A week or two after the caterpillars turn into chrysalises up at the top of the cage, there is not a lot going on. Every day I walk by when the dog needs to go out and do her business and they are all there, just hanging around doing nothing like teenagers in
a parking lot. Every once in a while, our kids will knock the cage and all of the chrysalises will rock back and forth, helpless in their little beds and I'm just hoping that none of them go crashing to the floor of the cage and explode like a waterbaloon. They are held on to the top by webbing that seems pretty strong, which is good considering how often the cage gets run into.
After what seems like months the emerald color of the chrysalis starts to turn brown and about a day before they pop out you can see the distinctive markings of the butterfly through the thin skin of the chrysalis. When we see that, we know that the next morning, or the next morning, or at least by the third morning a butterfly will break out of the chrysalis and begin its new journey in life.
Sometimes, the chrysalis will turn brown but the butterfly will not come out. I'm not sure what happens, but I want to blame it on the heat of Florida summers. The first year we did this, butterflies would break out, but get stuck to their chrysalis and would just die there stuck to their chrysalis, or we would come out and there is a dead butterfly on the floor of the cage. We had many a discussion about death with Ryland with the mass butterfly massacre of 2017. This year however, we only had one not make it.
Once the butterfly breaks out of the chrysalis, it hangs on their chrysalis for a while, but its wings are really small. The first time that I saw this, I thought it was a deformed butterfly, like the one that we read about in elementary school where the caterpillar did
a lot of hard drugs and didn't form properly when he came out of the cocoon half caterpillar and half butterfly all sad while his friends flew away. I figure that anything can go wrong in between being a caterpillar, cellular soup inside the chrysalis, and the reforming of a butterfly. This is normal though and if you watch the newly hatched butterfly, you can see the it pump fluid into its wings and then flap its growing wings that are dripping with fluid.
We live in Florida so we have an infestation of lizards. When people come to visit from other states, they are fascinated by the lizards that are everywhere. I'm so use to them that I don't even notice them, kind of like how people in LA must see celebrities hanging around all of the time and don't even notice them, we just see lizards hanging
around the back porch all of the time, roaming the sidewalks and scurrying out of the way. This is bad news for a bug though. The butterfly will escape the cage and then go hang out on the screen window, right where the lizards go on the prowl. Sometimes we just see butterfly wings lying on the floor and I can assume what happened.
If the caterpillars survive the Florida heat, the lizards, and the children picking them up or shaking them, then they will grow up to be mature butterflies. It's kind of a shame though watching them fly away. We spend so much money, time, and patience getting them to grow, feeding them, protecting them, and waiting for them to transform, and then within a few, they burst out and fly out of the back porch, never to be seen again.
These little bugs teach us a lot about life. There is so much invested in their little lives and they don't even appreciate it nor do they notice all of the effort that we put into them. Their little lives can be taken away so quickly though, but the joy of seeing the kids watch them burst out of their chrysalises, dry their wings, and fly away makes it all worth it. However, there are some videos on YouTube that could probably substitute the monetary expense and discussion about death.
P.S.
We let the milkweed do its thing in the yard and two caterpillars were found eating
what little leaves were left. They then made their chrysalises on the kids' playground. I guess we didn't need to waste all of the time and energy into this project after all. These little bugs will do just fine by themselves.
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