Interesting Things

The top picture is of a grasshopper (of course!). I know, we all have seen them, I think, and know what they look like, but did you ever notice their bellies? If you look closely, you can see what looks like a person's face with sunglasses on between the second pair of legs.

The next picture is of a Parasa Chloris. We found this rather ugly caterpillar/slug on our flowering cherry tree one day while looking for a Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar (which, by the way, we never found. I hope we can watch one next year, though. I'm sure it would be fascinating). I will post some more pictures as we watch the Parasa Chloris, the ugly thing :-P :-)

The caterpillar in the picture above is a yellow-necked caterpillar that I found on our front porch. A very interesting looking feller, huh? They aren't very exciting looking as a moth either. They are dark brown and tan when that are a moth. To see a picture of a moth click here. Very pesty though, and the yellow-necked caterpillars cause a lot of damage to trees, eating the leaves. The other picture is of a toad we found in the herb patch beside our house.


And this very interesting creature is... well, I have no idea whatsoever. Very interesting looking, do you not think so? Mom thinks his head looks like that of a crocodile. Notice the intricate designs on his back. His leg's colour is greenish-yellow, or lime green. His hind legs are like that of a cricket. He is about one and a half inches long from nose to tail. If anyone has any idea what this creature is, please leave a comment on this post!

Seven Gems

Hello! I want to share some information about the seven Monarch butterflies I raised this year.
I learned some new things this year, including the fact that the Monarch caterpillar has twelve eyes, six on each side of it's head! Even though it has all those eyes it has very poor vision, so it uses it's antennas to know where it is at.

Also, I want to let you all know "Monarch Monica" from last year, is a male. The last picture on this post is a picture of a female. The female has wider black veins on her wings, and no dots on the hind wings. She is also smaller. The male has dots on his hind wings. In our studies, last year and this year , we have had only one female butterfly. We also noticed that all of the our male chrysalis' were the same size, but the female chrysalis was considerably smaller.

The caterpillars seemed to grow at the same rate as last year and about the same length except for the female. She was only about 1-1/2 inches long when she went into a chrysalis. Another thing I learned is how a caterpillar breathes. It breathes through little holes along its body called spiracles which are connected to tubes called tracheae, which carry oxygen throughout it's body.

I also noticed as I was watching a caterpillar spinning into it's chrysalis, that I could still see the stripes for almost an hour! After the stripes disappeared, I noticed yellow dots on the solid green chrysalis. A few hours later those dots had turned a lovely gold! Watch a gem!!!

The first picture is of a baby caterpillar when it first hatched. It's... kinda cute, don't you think? :-) The baby caterpillar will eat it's eggshell immediately after it hatches and then it will begin munching on the underside of the milkweed leaf, making a hole large enough for it to crawl through.