The Life Cycle

Madison got a butterfly habitat for Christmas and has been dying to order the caterpillars and watch them grow into butterflies. We finally got around to doing it in April, and it was really cool!! We ordered the caterpillars online and they came a couple days later in a cup. There were five of them and they were really tiny, like no bigger than my pinky fingernail. I figured they must just be specially bred to be smaller than normal caterpillars you see in nature so they could stay in the cup. Boy was I wrong!! They were in the cup for about a week just eating and growing and they got huge!!!! Compared to what they started out as, we were all shocked to see how big they got! It actually got a little creepy. It was fun to watch them move around and climb all over the place, although they freaked out whenever they got close to each other. We didn't have to do anything with them - all the food they needed was inside the cup so we just watched them.

One day, one of them went to the top of the cup and hung upside down like a J. A couple hours later, he was hard as a rock and had formed his chrysallis. The other four all did so the next day. We had to leave them in the cup for a couple more days to make sure they were all hard and then we transferred them to the butterfly habitat and left it sitting on the counter. A couple days after that, I looked up one day while doing the dishes and saw a butterfly in the habitat! The other four all emerged over the next day. We didn't actually see any of them come out, unfortunately; we just looked in randomly and saw another butterfly!! The girls really loved it!! Madison named them all - Sparkle, Jewel, Rainbow, Glitter and Beautiful. We kept them in the habitat for a few more days and fed them watermelon. They were really pretty and interesting to watch. Then we had to let them go :( Of course Madison was sad about that, but we told her they had to go out in nature so they could make baby caterpillars. Letting them go was kind of anti-climatic. They wouldn't fly out of the habitat! Madison was really hoping one would land on her but we watched them for about a half hour and they stayed put. We had to leave to go somewhere and when we came back about an hour later, only one had flown away. We left the habitat out over night and in the morning, that one had come back! But by the end of that day, they had all gradually made their way out. It was a fun activity that I would definitely do again!

Ready to transform. You can't really tell the size but they're about two inches long

Four chrysallises (One fell to the bottom of the cup shortly after forming but he still made it out just fine!)

Time to transfer to the habitat

Another one fell off the lid as we transferred. There was definitely some concern that we had murdered the butterflies but they all emerged!

Our first butterfly!

There's four total in this picture, although it's kind of hard to tell because there are fake butterflies on the bottom of the habitat. But there's three on the right on the paper towel and one on the left just on the corner of the paper towel

A better shot of the one on the left

Time to say goodbye

 Seriously pretty

 She's waiting anxiously for it to fly out onto her hand

We thought this one was going to go but after hanging out up here for a while, it flew back down into the habitat

Jordan got it to climb onto a stick in the hopes of getting it to fly but it just flew back into the habitat