Monarch Butterfly
Around the 20th of December, we were playing outside when we saw a monarch caterpillar hanging upside down in the telltale J-style form, ready to pupate. It was jiggling and squirming, bobbling in small circles, with its back end stuck to the underside of an areca palm frond with silk. We kept playing, waved to the mailman as he delivered mail to the houses on the other side of the street.
A few minutes later, Kendall and I came back to see the caterpillar. The lower half, where the head is and the “J” curves, was pupa green. It was swelling in some parts and squeezing in others, very dynamic motion. So a few minutes after that, I cam back to see the cater-pupa and found that it had completely morphed. It was green, textbook monarch chrysalis. It didn’t yet have the gold-looking line around the cap of the pupa, and it still had its former “skin” crumpled up at the top, where the silk holds the pupa, the “cremaster,” if you speak butterfly science.
When the mailman was making his rounds our side of the street, all of us were really excited about the newly morphed pupa, and the girls told the mailman all about it. All he can do is smile and nod because he didn’t understand a word that the three-year old’s were telling him. I wanted them to tell the story, so I only translated.
We could have all sat there and watched the whole thing in no more than ten minutes total, but I was under the impression that the morphing took about an hour. Now that I know it takes minutes, I’ll definitely stay to watch next time.
Just before going camping for Taylor’s birthday, the pupa started turning black, a sign that a)it’s dead, or b) it’s ready to exit. The black shows more in the end because the wings are mostly black. After a day and a half of its turning black, one can see the orange and white through the clear, thin pupal “skin.”
January 5 in the afternoon
January 6 in the morning
Clearly, we would be missing the butterfly’s emergence because we would be out camping.
He did leave us a present, as they all do when they emerge and go off to survive:
Pupal skin
I caught a picture of this one.
I can’t find his pupa if he did successfully morph. I’m sure we’ll see him again, though.
