Caterpillar Scat

Factual Questions
1

I know what you’re thinking…band name, right? No! Well…maybe, but that’s not the purpose of this thread. No, what I really wanna know is this:

What is the basic composition of a caterpillar’s solid excreta? I am talking about a caterpillar that eats the leaves of a flowering plant, and my assumption is that the excreta is basically made up of the undigestible parts of the plant, i.e. cellulose. Is caterpillar feces really cellulose? If it is, is it good for plants? Like mulch or fertilizer?

I have a caterpillar in a bucket and I’ve been feeding it leaves and removing it’s poop from the bucket and scattering it at the base of the plant that is providing the leaves in the hope that the stuff will encourage the plant to grow more leaves to replace the healthy ones I’ve clipped off for caterpillar food.

Is this one of those ‘Circle of Life’ kind of things, where the caterpillar eats the leaves but the caterpillar scat feeds the plant, allowing it to grow more leaves to feed the caterpillar?

Have I lost my mind? Yes. But this is a legitimate question. Can anyone help me? Please?

2

Energy has to come into the system someplace, so, while you can probably use the caterpillar dung to fertilize the plant, you’re gonna need to add something else – plant food, probably.

When I worked in upstate New York several years ago, there was a hefty batch of caterpillars. In some places, I was told, you could hear it coming down on the leaves below – it sounded like rain.

One of my co-workers told me that caterpillar dung is properly called “frass”.

3

Plants don’t get energy from their (so called) food; they get nutrients that they can use to build tissues. They get their energy from sunlight and manufacture real food (in the form of carbohydrates, mostly).

However, something is still being lost from the system - the materials needed to make the caterpillar’s body. If the plant is growing in the ground outside, it is unlikely to starve from these losses.