Help Farmers Rear Silk Moths to Restore Forests

Dear Colleagues and Friends The weather is getting hot again in Maroantsetra and that make emerge the chrysalid fastly, so we have many eggs now, Denis is producing a few cocoons now but for us we had trouble again because many of our larvae were dead at stage 4, but we are still continuing to rear larvae in the garden. Many eggs are hatching everyday. Only 30 cocoons have been produced in Maroantsetra during August, and twice in Denis`rearing.

It`s really important to intercrop the talandoha with a taller plants to shade the talandoha because only the larvae in the shade were survived. in opposite , in April only the larvae in an open area were survived so now we have lots of experiences about the rearing.

In Manaby, most of Denis`s trees were shaded so that allow him to produced more than iMaroantsetra. I`ll inform Jaonary Jean about all of that. When the farmers finish to farm 1000 trees, we must sensibilate them to intercrop the trees with a big plant like casava, banana...

Denis is working on the talandoha farming, so He is getting many seedlings and if it`s continuing like that we will be able to provide seedling to all interested farmers. I`ll visit Denis land on Saturday because he had a small problem in his land, An hydroelectric company has been set up in Ivoloina to provide electricity to all the Analanjirofo region, so the equipments pass over Denis land and he must move his house to another place always in his land. Fortunately our talandoha trees are still there , and no problem for the Cpali project. The advantage for that hydroelectricity is that Manambia may get an electricity and we can move the project to Manambia in the future (but right now , that seems take so long time).

The attached are photos of earrings that CPALI hopes to sell on its website - There are made from comet moth silk. We are making similar earring from suraka silk that we hope will be ready for the Christmas holiday!

Best wishes, Mamy