What does the silkworm eat 6 letters. Silkworm or silkworm. What are the characteristics of silkworm eggs

Description

Relatively large butterfly with a wingspan of 40 - 60 mm. The color of the wings is off-white with more or less distinct brownish bands. Forewings with notch on outer margin behind apex. The antennae of the male are strongly pectinate, the females are pectinate. Silkworm butterflies, in fact, have practically lost the ability to fly. Females are especially inactive. Butterflies have underdeveloped mouthparts and do not feed throughout their lives (aphagia).

Life cycle

The silkworm is represented by monovoltine (gives one generation a year), bivoltine (gives two generations a year) and polyvoltine (gives several generations a year) breeds.

Egg

After mating, the female lays eggs (500 to 700 on average), the so-called grena. Grena has an oval (elliptical) shape, flattened laterally, somewhat thicker at one pole; soon after its deposition, one depression appears on both flattened sides. At the thinner pole there is a rather significant depression, in the middle of which there is a tubercle, and in the center of it there is a hole - a micropyle, designed for the passage of the seed thread. The grain size is about 1 mm long and 0.5 mm wide, but it varies considerably depending on the breed. In general, breeds of European, Asia Minor, Central Asian and Persian give a larger gren than Chinese and Japanese. Egg laying can last up to three days. Diapause in the silkworm falls on the egg stage. Diapausing eggs develop in the spring of the following year, while non-diapausing eggs develop the same year.

Caterpillar

A caterpillar comes out of the egg (so-called silkworm), which grows rapidly and molts four times. After the caterpillar has gone through four molts, its body becomes slightly yellow. The caterpillar develops within 26 - 32 days. The duration of development depends on the temperature and humidity of the air, the quantity and quality of food, etc. The caterpillar feeds exclusively on mulberry (tree) leaves. Therefore, the spread of sericulture is associated with the places where the mulberry tree (mulberry) grows.

While pupating, the caterpillar weaves a cocoon, the shell of which consists of a continuous silk thread ranging in length from 300-900 meters to 1,500 m in the largest cocoons. In the cocoon, the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis. The color of the cocoon can be different: pinkish, greenish, yellow, etc. But for the needs of industry, only silkworm breeds with white cocoons are currently bred.

The release of butterflies from cocoons usually occurs on the 15-18th day after pupation. But the silkworm is not allowed to survive to this stage - the cocoons are kept for 2-2.5 hours at a temperature of about 100 ° C, which kills the caterpillar and simplifies the unwinding of the cocoon.

Human use

Sericulture

Sericulture- breeding of silkworms to obtain silk. According to Confucian texts, silk production using the silkworm began around the 27th century BC. e. , although archaeological research allows us to talk about the Yangshao period (5000 BC). In the first half of the 1st century A.D. e. sericulture came to ancient Khotan, and at the end of the 3rd century came to India. It was later introduced to Europe, the Mediterranean and other Asian countries. Sericulture has become important in a number of countries such as China, Republic of Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, Russia, Italy and France. Today, China and India are the two main producers of silk, accounting for about 60% of the world's annual production.

Other uses

In China and Korea, fried silkworm pupae are eaten.

Dried caterpillars infected with a fungus Beauveria bassiana used in Chinese traditional medicine.

Silkworm in art

• In 2004, the famous multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and leader of his own group Oleg Sakmarov wrote a song called "Silkworm".
• In 2006 Flëur released a song called "Silkworm".
• In 2007, Oleg Sakmarov released the album "Silkworm".
• In 2009, the Melnitsa group released the Wild Herbs album, on which a song called Silkworm sounds.

