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Monthly Science: Raising a Monarch Butterfly
A Monarch butterfly laid eggs in late July. On the 29th of July they looked like this:
Monarch Egg – focus stacked By August 2, a pair of caterpillars had hatched and grew to 3 mm:
Monarch caterpillar – 3 mm – 2017-08-02 A day later, they were 4 mm long:
Monarch caterpillars – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 They really were sort of blue-ish with green hints:
Monarch caterpillar 1 – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 And:
Monarch caterpillar 2 – 4 mm – 2017-08-03 By August 9, one had had more mature coloration:
Monarch caterpillar – 2017-08-09 The other caterpillar had vanished; we assume it got out of the aquarium and wandered off.
Apparently, the front end of the caterpillar (at the bottom of the picture) has a hard windshield reflecting the ring of LEDs around the camera lens. The caterpillar eats its skin after each molting, except for the windshield:
Monarch Windshield – 2017-08-09 We kept fresh milkweed branches in a vase and the caterpillar ate almost continuously:
Monarch caterpillar – 2017-08-13 By August 15, the caterpillar was ready for the next stage in its life. At 10 in the morning it had attached itself to the screen covering the aquarium and assumed the position:
Monarch caterpillar – starting chrysalis – 2017-08-15 It transformed into a chrysalis by 5:30 PM:
Monarch Chrysalis – with skin The discarded skin remained loosely attached until I carefully removed it.
What look like small yellow spots are actually a striking metallic gold color.
Eleven days later, on August 26 at 9 AM, the chrysalis suddenly became transparent:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – left And:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – right The shape of the butterfly becomes visible in reflected light:
Monarch chrysalis – ready – ventral detail The gold dots and line remained visible.
The magic happened at 3 PM:
Monarch chrysalis – emerging – unfolding The compacted wings emerge intense orange on the top and lighter orange on the bottom:
Monarch unfolding – left The butterfly took most of the day to unfurl and stiffen its wings into flat plates:
Monarch unfolding – dorsal And:
Monarch unfolding – right By 8 PM it began exploring the aquarium:
Monarch unfolded – right As adults, they sip nectar from flowers, but don’t feed for the first day, so we left it in the aquarium overnight.
At 10 AM on August 27, we transported it to the goldenrod in the garden, where it immediately began tanking operations:
Monarch on Milkweed – left A few minutes later, it began sun-warming operations:
Monarch on Milkweed – dorsal Mary watched it while she was tending the garden and, an hour or so later, saw it take off and fly over the house in a generally southwest direction. It will cross half the continent under a geas prohibiting any other action, eventually overwinter in Mexico with far too few of its compadres, then die after producing the eggs for a generation beginning the northward journey next year.
Godspeed, little butterfly, godspeed …
In the spirit of “video or it didn’t happen”, there’s a 15 fps movie of the emergence taken at 5 s/image.
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