Metamorphosis

My alternate title would be "Butterflies and Funerals."  Or, "The Hungry Caterpillar", not by Eric Carle.

Harriet led us on a big adventure through the life cycle of a butterfly.  I had promised her that I would get her something very cool for trying out for the school talent show since she had been so brave and so crushed when she didn't make it.  In an effort to not add any more toys or plastic to our house, we went for a live gift.

We ordered the Painted Lady Butterfly habitat in the mail which came with a coupon for live painted lady caterpillars, which we then ordered.  It still feels weird to me that you can order live animals to be delivered to your mailbox.  The order form asked for a phone number so that they could call to tell you when they would be delivered.  I was waiting for the phone call, but should have been more vigilant in checking the mail right away every day.  At 5pm one day, we discovered a hot little box of caterpillars in our mail box - no phone call!  We prayed that they hadn't gotten too hot and would live.  We took really good care of them and followed exact instructions.  Thankfully, all 5 caterpillars did make it.  No funerals yet.

Being a biology major, I had an idea of what I had gotten myself into, but I was still surprised at how much work this project really turned out to be.  You have to be committed if you want to raise butterflies in your house!

Here's the photo tour.  It's long.  The whole thing took about a month.  Harriet bonded with these little critters and we took tons of pictures.  (She is the butterfly girl after all - you should see her bedroom!)

the caterpillars come in a self-contained cup with complete nutrients.  this part was easy.  we just had to make sure to keep it out of direct sunlight and A/C

 

The caterpillars spin this web kind of stuff.  It helps protect them from predators when they spin it on a leaf in the wild.

 It was so cool to watch them become attached to the top of the cup and hang down very still.

 We were surprised to find out that they do NOT spin a chrysalis.  (Yes, it's a chrysalis, Eric Carle!  Not a cocoon!!) Their skin splits open from top to bottom and the chrysalis is inside and kind of folds around the caterpillar.  Wild stuff.

 The chrysalis becomes iridescent.  So cool.

They do NOT stay still in the chrysalis.  I had to move the cup a few times and every time I did it, 2 of the chrysalises went wild and crazy with shaking.  Another defense mechanism.  I'm just curious how it is able to move because the caterpillar becomes liquefied inside the chrysalis while the dormant butterfly DNA takes over and starts forming the butterfly cells.  Nature is really freaky cool.

(this is a really blurry picture, but if you look closely at the little black spots, you see that they are caterpillar segments.  This was also new to me... the caterpillars molt off body segments to go from 16 caterpillar legs to the 6 legs of the butterfly.  I never thought about that before.)

Time to move them to the butterfly habitat so that when they come out of the chrysalis they aren't in a tiny cup.

The first butterfly is born!

 

 and... a few more.  They guarantee that at least 3 of 5 will turn into butterflies.  All 5 of ours made it.  We must be butterfly geniuses or something.

 It took about 2 days for all the butterflies to emerge.  Then about 2 days later...

 they mated.  "got stuck together"  Butterfly _ _ _
Oh my gosh.  Seriously.  I guess when you only live 4 weeks, you've got to get a move on it.

The instructions say to keep dropping sugar water on fresh flowers like dew.  After going through many piles of sticky wilted flowers we decided to switch to orange slices.  That was much better.

But, we had 5 butterflies - definitely an odd man (woman) out.  It was pretty obvious that we had 2 sets of mates and a 5th wheel.  I thought they seemed to be a little mean to the 5th.

I wondered how long it would be before they laid eggs.  Turns out, not long!

 (the eggs are the tiny blue dots on these flowers)

 Harriet spent lots of time on her way in and out of her room, stopping to hold her butterflies.

 Guess how long it takes before the caterpillars hatch?  Not long.  I kept reading that I had a week on these things (laying eggs, hatching, etc), but they always seemed to happen in less than 5 days.  One day Harriet woke up and yelled "they hatched!! and they're all over!!"  The baby caterpillars were tiny enough to crawl through the mesh of the butterfly habitat.  They were all over her dresser.  She carefully picked up each one on the edge of a paper towel and put it in a caterpillar container.  She was pretty determined that none of them would die and none of the eggs would be wasted.  I tried to have the biological conversation with her - that especially tiny animals, like insects, lay many many more eggs than will hatch and many many more caterpillars hatch than will survive to adulthood.  She wouldn't have it.  She wanted to save every single one.  They were her baby butterflies.  Oh dear, I could see us at the top of a slippery slope.

look how tiny!!!!  barely bigger than a speck.

The instructions say to release the butterflies a few days after they emerge.  Harriet knows they live for up to 4 weeks so she thought it would be good to keep them around long enough to meet her cousins coming for the family reunion in 2 weeks.  This is how we ended up with eggs and caterpillars.  I'm thinking the early release might have been better, but it was cool to see the baby caterpillars too.

 The tragedies started right before the cousins started coming.  One butterfly (whom she named Flowr) was found fairly still on the bottom of the cage.  We thought she was dead, but discovered she was just starting to die.  I really didn't know if this was going to be the worst idea I've ever had - to let Harriet raise an animal and now watch it die, but figured it might be good practice for things to come in a household full of elderly pets.

She gently took care of Flowr for about a day.

She tried to release her but found that she was too weak to fly away.  We didn't want her to be eaten by a bird after all that, so we kept her in a safe spot away from the other butterflies.  She finally did die and we had... yes... a butterfly funeral.  (There is a beta fish buried in our old yard in Salt Lake.  What can I say.)  Cousin Janie had arrived by then, so the 3 girls went to the front yard (the only place we have dirt,) and buried her in the flower bed.  Harriet was stoic and seemed to be ok with it even though she was sad.

Harriet, Grace, and Janie's makeshift memorial.  

We decided we didn't want to watch any more of them die, so it was time for release even though the rest of the cousins weren't here yet.

Harriet named each one.  We released them one at a time so she could hold them all.  Luckily our neighbors have a really nice flowering bush that crosses our fence line, so we let them go near it and they hung out there for a while before fluttering away.

R.I.P. Flowr
Farewell to Orange (who had a broken wing tip but was still able to fly away), Sweet, Sugar, and Flutter

And, those cute tiny little caterpillars?  Well, we aren't very good at baby caterpillar care.  The entire nursery has died.  Quite the circle of life lesson here.  I might be a tiny bit relieved that none of the baby caterpillars made it even though it would have been cool to see them grow up into those giant caterpillars we got in the mail.