Notes

Categories:

• Animals alphabetically
• Animals described in 1758
• real silkworms
• farm animals
• Pets

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See what "Mulberry silkworm" is in other dictionaries:

- (Votbuh mori), this butterfly. real silkworms (Bombycidae). Wingspan 40-60 mm, whitish. The body is massive. According to the number of generations per year, monovoltine (one), bivoltine (two), and polyvoltine (many) breeds of T. sh. Wintering... ... Biological encyclopedic dictionary

Silkworm, silkworm Dictionary of Russian synonyms. silkworm n., number of synonyms: 2 silkworm (2) ... Synonym dictionary

Butterfly of the true silkworm family. Not known in the wild; domesticated in China c. 3 thousand years BC e. to get silk. Bred in many countries, mainly in the East., Wed. and Yuzh. Asia. A close view of the wild silkworm lives in ... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Butterfly. Caterpillar T. sh. called a silkworm, feeds on the leaves of the mulberry tree, curls a cocoon rich in silk, and is bred for the sake of getting a horn. Silkworm (: 21/2): 1 caterpillar; 2 dolls; 3 cocoon; 4 female laying eggs. ... ... Agricultural dictionary-reference book

Butterfly of the true silkworm family. Wingspan 4 6 cm, massive body. It feeds (caterpillar) on mulberry leaves. Not known in the wild; domesticated in China around 3000 BC. e. to get silk. Bred in many countries, ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

- (Bombyx mori) butterfly of the family Bombycidae. Wingspan 4 6 cm; has an underdeveloped mouth apparatus and does not feed. Caterpillar G. sh. feeds on mulberry leaves (See Mulberry) (or mulberry tree); inferior substitutes for it ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Bombyx mori (silkworm, silk moth) silkworm, silkworm. Lepidoptera insect , one of the first domesticated species (domesticated in China over 4000 years ago as a producer of valuable silk fiber ... ... Molecular biology and genetics. Dictionary.

- (Bombyx s. Sericaria mori) a butterfly belonging to the silkworm family (Bombycidae) and bred for the silk that is obtained from its cocoons. The body of this butterfly is covered with dense fluff, the antennae are rather short, comb-like; wings are small... Encyclopedic Dictionary F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron

Niramin - Feb 23rd, 2017

The silkworm lives almost nowhere in the wild. The ancient Chinese domesticated this useful insect 4.5 thousand years ago. Despite the fact that the Chinese have long kept the process of producing natural silk in the strictest confidence, it has also become known in other countries where there are optimal conditions for growing silkworm larvae.

An ancient legend says that a Chinese princess, having married an Indian raja, stealthily took with her gren - a clutch of silkworm eggs - when she left China. It is worth noting that such an act was considered a state crime, and the princess was threatened with the death penalty in her homeland. Nowadays, silkworm breeding is carried out on special farms in Asian countries: China, Japan, India, Pakistan, North and South Korea, Uzbekistan and Turkey. In addition, similar farms exist in Italy and France.

Like most insects, the silkworm looks different in the course of its life, as it goes through several stages of development:

Grena stage - laying eggs.

Photo: Silkworm laying eggs.

Caterpillar stage (larva).

Photo: Silkworm caterpillars.

Pupation (cocoon formation).

Photo: Silkworm cocoons.

The adult stage is the butterfly.

Photo: Silkworm - butterfly.

The white butterfly is quite large in size with a wingspan of about 6 cm. In the process of natural selection, the silkworm butterfly has lost the ability to fly. During its short existence, about 20 days, the butterfly does not feed. Its main function is mating and laying up to 1000 eggs in one clutch, after which the butterfly dies.

Depending on a certain temperature, black, hairy larvae emerge from the eggs. In the process of its development, the larva molts several times and becomes a smooth white caterpillar.

It is the caterpillar that feeds exclusively on the leaves of the mulberry (mulberry tree).

Photo: Mulberry tree with fruits.

Any other plant food is not suitable for her. Hence the name of the insect. After 5 weeks of intensive caloric intake, the caterpillar attaches itself to a suitable twig and forms a cocoon of silk thread, which it produces thanks to the presence of a special gland. In the cocoon, the caterpillar turns into a butterfly. To get silk thread, farmers do not allow the butterfly to leave the cocoon. But a certain number of cocoons are still left for butterflies as successors to the next generation of silkworms.

