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A Monarch Among Us

TOS_Monarch_Caterpillar_web.jpg
Illustration by Adelaide Tyrol

Earlier this summer, my daughter persuaded me to bring home a monarch egg. I had misgivings. This wasn’t my first butterfly rodeo, and previous experience was discouraging. Two summers past, a friend gave us several black swallowtail caterpillars. One lived to adulthood, but all the siblings wasted away, taking on the form of burnt bacon gristle.

On the plus side, this time we’d be starting with an egg, and a new one at that. We had found it minutes after watching the mother butterfly flutter down into a milkweed patch.

A new egg, I reckoned, was safer. In practical parental terms: if we raised the caterpillar in a reasonably sterile environment, it seemed unlikely to die in spectacularly horrid fashion, for example, by bursting open to reveal tachnid fly larvae, and thus inspiring tears and difficult religious conversations during the morning drive to daycare.

So I agreed to take it home. I begged my children not to get emotionally attached. I emphasized that we were starting a science project, not adopting a pet.

Over the next five days we watched as the egg elongated, and its radial grooves, running base to tip, became more distinct. By the fifth day, the top of the egg had darkened, and soon after a tiny, translucent maggot with a black head popped out. The kids named it Hatchy Tractor Tillinghast. “Hatchy” for obvious reasons; “Tractor” because my son, age four, is of the firm opinion that anything is better with a tractor in the middle of it.

Hatchy’s first order of business was to devour its own egg case. This is standard operating procedure for many caterpillars, and provides them with a protein-rich first meal. Our young monarch’s next act (after resting) involved weird back and forth swaying – what my kids described as its “waggle dance.” By the end of its first day, it had chewed a hole through the middle of the leaf, and turned light green.

Given my anxieties about the impact of caterpillar death on family serenity, it’s just as well that I was ignorant about monarch feeding behaviors. Although monarch lives are fraught with peril at every stage – from egg-eating ants to any number of dangers during the fall migration down to Mexico – it turns out that one of the most dangerous moments of all is the caterpillar’s first vegetarian meal.

In his excellent new book, Monarchs and Milkweed, Cornell professor Anurag Agrawal described the evolutionary arms race between monarch butterflies and their host plant. For many milkweed species (including our common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca) the first line of defense is the plant’s woolly texture. A thick forest of hairs creates a wall between caterpillars and the leaf surface. In retrospect, I believe Hatchy’s swaying behavior was an effort to get through this barrier – what Agrawal described as “mowing the lawn.” A young monarch caterpillar spends precious energy shaving off leaf hairs in order to clear a feeding patch.

Next comes the dangerous moment, the first bite. According to research cited by Agrawal, odds are remarkably grim, with more than 60 percent of monarch caterpillars dying from their first leaf meal. The killer is latex – the milky fluid from which milkweed gets its name. This fast drying goo, stored under pressure and released when a leaf is injured, can swamp a young caterpillar and seal its mouth shut. Toxins in the latex can also be lethal.

In retrospect, I suspect that we improved our caterpillar’s chances by providing cut leaves with some of the latex already draining out of the stems. Hatchy also appeared to follow a typical irrigation tactic to reduce latex exposure. The middle leaf holes, which it made as a young caterpillar, were likely examples of “circle trench” feeding. This involves biting holes in a circular pattern, and retracting the head every time that the latex wells up. When the circle’s complete, the caterpillar has created an island of leaf tissue that’s relatively latex-free.  

There was never a time that I stopped dreading caterpillar catastrophe, especially as Hatchy grew bigger and cuter, and my daughter began reading it evening bedtime stories. (Hatchy, she reported, did not like books with pictures of birds.) But the caterpillar continued to thrive, progressing rapidly through its five instars; at each molt, it efficiently popped off its head and wriggled out of its old skin, eating both. When Hatchy did eventually split open, what emerged was not a parasitic fly but a perfect green chrysalis. Eleven days later, a male monarch butterfly emerged, its gender evident from the black spots on its hind wings.

Its wings dried. We let it go. It fluttered high into a maple tree, and for a while at least, lived.

Discussion *

Sep 14, 2017

Thanks all for the comments - and Bernadette, lucky you to have so many caterpillars in residence! It has been encouraging to see more monarchs flying around this year.

Elise Tillinghast
Sep 12, 2017

I am thrilled to report 10 Monarch caterpillars in my yard as of yesterday!! Watching them outside and looking for more. Last year we had none here in East Randolph. Great article and website!

Bernadette Lacey
Sep 03, 2017

Elise, you should be writing! Write Childrens’ books, nature books more ‘zine articles, but write!

Bill Risso
Aug 28, 2017

Thanks you for this delightful account. It reminds me of my experience with Monarch caterpillars in Massachusetts in the the 1950s:  late one summer I brought one Monarch caterpillar from Keene Valley, NY home to Essex MA in a quart jar with daily freshened milkweed to bring to the school where I taught natural science to grades 1 - 5. I kept water in the bottom of the jar, protected from the wandering caterpillar by a layer of smooth 1” pebbles so s’he couldn’t drown.  Of course i had to change the water almost daily.  the caterpillar grew rapidly and soon hung from its hind “feet” from this was miraculous to watch it climb out of its caterpillar skin as it hung upside down from the twig, and the miraculous moment when it crawled out of its striped skin and incredibly quickly released its new body uno its new chrysalis and hung from the twig. The curled up caterpillar inside is now visible for a very short time as a dark body, and its shrugged off wrinkled old skin is hanging from the twig. The caterpillar-becoming-chrysalis now has to get rid of its old skin without letting go of the twig. The move takes a millisecond so quick that the human eye can’t comprehend it, and there is the chrysalis miraculously still hanging from the milkweed twig. Now it’s time to move it to a hatching jar which has already been prepared with water and pebbles at the bottom for moisture in the air. Then a piece of fine mesh wire goes across the top of the jar to be fastened with a couple of rubber bands.

This should be kept in a quiet place (no sunlight) for a couple of weeks (I can’t remember whether it’s 2 or 3) and one day the kids will notice that the transparent chrysalis shows the folded dark wings of he new butterfly, with black ribs and dark skin showing through the now transparent skin. Very soon the skin will split and the emergent butterfly slowly climbs out and hangs there with its wet, crumpled wings. This ay take quite a while; the jar can be put outside and the if you are lucky enough to have a kids class to watch this, everyone can go outside, sit on the grass in a circle and watch the new butterfly with its newly smooth wings flutter away into the sky.  The children’s s;spontaneous chorus “Good bye!”  brings tears to my eyes.

A year or two later I learned that a caterpillar or chrysalis should NEVER be moved from where it was found for any distance;  I moved the one I found in the Adirondacks 3 states away to Massachusetts:  a No-No;  You are playing God by moving genes across country much faster that nature would allow.

Martha Hoar
Aug 24, 2017

Interesting, enlightening, and so sweet.  Thank you

Cindy Ecklesdafer
Aug 21, 2017

Thank you for this fun and interesting article from a parent’s perspective.

Tricia Knoll

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