Pupae vs. Chrysalis

[Chris J. Durden]

Ken,
    Maybe my teachers got it wrong or went to a different school from 
your's. I shall see if I can find a reference they might have used. 
Sawflies definitely have caterpillars, as do caddis flies some scorpion 
flies and snake flies.
    It is probably simpler and less confusing to talk about larvae and 
pupae. I always do.
    Back in 1957 when I raised Lepidoptera for the CNC in Ottawa, the lab 
report sheet for preserved specimens had a box for "instar". In this box we 
put either e, l1, l2, l3, l4 . . . p, or a. Most holometabolous insects 
have more than four instars, most of which are larval and all are separated 
from the others by a moult or egg laying.
............Chris Durden
Does an Hedylid have a chrysalis? I would say yes, but I would use the word 
pupa to describe it, and I would call the similar stage of an Orange Tip a 
pupa too.

At 11:53 AM 10/21/2001 -0800, you wrote:

> >    The way I learned it over 50 years ago -
> > - ovum, larva, pupa, and imago are the proper words for the ontogenic
> > instars of holometabolous insects.
> > - egg, caterpillar, chrysalis (with or without a cocoon), and adult are
> > the colloquial words for the life stages of insects with complete
> > metamorphosis.
>
>         I find this odd on two counts:
>
>1) 'Instar' is the "stage of an insect between successive moults, the first
>instar being the stage between hatching and the first moult" (Borrer &
>DeLong, glossary). I have never seen 'instar' applied to the 4 stages of
>a holometabolous insect.
>
>2) 'Caterpillar' as the colloquial word for a dipteran maggot, coleopteran
>grub, etc. is something I have never come across. Same with 'chrysalis'
>for the pupa of any non-lepidopterous insect.
>
>         That's certainly not the way _I_ learned it over 50 years ago.  :-)
>
>                                                         Ken Philip
>fnkwp at uaf.edu
>
>P.S. I checked a number of my older books (late 1800s to early 1900s), and
>all of them agree that 'chrysalis' applies only to butterflies (without
>going into taxonomic minutiae as what is and what isn't a butterfly). So
>whatever people are saying nowadays, the original use of the term was
>not applied to moths (let alone other orders).
>



 
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