I thought that I would share with your our favorite Caterpillar & Butterfly study books that we used while raising our caterpillar larvae :)
Raising Minibeasts ~ Caterpillars by Barrie Watts is a great one to start with. The information is nice and simple so your youngest children can enjoy it, covers everything and even includes a really easy project on how to build your own screen house for raising your caterpillars inside.
The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Bobbie Kalman is more than just about the butterfly life cycles! There are really neat sidebars with fun information, how to identify male & female butterflies, migration info, what to plant in your own butterfly garden and how to pamper visiting butterflies :)
The Life of a Butterfly by Clare Hibbert is another great book with great photos, Q&A throughout to quiz your children as you go along to see what they remember and really neat info on how parasites feed off of caterpillars!
National Geographic's Face to Face With Caterpillars by Darlyne A. Murawski has absolutely stunning photos!! This one is great for your older child as it goes into a little more depth than the others by going into detail about their anatomy and more and it covers caterpillars from around the globe. If anything you have to see this book just for the pictures *grin*. Some of them are really bizarre looking!
And last but not least, what would a butterfly study be without Ms. Frizzle and the Magic Schoolbus!? Butterfly Battle has the class turned into butterflies as they struggle to survive. The short novel is peppered with tons of great information like how to tell a moth and a butterfly apart, how the scales on a butterflies wings help give it its unique color and much more :)
In my last entry I shared with you all about the growth of our caterpillars and their final molt as they shed their skin for the last time and formed their pupa's. Well now they are just about ready to emerge!
Do you know how to tell when your caterpillar turned butterfly is ready to break out of its pupa? The pupa will turn clear and you will actually be able to see the newly formed butterfly inside the pupa! Look really closely at the photo above. Can you see some of the colors on it's wings?
It's hard to believe that just 10 days ago this pupa was completely black and there was no way to see inside of it.
Our caterpillar has made a complete metamorphosis or change and has now emerged as a beautiful Painted Lady :) After 3 or 4 pushes it has freed itself from its pupa. When a butterfly first emerges its wings are really wet and sort of crumpled, and it cannot fly. It dangles from its pupa and for the next couple of hours it will slowly flap its wings open and closed.
Do you know why it spends so much time flapping its wings? When a butterfly emerges its body is full of a lot of liquid and the pumping action gets that liquid moving into the veins of its crumpled wings. Each time it opens and closes its wings more of the liquid fills the veins and makes them stronger and bigger! Soon this butterfly will be ready to fly.
Here's a close up shot of the pupa that one of our butterflies came out of. It's still intact.
Our butterfly has finished drying, its wings are stronger now and it has actually started to become more colorful as well. They know instinctively how to fly, no one has to teach them how to do it. It's ready to find something sweet to drink :)
Did you see the proboscis on the butterfly (3 photos above) that just emerged from its pupa? You can see it curled up coming out of the butterflies head. The proboscis is the butterflies mouth that acts like a drinking straw. It will use it to suck up water and sweet nectar from flowers. Butterflies actually smell nectar with their antennae!
We have released our butterflies into nature :) They are now off to lay new eggs to start the life cycle all over again. We are definitely looking forward to raising more next year!
With all of the excitement over our baby Robins I completely forgot to update you on how our butterfly larvae was doing! So I'm going to recap what happened since we have raised and set them free already :) Calling them hungry is an understatement, try starving! All day long they munched and crunched, so loud in fact that they could be heard clear across the other side of the room. On top of their little food container they came in was a piece of breathable woven mesh type fabric separating them from the lid and one of the little rascals or maybe it was more than one actually chewed holes through the material resulting in one escapee.
Do you know how a caterpillar chews? By opening and closing its jaws just like a pair of scissors!
As our caterpillars ate and grew their skin did not grow with them and grew tight. To tight in fact that they had to 'molt' or shed their skin and a new skin would form. And each time our caterpillars molted they grew twice their size and then they would molt again! Do you know what a caterpillar does with the skin that it sheds? It eats it! It is full of good nutrients that help the caterpillar grow. The stage in between molts is called an 'instar' and during this time they continue to eat like crazy. On average a caterpillar goes through 4 different stages of molting.
The above photo is just about 10 days after they arrived at our home. They had just began to get ready for their last and final molt. When a caterpillar is ready to form it's 'pupa' or 'chrysalis' it finds a nice place to hang upside down, and from out of it's spinneret it shoots sticky silk (just like a spider) creating a little button from which it sticks its abdomen to. Once they were all ready, having glued themselves to the top of their little home they began their last molt by splitting open their skin and from underneath their 'pupa' formed.
Their skin splits right in half from top to bottom and the 'pupa' appears and becomes a hard protective shell for the caterpillar to change into a butterfly. The caterpillar actually turns into a liquid inside of the 'pupa' as it's body re-organizes itself into the butterfly that it will emerge as. They are very strange looking to. Look ours has spikes on it!
Did you know that caterpillars don't see very well? They can only see light and shadows through their clusters of eyes. Another interesting bit of info about caterpillars is that once they have formed their pupa sometimes you can see movement from inside of it! This happens if they get bumped or moved. They can actually startle and means that they are in tune with what is happening around them. Isn't that neat!
Make sure you check back for the last update on our caterpillars when the emerge from their pupas as butterflies.
We have been waiting for nearly a month now for our butterfly larvae to arrive and it finally came!! I didn't tell the kids when I ran down to the post office Saturday morning what it was I was picking up, I just love to keep secrets. *grin* So when I came back with a very large box plastered with the above 'Live Specimen' stickers all over it they really went nutty trying to figure out what in the world mama had got them now :)
I wasn't joking when I said the box was big either! We were only getting 5 caterpillars and a little pop up screen enclosure for when the butterflies emerge later on so what in the world could be hiding in all those packing peanuts?!
A full color poster showing the life cycle and various butterflies....
and our 6 Painted Lady caterpillars, we ended up with one extra one. They are an ugly little black caterpillar, not one of those pretty little fuzzy ones which quite often are moths *grin* and they are noisy to! You can hear them chewing when it is really quiet. I was sitting on the couch earlier reading and I could hear the strangest noise, sort of like a scratching sound and it was them! They must be super hungry :) They came in their little plastic container filled with food so we don't have to do anything now but wait. It takes 10 - 14 days for them to grow and form their chrysalis' so now we watch and
wait :)
