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:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapor sometimes like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon ‘t that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs;
They are black vesper’s pageants.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)