Life Cycle Lessons

The teacher in me is coming out like crazy today! We've got a butterfly! This is very exciting for the Smith household, and Brody is so intrigued with our new little friend. To catch everyone up since my last post about caterpillars, our cute little Woolly Bear caterpillar didn't make it. We had him for probably three weeks or so, and one day we went outside to feed him and he was all shriveled up at the bottom of his habitat. So sad. However, not five minutes later, Brody found another caterpillar in the exact same spot on our sidewalk where we had found Woolly weeks before. This caterpillar was a crazy looking little guy, and I didn't get a chance to take a picture of him, but he looked like this...

...crazy and spiky and a little bit scary, if you ask me! Brody had no fear picking him up and immediately began calling him Spiky. I was kind of over the whole caterpillar thing at that point, and we were leaving for the cabin the next day, so I told Brody to give him lots of grass and leaves and we'd figure out what kind of caterpillar he was when we got back from our trip. (I thought he'd be dead by then for sure!)

Well, he wasn't. In fact, when we got back, I looked in the habitat and I found a chrysalis hanging from the branch that looked like this...

It was really exciting, but I thought a bit strange that we had this caterpillar for less than a week before he made his chrysalis and poor little Woolly hung out for three weeks and never made one. I finally decided to look online to try to figure out what kind of caterpillar it was, and I quickly discovered that it was a Mourning Cloak. The online site said that the caterpillars like to eat the sap from oak trees, but when they are mature, sometimes you find them wandering around aimlessly. This made total sense since we found him on the sidewalk crawling away from the oak tree in our backyard. Also made sense as to why he made his chrysalis so quickly. This guy was ready!

So today we took a peek, and there on the branch was our friend Spiky, no longer a scary looking caterpillar but a full-fledged Mourning Cloak butterfly. He must have hatched late last night, and he's now resting and drying his wings. Brody and I cut up some fruit and put it in his habitat, and we'll release him in the next couple of days. Brody can't believe that his funny looking caterpillar is now a butterfly! What a cool lesson on the life cycle!

Here he is! What an exciting find!

This is what he'll look like when he's all dry.

Mourning Cloak butterfly