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Video: Silkworm cocoon Uzbekistan

China is an amazing country filled with myths and legends. According to one of the ancient legends, the wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor taught her people to weave and extract silk from the silkworm. It is not known how much this legend can be believed, but to this day China is breeding this butterfly.

What does it look like

This is a fairly large butterfly with a wingspan of up to 60 mm, which has unique individual characteristics. For example, in the process of evolution and domestication, it lost the ability to eat and acquired.

After the appearance, she mates, lays larvae and dies. Its ancestors fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, it was in its crown that they lived, which is why the name of this insect came about.

Lifestyle

It has been noted that males, when spinning a cocoon from a single silk thread, spend a little more life resource and time on it. As a result, the cocoon of the male turns out to be 25% heavier than that of the female. The process of creating a silk cocoon is very laborious and troublesome, releasing two strong, but at the same time the thinnest threads from the lower lip, the caterpillar builds its house for 18-25 days to turn into a butterfly.

An important moment in the life of a silkworm is the arrangement of a place for forging: thin rods must be installed in it, it is in them that the silkworm will weave its house. The size of the cocoon reaches 38 mm, it is very dense with closed edges.

reproduction

The life cycle of an insect is simple and primitive, and for many years of work with it by a person, it has been worked out to a mechanism.
After mating, the female spends 2-3 days laying eggs, she gives about 600 eggs per laying. Once the tiny caterpillar is born and properly maintained, it will grow and develop for about 25 days until it reaches maturity. And only then will preparations begin for the transformation into a butterfly.

The pupa becomes 10 days old, and only then can silk cocoons be used to produce silk thread.

Economic importance

Today you can go to the silkworm breeding factories, see and learn the entire production process, but a few centuries ago, for the Chinese, everything related to the manufacture of silk from the silkworm was the strictest secret, the disclosure of which threatened the death penalty. But there are no secrets that cannot be revealed. It also happened in this case. Gradually cunning merchants revealed this secret, and it became the property of many peoples. Silk production began to develop in India, Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan.

The second country where they began to engage in this profitable business, based on the reproduction of butterfly larvae, was India. It still occupies a leading position in the production of natural silk today.

The silkworm is no longer found in the wild, and the entire life cycle takes place under human supervision.

Modern developments make it possible to select the silkworm to such an extent that the cocoon itself has the whitest color. Grey, green or yellow cocoons are not suitable for producing high quality silk, so breeders do not use them in large scale production.

A sticky substance is released from a small tubercle under the lower lip of the caterpillar, which, upon contact with air, immediately solidifies and turns into a silk thread. The thread is very thin, but can withstand weight up to 15 grams.

All modern domestic animals and cultivated plants are descended from wild species. Not without an insect on the farm - silkworm butterflies. Over four and a half millennia of breeding work, it was possible to breed breeds that give silk of different colors, and the length of a continuous thread from one cocoon can reach a kilometer! The butterfly has changed so much that it is now difficult to say who was its wild ancestor. In nature, the silkworm is not found - without human care, it dies.

Recall that many other caterpillars weave a cocoon of silky threads, but only in the silkworm they have the properties we need. Silk threads are used to produce fabrics that are very durable and beautiful; they are used in medicine - for sewing up wounds and cleaning teeth; in cosmetology - for the manufacture of decorative cosmetics, such as shadows. Despite the advent of artificial materials, natural silk threads are still widely used.

Who first came up with the idea of ​​weaving silk fabric? According to legend, four thousand years ago, a silkworm cocoon fell into a cup of hot tea, which the Chinese empress drank in her garden. Trying to pull it out, the woman pulled on a protruding silk thread. The cocoon began to unwind, but the thread did not end. It was then that the quick-witted empress realized that yarn could be made from such fibers. The Chinese emperor approved the idea of ​​his wife and ordered his subjects to grow mulberry (white mulberry) and breed silkworm caterpillars on it. And to this day, silk in China is called the name of this ruler, and her grateful descendants elevated her to the rank of a deity.

