Meet your neighbor with the fun moth project

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s Sept. 21.

Today, I share with you the project of our neighbor, Ashley Rodeheaver, a 39-year-old resident of Mountain Lake Park in western Maryland and a fan of moths.

I met Ashley in July during National Moth Week. A reader had told me about the week celebrating our nocturnal insects. I delved into an iNaturalist project that Ashley had launched for people to record 2026 moth week observations in Maryland. She recorded 235 observations that week.

She had grown up with scientist parents and helped them with their research on small mammals. Her own interests as a young child were butterflies at first and then moths, she said, because there are so many more species of moths than butterflies.

Since July, she has sent me blow-by-blow photos of the two giant moth species she is raising from eggs — imperial and promethea moths, both of the Saturniid family. She has a wealth of knowledge about moths. She shared details of her project and patiently answered my many questions.

She started out with about 14 imperial moth eggs, which she had found on the window of a clothing store near the Walmart where she works.

“Sometimes at lunchtime, I go on a walk near the buildings where I work. I take pictures of the insects. One day, I look over and see eggs stuck on the window. And I thought, ‘Well, they’re not gonna survive there. They’ll just hatch and die,’” she told me on a call last week. “I put them in my hand, then in a bag and stuck them in my locker for the rest of the day … I had raised the species a couple years ago, which is how I recognized them.”

The imperial moth eggs start out a solid “butter yellow” color, almost like wax, she told me. “Then they develop and turn dark, and then you can see the caterpillar inside the egg. Then one day, they just pop out.”

All 14 of the imperial moth eggs hatched. She said they need natural sunlight to thrive, so she raised the caterpillars — which are either brown or green — in indirect sunlight on her sun porch. “I was tickled that I had an even amount of greens and browns.”

Once the imperials are fully grown, she told me, their bodies kind of shrink a little and become firmer, and they get a purple tinge to their bodies. Then they drop off their host plant.

At this phase, Ashley placed them in a bucket with damp shredded paper towels that mimic leaf litter. She put them in a dark spot. A few days later, they crawled under the paper towels to the bottom of the bucket, “then their skin splits, and they wiggle out of their skin as pupae … It mimics them burying themselves under leaves; some people find it difficult [to raise imperials] because if you don’t mimic it right, sometimes the caterpillars will just flop over and die.”

Imperials don’t form cocoons, she said. They just bury under leaves and loose soil. Or in this case, under damp paper towels. She then prepped them for the winter.

“I’ve removed the pupae from the bucket and placed them in layers of sphagnum moss. And then I cover them with more layers of sphagnum moss,” she said. “It keeps the moisture, so they don’t dry out … It also keeps them from freezing.”

She puts the pupae in her basement to keep them cool and dark enough so they stay pupae all winter and don’t emerge early, she said. “If I leave them with my indoor heater, they’ll just hatch out over winter.”

At the same time that she was raising the imperials, she also had promethea moth eggs, which were from a female moth she found on the same building near her work.

“Raising prometheas was on my bucket list. This was my first time,” she told me with giddy excitement.

“I picked her up and brought her home. I don’t like to leave them on the walkway because people have a tendency to step on them. This is a species I wanted to try raising. I brought her home, and she laid eggs between the time I picked her up and the time I brought her home. There were over 100 eggs,” she said. “I split the eggs with local ladies near my home. I kept about 30 eggs of the promethea, but they had a very poor hatch rate.”

She got only eight promethea caterpillars. She looked up what prometheas eat and gave them four different species; the leaves of the black cherry tree were the winner.

Now what? I asked her.

“Now we wait for spring. Once the temperatures warm up, and we have leaves on the trees, I take them out of the basement, and I put them in [an enclosed popup spot] that is safe for them to [emerge].”

And then, when they’re ready, she will wait for nightfall and release them.

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Northern Virginia Bird Alliance is hosting an event to see chimney swifts at Penrose Square in Arlington on Sunday, Sept. 27, 6-8 p.m.

“Marvel as hundreds of these agile birds swirl through the sky in a breathtaking display before diving into their communal roost for the night,” the group says in their invite for the event.

There will be a short presentation about the chimney swifts. Then at sunset, the birds will descend. Click here to learn more and register.

Your fellow Daily Dose readers and I want to see your DMV: Please share your photos here.

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