Host Trees and Shrubs
Over three hundred species of trees and shrubs are host to the gypsy moth. Gypsy moth larvae prefer oak trees, but may feed on many species of trees and shrubs, both hardwood and conifer.
In the eastern US, the gypsy moth prefers oaks, aspen, apple, sweetgum, speckled alder, basswood, gray, paper birch, poplar, willow, and hawthorns, amongst other species. Older larvae feed on several species of softwood that younger larvae avoid, including cottonwood, hemlock, Atlantic white cypress, and pine and spruce species native to the east. The gypsy moth avoids ash trees, tulip-tree, American sycamore, butternut, black walnut, catalpa, flowering dogwood, balsam fir, cedar, American holly, and mountain laurel and rhododendron shrubs, but will feed on these in late instars when densities are extremely high.
Read more about this topic: Lymantria Dispar Dispar
Famous quotes containing the words host, trees and/or shrubs:
“The rule for hospitality and Irish “help,” is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Half-opening her lips to the frost’s morning sigh, how strangely the rose has smiled on a swift-fleeting day of September!
How audacious it is to advance in stately manner before the blue-tit fluttering in the shrubs that have long lost their leaves, like a queen with the spring’s greeting on her lips;
to bloom with steadfast hope that, parted from the cold flower-bed, she may be the last to cling, intoxicated, to a young hostess’s breast.”
—Afanasi Fet (1820–1892)