What do silkworm babies eat in addition to mulberry leaves during their growth?

"Spring silkworms should not be old. They are always in love day and night. He Xi's body is exhausted, lingering from time to time. " This is the Silk Song written by Bao Linghui in the Northern and Southern dynasties. The silkworm's life has gone through the egg-ant silkworm-mature silkworm-cocoon-moth, a total of more than 40 days, it can be seen that the growth process of silkworm baby is very short.

1. The growth process of silkworm babies

1. The baby silkworm that has just hatched from the egg is as black as an ant. We call it "ant silkworm". It is covered with fine hair, but the hair is not obvious after about two days. The silkworm ant has an appetite about 40 minutes after it comes out of its shell, and the feeding process is about to begin.

2. The baby silkworm lives on mulberry leaves. After eating mulberry leaves, the body becomes white slowly. After a period of time, it begins to peel. Peeling for about a day, such as sleep do not eat or move, this is called dormancy. After a peeling, it is the second instar larva. Even if it is peeled once, it will increase by one year, and it will take five times to peel off and become a sixth instar larva before it begins to spin silk and cocoon.

Third, the sixth instar larvae need two days and two nights to form a cocoon, and the cocoon silk can be drawn up to 1.5 kilometers long! The silkworm peels off for the last time in the cocoon and becomes a pupa. About ten days later, it feathered into a silkworm moth and broke its cocoon. After coming out of the cocoon, the tail of the female moth emits a smell to lure the male to mate. After mating, the male moth dies. The female moth can lay about 500 eggs in a night, and then slowly die.

What can silkworm babies eat besides mulberry leaves?

Baby silkworms can eat a lot of food. In addition to mulberry leaves, there are Zhe leaves, elm leaves, fig leaves, Artemisia willow leaves, dandelion leaves, lettuce leaves, lettuce leaves, Brahmin ginseng leaves, and so on, no less than 20 kinds; but silkworm babies like to eat mulberry leaves most, this is because silkworms spend the most time on mulberry leaves, and their children and grandchildren breed on mulberry trees from generation to generation, gradually forming the characteristics that are most accustomed to eating mulberry leaves, and become hereditary. A chemist once analyzed the smell of mulberry leaves. After distillation of mulberry leaves at 132-157 ℃, he obtained an oily substance in the test tube, such as vinyl alcohol and vinyl aldehyde. The substance is volatile and smells like peppermint, which can be detected by silkworms 30 centimeters away when dripping it on paper. When the silkworm smelled the smell, it crawled over quickly. It can be seen that this is the most familiar signal smell of silkworms. Silkworms recognize the smell of mulberry leaves by their olfactory and taste organs. If they are destroyed, they will not be able to distinguish the smell of mulberry leaves, so it is no longer picky and can eat some other leaves at will.

In recent years, in the progress of artificial diet research on silkworm, people have basically identified the kinds of nutrients necessary for silkworm growth and their minimum requirements. Only by eating mulberry leaves can baby silkworms grow and develop healthily and successfully complete their alternation of generations.