Picture of the Week: My Childhood 2.

My mother and father made several of these large jewelry cases into insect display boxes. This one was for a variety of things, specimens that didn't fit into the dragonfly and butterfly cases. We raised the four big saturniids at the top, the luna and Cercropia moths, from caterpilliars when I was 5. The Cercropia cocoon (top right center) was from one of those individuals. The Prometheus moth (center left) we hatched from the cocoon to its right. Most of the rest were collected by my father, but there are a few things there that I collected, maybe the first arthropods I ever collected. Down near the bottom right to the left of the sphinx moth is a tabanid and a millipede. I remember collecting those two somewhere between the age of 5 and 14. And I think the small mantid on the bottom left. I can tell because the mounting is far more haphazard and less perfect than the rest. My father is a perfectionist when it comes to these things, and it shows in how nice they look in this display case.