What you witnessed in the previous blog post was the hatching of little egg gems and the morphing into tiny barely visible creatures, which, when fed well, grew and grew into chubby green multi-legged hungry guys, with black, white and yellow markings.

In short, it was amazing.

Life is a series of transitions and growth: Caterpillars are programmed to transition and they adapt to each stage so well, relying on innate messages to move on with their lives. We watched this occur with eight caterpillars. The eighth one was rescued after we explained to our neighbor that it was a future butterfly. And so, when she found a “pearl” on her parsley, she handed it over for foster care.

So then what?

After they stuff themselves for days, after you change their habitats over and over each day, after you think they possibly couldn’t eat another bite of parsley and they do, after they begin to look like green stuffed sausages with cute little feet, they, BARF a puddle of their last parsley meal.

That is the signal.

So, when this happened with “Cat” #1 of the bunch, we had to hit the research again and figure this out. The next signal is that they instinctively begin to crawl UPWARD because they are looking for a place from which to hang and morph into a pupa. We had to act fast: we constructed a little “tree-house” and helped #1 get into it. Now that he wasn’t confined to a jar, he meandered up and down, around a little track we made; he tested each branch and stick and eventually settled on the place where he would form a letter “J”.

Within twenty-four hours, he had woven a belt of silk around his middle and hung backwards like a window washer doing tricks and eventually his bright green color was the same color as the twig and he was virtually unrecognizable and seemed to be a protrusion from the braanch.

We did this eight times. The events varied slightly. But it seemed that each “cat” needed to explore before settling in and strangely, after the second one entered suspended animation and the third one entered the tree abode, I noticed this:
#3 couldn’t get settled and went up and down and around and brushed against the “zomby” #2, which sensed the pressure or the movement nearby and began to swing to shoo #3 away. I was flabbergasted; it was the weirdest thing!

This is how #1 morphed. He now looks like part of the tree branch and is well camouflaged from predators.

The tree began to fill-up, one by one, about a day apart, we moved the ‘pillars into the tree. But there had to be a protected environment around them: We didn’t know when they would emerge as butterflies.

The solution: a butterfly house to shelter the “tree.”

©SusanKalish iPhone XS max/Moment Macro lens or Camera+2 app macro setting

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