As foliage blazes bright reds, oranges, and yellows, it’s easy for our attention to go upward. But what lays at our feet as we walk through an autumn landscape?
The maple leafcutter, or Paraclemensia acerifoliella, spends most of its insect life on or surrounded by a maple leaf, writes Bryan Pfeiffer for Northern Woodlands.
From spring through summer, when it feeds and grows, a leafcutter chews two discs of maple and fastens them together with silk so they serve as a protective casing. It’s a bit like a pita bread with a caterpillar inside. The casing is formally known as a habitaculum, and it hides the caterpillar from predators like warblers and black-capped chickadees.
In autumn when they finish feeding, leafcutters crawl down the tree trunk in their shelter or flutter within it to the ground. Within the casing, a leafcutter will spin a loose silken cocoon and spend the winter in a suspended state of development. And in May, just as the sugar maple leaves emerge, the maple leafcutter flies free as a tiny moth with steel-blue wings and an orange head. The moths will mate, and the females will lay eggs on fresh maple leaves to complete the cycle.
So on your next Long Trail hike, look at the ground for discs of maple leaf. (It might look like someone’s been busy with a hole puncher.) You could be walking with the leafcutters.
Original source can be found here.
