Monarch Summer–Fighting the Odds and New Beginnings

Several years ago, some milkweed started growing along the side of my parent’s yard. Nobody is sure exactly where it came from. The seeds must have blown in from somewhere, but we aren’t sure where. Even though the scrawny-looking stalks don’t add much to the landscaping, my mother has let them continue to grow because milkweed is the only food for monarch butterfly caterpillars, and it has become more and more scarce as fields have been disappearing in favor of housing developments. In fact, it has become scarce enough that it is threatening the monarch butterfly population.

The butterflies have found my mother’s milkweed patch, and they have been anxiously laying their eggs on it, but somehow, none of the caterpillars have been able to grow large enough to pupate and turn into butterflies. Something has been coming along and eating them while they are still tiny hatchlings. So, in order to give them the best chance of survival that we could, this summer we started collecting any eggs or tiny caterpillars we found on the milkweed and bringing them inside to raise. A monarch caterpillar takes around a month to turn into a butterfly after it hatches from the egg (add or take a bit–some take less time than others I learned) and since we didn’t find them all at the same time, we were raising caterpillars for most of the summer.

Even indoors, the life of a caterpillar is not free of dangers. Not every caterpillar we had made it to adulthood. We had two disappear (we still don’t know where they went), we had another wander away from the milkweed and starve, and we had three others that were found by a spider. However, we had ten that made it all the way through the caterpillar stage and pupated, and all of these made it through that stage and emerged (I learned that the technical term is actually eclosed) as butterflies.

Watching these tiny caterpillars grow into large caterpillars, then form chrysalises (I think it should be called chrysalize, because that just sounds cooler than pupate) then emerge as something so different never ceases to fascinate me. It reminds me that there is such a thing as a new beginning and that people can grow into something better. It reminds me that hard things can help us reach our full potential. All in all, I thought it was really cool, though sometimes it took a lot of work to make sure those ravenous caterpillars had enough milkweed. Here are some pictures, so you can see some of what we saw.

Have you ever watched a butterfly go through its life cycle? How does it make you feel?