10
Wednesday, July 24, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Tales from a
Sisters
Naturalist
by Jim Anderson
They’re baaaak!
By golly, this is a strange
time for Pandora moths to
pop out of the woodwork&
er& soil. They were here
in grand numbers back in
2017, and it9s usually five to
10 years before they appear
again. Must be climate
change; something is taking
place in and around us that is
favorable to this species.
And another species is on
the rampage. Over on Green
Ridge, near Sisters, white
satin moths are defoliating
the aspen trees and the adults
make it appear as though it is
snowing in July.
In past times, pandora
moths were known as a for-
est pest, defoliating pines
about every 20 years 4
which ruined the attempts of
foresters to grow pine timber
for lumber.
But the native peoples of
this region looked at them
very differently; they har-
vested, stored and ate the lar-
vae of these delicious moths,
and as far as I know, some
families still do it to this day.
The larvae were collected
just before they were ready
to pupate, before they began
their July migration from the
high green boughs to the for-
est floor to pupate in the soil.
They were/are gathered
by hand once or twice a day,
and temporarily stored in
trenches in the ground. The
larvae were then roasted
in fire-heated sand for 30
minutes; the sand not only
cooked the insects but also
served to remove the fine
hairs 4 setae 4 from their
bodies.
The cooked larvae were/
are then washed, sorted,
and dried. Stored in a cool
and dry place, they keep for
at least a year and perhaps
as long as two. The dried
larvae 4 known as piuga
4 are reconstituted before
consumption by boiling for
about an hour in plain or
salted water.
I9ve heard the boiled
insects have an aroma
described as that of cooked
mushrooms and are eaten
as a finger-food; the entire
larva is eaten except for the
head. (This reminds me that
big brown bats who come
here in summer and eat our
Jerusalem crickets don9t eat
the heads either.) The cook-
ing water is also consumed
as broth, or used as a base
for a piuga-and-vegetable
stew. Yum, yum&
This also reminds me
of the time I spent living
with an aborigine family on
a billabong near Darwin,
Australia, years ago. My
host9s 14-year-old daughter
Daphne teased me as she
was chomping down on the
roasted wood-boring beetle
larvae she dug out of the
eucalyptus. I still get a funny
feeling in my tummy think-
ing back on those interesting
times.
So& back to our own
pandora moth larvae. I don9t
know if you ever gave any
thought to the process of
metamorphosis 4 when the
larva builds the outer shell
it will change inside from a
wiggly caterpillar to an adult
insect that has the ability to
fly and mate. (In butterflies,
the shell is known as a chrys-
alis, and in moths, a cocoon).
The adults emerge and
then as they age their cal-
endar of life triggers the
recognition of sex, and the
females begin to put off a
perfume that today is known
as a pheromone.
Wikipedia says a pher-
omone is a secreted or
excreted chemical factor that
triggers a social response in
members of the same spe-
cies. Pheromones are chemi-
cals capable of acting like
hormones outside the body
of the secreting individual,
to impact the behavior of the
receiving individuals.
In fact, adult male moths
go nuts over it, and can sense
it from several miles away,
especially if there9s a breeze
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blowing through the forest.
Way back, when I was
a kid on my grandfather9s
farm on Jones Hill Road in
West Haven, Connecticut, I
woke up one summer night
in the upstairs bedroom to
the sound of soft thumping
on the screen of the open
window.
I discovered a cecropia
moth outside acting like it
wanted to come in the bed-
room. I went and woke up
my Uncle Ben, the naturalist
of my three uncles, and told
him about the moth.
He rubbed his eyes,
blinked and, throwing the
sheet off himself said, <I
don9t believe it!= I had to
PHOTO BY SUE ANDERSON
Satin moths.
jump out of his way as he
leaped out of bed and ran
back into the room where I
was sleeping. He turned to
an old bureau, pulled the top
drawer out, removed a cigar
box, lifted the lid and out
flew an adult female cecro-
pia moth.
Yep, you guessed it. Her
pheromones had drifted out
of the cigar box, out of the
bureau, and out of the house
to get the male moth all fired
up. Ben stood there in his
BVDs exclaiming how he
had collected the cocoon that
fall on a trip into our kitchen
garden.
What goes on inside that
cocoon after the pandora
caterpillar drops to the for-
est floor and buries itself in
the soil is one of the miracles
of nature. And speaking of
soil, you won9t find pandora
moths in just any old place;
they need the loose soils of
a ponderosa pine forest to
make it from caterpillar to
adult moth 4 other soils
won9t do.
It9s inside that cocoon
that the miracle takes place.
Once the caterpillar buries
itself to the right depth in the
soil, it spins a silken blanket
around itself and then dis-
solves into kind of a green
soup 4 but is still alive. The
PHOTO BY JIM ANDERSON
Typical Pandora outbreak.
soup then begins to slowly
reform into the adult insect.
Laying there in the
ground for several years, it
goes from an animal with
only stubby little legs to
get around on, and a mouth
that9s formed to munch on
pine needles and with a gut
to digest them and changes
(metamorphoses) into the
adult insect with three body
parts, a whole new breath-
ing apparatus, wings and a
method to reproduce.
With all that9s going on
in our environment today I
hope this cycle will carry on
long after we9ve gone out
among the stars.