Mourning Cloak Caterpillar Care: Helpful Tips

Are you looking to groom some mourning cloak caterpillars so that you can see these beautiful butterflies grace your garden this spring? Then this article is the perfect spot for you to get all your tips.

Butterflies are hands-down one of nature’s most beautiful creations in the insect world. If you find interest in raising butterflies from caterpillars, we have something in common. 

While caterpillars are easy to raise, one still needs to know how to care for specific species. In case you are planning to raise Mourning Cloaks, we have got you covered.

We will take you through the entire process of bringing up these beautiful creatures so that you can enjoy their beauty in your garden.

A Bit About The Mourning Cloak Butterfly

Scientifically known as the Antiopa species, the mourning cloak belongs to the genus Nymphalis, under the Brushfoot family and Nymphalinae sub-family. 

It’s easy to identify a mourning cloak – these beautiful butterflies have maroon or purple-brown wings with a bright yellow border.

A strip of black lies between the brown and the yellow, lined with white or blue spots.

However, there’s more to this butterfly than its beautiful appearance. Among all the butterfly species, this one boasts the longest lifespan.

This is because they enter a period of dormancy both during summer (aestivation) and winter (hibernation). 

Such behavior isn’t common among butterflies – most of them either migrate in winter or overwinter as eggs or pupa. 

The mourning cloak’s resilience against the cold weather deserves a special mention too. They can survive temperatures lower than -35°F while huddling inside tree cavities.

Their Lifecycle in Brief

The life cycle of a mourning cloak butterfly lasts about 10 to 12 months, during which they go through the same stages as any other butterfly.

Laid in spring, the eggs take anywhere between 4 to 14 days to hatch. 

The larvae develop through five instars, with the larval stage taking two to three weeks in total.

Once the larvae are full-grown, they enter a state of hyperactivity and wander around. Within a day or two, they enter the pupal stage. 

A mourning cloak butterfly pupa is usually around 0.8 inches long and hangs vertically, upside-down.

Mature butterflies can take up to early august to appear, although they might also emerge in June or July, depending on when the eggs hatched.

Caterpillar Care

Moving on, let’s now figure out how to take proper care of this species of butterflies. Here’s how you’re to go about it:

Females laying eggs

To collect mourning cloak eggs, you need to look out for a female butterfly laying them. Identifying the females isn’t hard if you observe their behavior a little.

 While the males are much more aggressive and seem to hassle the females often, the females aren’t as active and seem shy. Besides, male mourning cloaks drink water from shallow puddles, a behavior known as puddling.

The females lay clutches of eggs at the bases of host plant branches during late spring. You should especially check out plants with mature leaves in wet meadows and river valleys. 

Once you find the eggs, you may use a small paintbrush to gently move them to a Tupperware container with small holes for breathing.

Making an Enclosure for The Caterpillars

Now that you have the eggs, you need to prepare an enclosure for the larvae, i.e., the caterpillars. 

You may use a pop-up enclosure, an old aquarium, or a container made from nylon or a net. The caterpillars need to stay on a branch cut from a host plant. You can place them on it using a paintbrush as soon as the eggs hatch.

Take a bottle of water and submerge the cut end of the branch to keep it fresh. 

Make sure to use a foil to cover the mouth of the bottle; else, the caterpillars might fall in and drown. The container you use must be large enough to accommodate the bottle too.

Mourning Cloak Caterpillar Diet

So now you have a bunch of tiny mourning cloak caterpillars in an enclosure, but what do you feed them? Thankfully, the mourning cloak caterpillar food is quite simple as they mostly feed on leaves. 

In the wild, common species of the mourning cloak caterpillar’s host plants include deciduous trees like cottonwood, willow, hackberry, mulberry, hawthorn, paper birch, etc. You may also feed them flowers of knapweed and scabiosa plants. 

Adult butterflies of this species primarily survive on rotten fruits and tree sap. However, they also drink nectar from certain flowers like milkweed and red maple and often extract necessary nutrients from animal droppings.

Growth Stages

As mentioned earlier, the caterpillars go through five instars. They barely move during the first one. During this time, they just eat, produce frass, and develop. 

They outgrow their skin and shed it during every instar, which is a common behavior among caterpillars. Depending on the availability of food and the weather, it can take them around two to three weeks to go through all the instars.

The caterpillars tend to group up in clusters and feed together during most of the larval stage. This makes it easy to mistake them for tent worm and gypsy moth larvae, which show such social behavior as well. 

Once the caterpillars have finished the fifth instar and are ready to pupate, they’ll part ways and seek out suitable locations for pupating.

In this regard, you may also collect mourning cloak caterpillars if you’re having a hard time finding their eggs.

Care During Pupation and Metamorphosis

Now for the most interesting stage, i.e., pupation and metamorphosis. You know the caterpillars are ready to pupate when you see them walking all around inside the enclosure, making repeated trips. 

This is quite unlike their usual, sedentary nature, and hence easy to notice. This phase lasts for about 24 to 48 hours, after which they fixate on a suitable location and hang their bodies upside down. 

It’s a good idea to put these mature larvae in small glass jars covered with paper towels, where they can complete the pupal stage undisturbed.

If you use the jar and paper towel method, the caterpillars will usually hang from the paper. The actual transformation is easy to miss as it takes only a couple of minutes. 

However, try to keep an eye out since the process looks quite amazing. The pupa seems to pulsate shortly before the transformation.

Make sure not to disturb the pupae. You don’t need to feed them either, as they don’t eat during this stage.

Care When The Butterfly Emerges

The adult butterflies will finally emerge in early August. However, they’ll first build a chrysalis, about 10 to 14 days before the emergence. 

Wait for the chrysalis to harden; it usually takes a few hours, but there’s no harm in giving it a couple of days, either. Once it has hardened, move it to the larger container where you had initially kept the caterpillars. 

This would be especially easier if you had covered the glass jar with paper or provided a stick for the pupa to hang from.

Attach the chrysalis to the inside of the enclosure and wait for the butterfly to emerge. However, make sure there’s enough space around it – the butterflies emerging in crowded or cramped spaces often end up with stunted wings. 

When they emerge, you may notice a bright red or orange discharge. Don’t worry, and it’s just some leftover pigment, not blood.

The sight of a mourning cloak butterfly emerging from its chrysalis is truly one to behold.

It would exit the structure with a crumpled and damp body and quickly start pumping the wings until the wings reach their full size. This is why they need adequate space around them for proper wing growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wrapping up

As mourning cloaks are found all over North America, you likely won’t have much trouble acquiring their eggs and caterpillars. 

Putting some effort into caring for them will indeed pay off, for watching a beautiful and healthy butterfly emerge is a beautiful sight.

If you have been planning to add mourning cloaks to your butterfly collection, I hope this article has been helpful.