Welp, we got ourselves a whole bunch of cocoons, sorry, chrysalises. This means that we will soon have a lot of butterflies. The caterpillars have been eating non-stop, just like the children do, and they have been growing very quickly. What starts out from a little egg the size of a mustard seed soon turns into a giant yellow and black monster that devours leaf after leaf until several milkweed plants were eaten entirely. We had to go out in search for more milkweed because the little monsters ate all of the rest of them into mere green twigs sticking out of a pot full of dirt and they were squirming around looking for more food.
We put the milkweed in the cage and kept switching them out, new bright green milkweed plants for the twigs in a pot that the growing caterpillars left behind. The caterpillars would then start devouring the new plant like they were the new flavor of Goldfish snacks and within a day or so we would have to switch them out again. The caterpillars would grow from the size of an ant to the size of Cheeto in a few days and were ready for the next phase of their journey.
Before we started growing butterflies I thought that the caterpillars would spin a cocoon around themselves and hide like a kid in a sleeping bag. What I learned was that what they actually do is much more like a scene from the movie Aliens.
After eating a week’s wages worth of milkweed, they climb up to the top of the cage and attach themselves to the top of the cage with a little bit of webbing. The caterpillar will curl up into a J shape for a few days doing seemingly nothing, just like most teenagers. After a few days, the caterpillar will start to look a little more green than yellow and it will straighten out and wiggle a little bit. Then its skin will burst from underneath starting at the back of the head and it will wiggle and squirm until the whole outer yellow and black striped skin splits and the green chrysalis breaks out from under the skin. It will continue to wiggle for a few minutes until the whole outer skin shrivels up into a ball and falls off onto the ground revealing the new green chrysalis. The new chrysalis wiggles for a while and is the same size of the previously hanging caterpillar and it will eventually condense into the small green
chrysalis that you mainly think of as a monarch butterfly cocoon. Scientists say that inside the chrysalis the caterpillar turns into a cellular soup where the whole bug turns into a goo that will eventually rearrange itself into a butterfly.
In a way, the caterpillars are a lot like raising children, but in super speed. They start out extremely small, so small that you are afraid to handle them because you might hurt or squash them. Then they eat everything in sight, which ruins your life savings and they grow faster than you can imagine. After a while though, they calm down and hang around by themselves isolated in their own little worlds where you don’t quite know what’s going on, though you read about the changes in books. Then, they burst forth and you’re so happy for their growth and maturity. By the time that you get to enjoy the beauty that is your new butterfly, it freakin’ leaves you and you are sitting on the back porch wondering what happened. At least with tiny humans, they grow slow enough that you can enjoy them, we just have to not take those moments for granted while they are small.
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