Cecropia: A Love Story

I’ll admit it. I’m a huge fan of Hallmark movies. The beautiful settings. The lightweight plot-lines. The sweet romances. Despite its flaws, and it does have those, sometimes Hallmark is just what’s needed after a day of wrangling with the world’s problems.

So you’ll have to forgive me when I say the storyline of the Cecropia moth seems the height of a beautiful, sweet romance. More than North America’s largest “night butterfly” (their wings span five to seven inches), the Cecropia lives life in a series of developmental stages, each more beautiful than the previous. A hopeless romantic, I can only see the Cecropia life as one of romantic destiny.

From eggling to winged one, Cecropia lives for about a year. And only two weeks of that year are spent with wings. Emerging from eggs as a caterpillar in early summer, Cecropia caterpillars molt several times coming forth from each molt ready to grow into a larger caterpillar and looking like an increasingly complex work of living art (see link here or images below).

Two of the multiple instar stages of the Cecropia caterpillar.

1st image: dwbritton. 2nd image: Judy Gallagher

This molting continues through several stages until early fall when the Cecropia spin a light brown cocoon. The seasons slip into winter. Amazingly, Cecropia caterpillars spend about ten months in their cocoon, overwintering until early summer of the next year. Nearly a year from when they entered this world as a caterpillar, they re-emerge, this time metamorphosed into a beautiful moth.

Here’s where the romance begins. Having no mouth or other elements of a digestive system, Cecropia as a moth has only two weeks to live, surviving from the fat they’ve stored up as caterpillars before entering their cocoon. Cecropias spend that two weeks looking for love (or at least that is how I would interpret the information you'll find in the following paragraphs if I were writing the Hallmark script for a movie starring two Cecropia moths).

Following scent trails, the male finds a compatible female. My understanding is that Cecropia is not an abundant species, so this could take some time. Once the male meets "the love of his life," the two remain together for up to twenty-four hours before the female heads off to find the right tree leaves on which to lay one-hundred or so eggs, often taking care to lay them in clusters of 2-6.

And the male? I wonder, does he spend the rest of his time contemplating life and its meaning? After his arduous search, he can’t have much energy remaining. Is it really too big of a stretch to imagine he may turn his remaining time to philosophizing? Or perhaps reliving the meeting with his true love and their romantic tryst? It's not if you see Cecropia as the Anishinaabeg and others have for millennia: one of the many older beings who, as humanity's elders, have so much to teach us.

This could have been the story of the two Cecropia moths I ran across a little over a week ago. It was after a wind-tossed night of severe thunderstorms. A tornado watch had been issued, a real rarity for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The next morning, I found both moths, separate from each other, sheltering near a neighbor’s garage and its large yard light.

Perhaps they weren’t mates. Perhaps they were. The one remained only for the morning. The other for several days.

As this moth was later gone while the other remained, I assume this was the female. She also appeared larger both in wings and abdomen.

Whatever their true story, I couldn’t help but imagine them as soulmates brought together in a storm. The male, exhausted from his search, appeared to have only enough energy to cling to a small area of tall grass for the rest of his time in this life. The female, after resting near this clump of grass, began her own sacred mission, searching for a protected, leafy nook from which a new generation can begin their young lives in this vast, sometimes scary, frequently beautiful world.

It will only be a week or two from now that their children will emerge as tiny black caterpillars into a green enchantment. Surrounded by the rustling leaves of wild apple, maybe cherry, or perhaps the magnificent oak, their birth will both complete and begin the cycle once again.

And so it goes in that mysterious, steady rhythm that is the passage of both the seasons and the millennia. The rhythm of our planet, sounding its quiet heartbeat.

There are many great sites detailing the currently known scientific data on Cecropia moths. One of the best sites I found was from the National Park Service.