It took a lot of work to get beautiful silk from butterfly cocoons. To begin with, the cocoons need to be collected, discarded and, most importantly, unwound, for which they were dipped into boiling water. Next, the thread was strengthened with sericin - silk glue, which was then removed with boiling water or hot soapy water.

Before dyeing, the thread was boiled and bleached. They painted it with vegetable pigments (gardenia fruits, moraine roots, oak acorns), or mineral pigments (cinnabar, ocher, malachite, white lead). And only then they wove yarn - by hand or on a loom.

As early as one and a half thousand years BC, clothes made of silk fabrics were common in China. In other Asian countries and among the ancient Romans, silk appeared only in the 3rd century BC - and then it was fabulously expensive. But the manufacturing technology of this amazing fabric remained a secret for the whole world for many centuries, because an attempt to take the silkworm out of the Chinese empire was punishable by death. The nature of silk seemed mysterious and magical to Europeans. Some believed that silk was produced by giant beetles, others believed that in China the earth was soft, like wool, and therefore, after watering, it could be used to produce silk fabrics.

The secret of silk was discovered in the 4th century AD, when a Chinese princess presented a gift to her fiancé, the king of Lesser Bukhara. These were silkworm eggs, which the bride secretly took out of her homeland, hiding in her hair. Around the same time, the secret of silk became known to the Japanese emperor, but here sericulture for some time was the monopoly of the imperial palace alone. Then silk production was mastered in India. And from there, with two monks who placed silkworm eggs in the hollow handles of their staffs, they ended up in Byzantium. In the 12th-14th centuries, sericulture flourished in Asia Minor, Spain, Italy and France, and in the 16th century it appeared in the southern provinces of Russia.

Silkworm pupa

However, even after the Europeans learned to breed silkworms, most of the silk continued to be delivered from China. Along the Great Silk Road - a network of roads running from east to west - it was taken to all countries of the world. Silk outfits remained a luxury item, silk also served as an exchange currency.

How does a small white butterfly live - "silk queen"? Its wingspan is 40-60 millimeters, but as a result of many years of cultivation, butterflies have lost the ability to fly. The mouth apparatus is not developed because the adult does not feed. Only the larvae differ in an enviable appetite. They are fed with mulberry leaves. When feeding on other plants that the caterpillars "agree" to eat, the quality of the fiber deteriorates. On the territory of our country, representatives of the family of true silkworms, to which the silkworm belongs, are found in nature only in the Far East.

Silkworm caterpillars hatch from eggs, the laying of which is covered with a dense shell and is called grena. In sericulture farms, grena is placed in special incubators, where the necessary temperature and humidity are maintained. After a few days, small, three-millimeter dark brown larvae appear, covered with tufts of long hair.

Hatched caterpillars are transferred to a special aft shelf with fresh mulberry leaves. After several molts, the babies grow up to eight centimeters, and their bodies become white and almost naked.

The caterpillar, ready for pupation, ceases to feed, and then wood rods are placed next to it, to which it immediately passes. Holding on to one of the rods with its abdominal legs, the caterpillar throws its head to the right, then back, then to the left and applies its lower lip with a "silk" tubercle to various places on the rod.

Caterpillars are fed with mulberry leaves.

Soon a rather dense network of silk thread is formed around it. But this is only the basis of the future cocoon. Then the "craftswoman" crawls to the center of the frame and begins to curl the thread: releasing it, the caterpillar quickly turns its head. The tireless weaver works on the cocoon for about four days! And then it freezes in its silk cradle and turns into a chrysalis there. After about 20 days, a butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. She softens the cocoon with her alkaline saliva and, helping herself with her legs, hardly gets out to start looking for a partner for procreation. After mating, the female lays 300-600 eggs.

However, not every caterpillar is given the opportunity to turn into a butterfly. Most of the cocoons are sent to the factory for raw silk. One centner of such cocoons yields approximately nine kilograms of silk thread.

It is interesting that the caterpillars, from which males are later obtained, are more diligent workers, their cocoons are denser, which means that the thread in them is longer. Scientists have learned to regulate the sex of butterflies, increasing the yield of silk during its industrial production.

