten down to the ground and did not recover.

So I ordered more seeds, let the plants grow a little bigger the second time, and was able to get 5 males and 2 females. The plants you see in the photo in the bedroom was the third and last effort, 7 fully mature plants and 5 larvae. Ended up with 4 females and the beautiful male in the photo was the final emergence. I was able to hand pair one couple from the second effort, and placed the fertile female on the plant I had covered with netting to ensure she was in contact with foliage. She laid 10 eggs over a couple of days.

A couple of problems I will mention. First, keeping the plants free of spider mites was a difficult task. When the plants were growing and there were no larvae on them, I had to spray them very regularly, and when there were larvae on them, I had to hand wash the leaves with an alcohol/water solution to keep the mites at bay. The second challenge was a bad habit of the mature larvae. Even though I had 7 large plants for 5 larvae, some of the larvae would eat through the plant stems effectively killing all the leaves further down the vine. I lost a lot of good healthy leaves due to that habit. I found my self interrupting their feeding when I could see they were cutting off a vine instead of just eating the leaves as one would expect.

Those are actually babies for this Aristolochia species. The mature plant has a thick branching tuber more than 1 metre long underground and leaves each over 1 foot long with main stems thicker than a golf ball and growing from the ground to the canopy.

Adam.