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.