Such is the story of the small white butterfly that made ancient China famous and made the whole world worship its magnificent product.

Olga Timokhova, Candidate of Biological Sciences

People know a lot about the merits of silk, but few people are familiar with the "creator" who gave the world this miracle. Meet the silk caterpillar. For 5,000 years, this small, humble insect has been spinning silk thread.

Silkworms eat the leaves of mulberry (mulberry) trees. Hence the name silkworm.

These are very voracious creatures, they can eat for days without a break. That is why hectares of mulberry trees are specially planted for them.

Like any butterfly, the silkworm goes through four life stages.

• Larva.
• Caterpillar.
• A chrysalis in a silk cocoon.
• Butterfly.

As soon as the head of the caterpillar darkens, the lenok process will begin. Usually the insect sheds its skin four times, the body becomes yellow, the skin acquires density. So the caterpillar moves to a new stage, becomes a chrysalis, which is in a silk cocoon. Under natural conditions, the butterfly gnaws a hole in the cocoon and shaves itself out of it. But in sericulture, the process proceeds according to a different scenario. Manufacturers do not allow silkworm cocoons to "ripen" to the last stage. Within two hours under the influence of high temperature ( 100 degrees), the caterpillar then dies.

Appearance of a wild silkworm

Butterfly with big wings. Domesticated silkworms are not very attractive (the color is white with dirty spots). It is radically different from the "home relatives" is a very beautiful butterfly with bright large wings. Until now, scientists cannot classify this species, where and when it appeared.

In modern sericulture, hybrid individuals are used.

1. Monovoltine, produces offspring once a year.
2. Polyvoltine, gives offspring several times a year.

The silkworm cannot live without human care, it is not able to survive in the wild. The silkworm caterpillar is not able to get food on its own, even if it is very hungry, it is the only Butterfly that cannot fly, which means that it is not capable of finishing food on its own.

Useful properties of silk thread

The productive ability of the silkworm is simply unique, in just a month it is able to increase its weight ten thousand times. At the same time, the caterpillar manages to lose “extra pounds” four times within a month.

It would take a ton of mulberry leaves to feed thirty thousand caterpillars, enough for the insects to weave five kilograms of silk thread. The usual production rate of five thousand caterpillars yields one kilogram of silk thread.

One silk cocoon gives 90 grams natural fabric. The length of one of the threads of a silk cocoon can exceed 1 km. Now imagine how much work a silkworm needs to work on, if on average 1,500 cocoons are spent on one silk dress.

Silkworm saliva contains sericin, a substance that protects silk from pests such as moths and mites. The caterpillar secretes a viscous substance of sloping origin (silk glue) from which it spins a silk thread. Despite the fact that most of this substance is lost during the manufacture of silk fabric, even the little that remains in the silk fibers can save the fabric from the appearance of dust mites.


Thanks to serecin, silk has hypoallergenic properties. Due to its elasticity and incredible strength, silk thread is used in surgery for suturing. Silk is used in aviation; parachutes and balloon shells are sewn from silk fabric.

Silkworms and cosmetics

Interesting fact. Few people know that a silk cocoon is an invaluable product; it is not destroyed even after all silk threads are removed. Empty cocoons are used in cosmetology. Masks and lotions are prepared from them not only in professional circles, but also at home.

silkworm gourmet food

Few people know about the nutritional properties of the silk caterpillar. it ideal protein product, it is widely used in Asian cuisine. In China, the larvae are steamed and grilled, seasoned, usually with a huge amount of spices you don’t even understand what “is on the plate”.


In Korea, they eat half-cooked silkworms, for which they are lightly fried. This is a good source of protein.

Dried caterpillars are commonly used in traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicine. The most interesting thing is that mold fungi are added to the “medicine”. Here is a useful silkworm.

What do good intentions lead to?

Few people know that the gypsy moth, which is the main pest of the US forestry industry, spread as a result of an unsuccessful experiment. As they say, I wanted the best, but the following came out.