Eclosion!

Well, I have Eri babies!

The eggs arrived on Saturday. They began to hatch out this morning.

These are the eggs. The pin is in there for scale; it’s a standard steel sewing pin. The eggs with the dark spots on them are in the (long) process of hatching – the dark spots are actually the heads of the worms as they chew their way out.

These are the babies. They don’t seem quite as keen to eat as the bombyx kegos, but hopefully they’ll get their munch on soon. The literature says that several of the larger species tend to wander around quite a bit before settling in to eat, and that some of them don’t pick up quite as well on the ligustrum as they would on their native food plants.