The World of Minibeasts

Fairy Dance: Call of the Orange Tip - Eggs

The females would continue to fly around a group of five or six plants, that were (?? English name?) Rauhe Gänsekresse (Arabis hirsuta), landing briefly on them, lift off, flutter around to return to the plant and to do the same again. The females were laying eggs on these plants.

This group of (??) Rauhe Gänsekresse were the only ones of their kind on the hill top meadow that I could overlook. They are one of only few species that orange tip caterpillars feed on. 

My text books say that orange tip females only lay a single egg per plant. Apparently, the population of that hill top was short of food plants, so they would not stay with the behaviour described, but would lay all their eggs on this little group of plants. There are already three of them on the very upper part, as the picture shows. 

Neither the plants nor all of the caterpillars will survive this. Only a few  caterpillars, that is, the ones that hatch first, will have enough food to grow and to develop into a chrysalis.  

The caterpillars will not give the (??) Rauhe Gänsekresse population a chance to grow, or probably even to survive. The plants will all be eaten by the caterpillars in their own struggle to survive. So the Rauhe Gänsekresse might vanish from this hill top, with no food left for future orange tip caterpillars. 

The orange tip population will have to move on in search of food for their offspring, leaving a chance for a (??) Rauhe Gänsekresse seed to germinate, grow and probably even multiply - until the population is discovered by another orange tip to start the same kind of struggle of survival again. 

The story on the call of the orange tip is finished now. You may want to select a chapter once again from the bottom switch board or go to the top switch board to select a different story.

Photograph by Maria Pfeifer, Tex by Maria Pfeifer