Artificial Food Diets?

[marcus24]

Has anyone tried artificial food diets for Saturniidae? I'm going to test it out since I live in a city (a few miles out of NYC) and there aren't many trees.

[africaone]

i tried a few years ago and I was dispointed (this seems to need a lot of experience to be useful !)

[irisscientist]

Marcus,

The most cited references for artificial diets for insects appears to come from Pritam Singh. He published a book in 1977 (Artificial Diets for Insects, Mites, and Spiders) detailing the ingredients for a general purpose recipe for rearing insects. The book can be found on Amazon and it's details can be found here:

www.amazon.co.uk/Artificial-Diets-Insects-Mites-Spiders/dp/0306651696

I was unfortunately unable to find a pdf available online.

This was later updated in a publication (Singh 1983) "A general purpose laboratory diet mixture for rearing insects", which I have also unfortunately struggled to find anywhere online.

As far as the Saturniidae are concerned, Capinera (1980) used a modification of Singh's 1977 diet (on page 31 of his book) to rear Hemileuca oliviae. A pdf of Capinera's paper can be found here:

www.springerlink.com/content/q7286567125778q2/fulltext.pdf

In summary however Capinera supplemented the general-purpose artificial diet with 10 g dried blue grama grass, Bouteloua gracilis (H.B.K.)/kg diet.

I was able to find a more detailed description of a modified version of Singh's diet contents here:

www.ento.org.nz/nzentomologist/free_issues/NZEnto13_1_1990/Volume%2013-87-89.pdf

Albeit for use with Stem Weevil's, in summary the relevant diet details were as follows:

Artificial diet for larvae was a modification of a general purpose diet (Singh 1977). The following ingredients were mixed together and autoclaved at 16 psi and 120°C: 1000 ml distilled water, 40 g agar, 30 g casein, 100 g cellulose powder (C11, Whatman), 5 g Wesson's salts, 30 g wheat germ, 30 g sucrose, 3 g glucose, 3 g trehalose, 200 mg inositol, 1250 mg methyl para hydroxybenzoate and 900 mg sorbic acid. After autoclaving, 500 mg cholesterol and 2 ml linseed oil were then mixed in. The following were added after cooling to 70°C: 3 g ascorbic acid, 2 g choline chloride, 20 mg niacin, 20 mg calcium pantothenate, 5 mg thiamine, 10 mg riboflavin, 5 mg pyridoxine, 5 mg folic acid, 400 pg biotin, 40pg vitamin B12, 350 mg penicillin, 350 mg streptomycin, and 2 ml 10% formaldehyde. All ingredients were mixed together thoroughly and the diet was poured into plastic Petri dishes and left to set.

Considering the complexity of the diet ingredients however, you may simply find it easier to locate the relevant larval food plant, even in NYC!

Good luck!


Mark

[marcus24]

That's one hell of a recipe, I don't think I'd be able to do that. Thanks for the info though, if only that book was a little less expensive. This I did find however: educationalscience.com/merchant.ihtml?pid=6662&step=4&merchantid=4&repid=0&passwordstatus=passed
I'm going to give it a try.
As for the trees, I could drive out to parkways or Staten Island, but that's a pain and I'm not sure I'd have the time, plus I'd get ticketed from the troopers.