Cabbage white butterflies—Pieris rapae—are one of the most common garden visitors across southern and eastern Australia. The butterfly looks elegant in white with black dots on its wings: females have ...

Stop the butterflies before the caterpillars start feasting.

When Kristen Giefer’s father would tend to his vegetable garden, he’d come across small creatures, the likes of which he called, “cabbage worms.” Giefer would eventually learn these ...

Person holding cabbage worms after picking them off a cabbage plant - Elena Shishkina/Shutterstock Although many of us are looking for ways to attract butterflies to the garden, some of the species we ...

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, together with their colleagues at the Universities of Stockholm and Tokyo, report in a new study in PNAS that larvae of the ...

Question: I see white butterflies landing on my kale, then later green caterpillars decimate the leaves. What do I need to do to stop this from happening, since I love kale? Answer: The arrival of ...

Researchers report that larvae of the cabbage white butterfly use two gut enzymes to effectively disarm the mustard oil bomb, the major chemical defense system of their host plants. Cabbage white ...

Cruciferous plants, such as cabbage, rapeseed, horseradish or mustard, have a special defense strategy against herbivores called the "mustard oil bomb". They store glucosinolates as defensive ...