I get ridiculously excited about going to the State Fair every year, starting in about April. I’m not sure why. I can’t remember ever having a real “peak experience” there, and once I had my camera and equipment stolen from me while standing in line for cheese curds. But I can’t help it. I love the fair.
And one of the things I love most, although not as much as cheese curds, is the Butterfly House on the northwest corner of Dan Patch Avenue and Underwood Street. You can walk into this classroom-sized screen-porch like room that’s just all aflutter with gorgeous butterflies. You have to be very careful, because butterflies are very delicate, but if you spend a few minutes and just stand quietly, they will flit around you, nestle near you, and sometimes land on you. Amazing.
Connected to the butterfly viewing area is a sort of gift shop that sells, among other things, pairs of live monarch caterpillars just getting ready to go into their chrysalis stage (more on that below). They come in a plastic screen-topped container about the size of a regular peanut butter jar, and they have a few fresh (but rapidly wilting!) milkweed leaves to munch. I had never bought them before, but this year I did. Ten bucks for two—I got them just before getting on the bus to go home, because I didn’t want to drag the poor little guys with me around the fair all day long first.
When I told the guy at the counter that I wanted to buy the caterpillars, he asked how “ready” I wanted them to be.
“Ready?”
“Yeah, like how soon do you want them to go into their chrysalises?”
I hadn’t thought about this, but sooner seemed better than later—less could go wrong, I thought. So I said, “Oh, really ready.” He picked up a container with a pair he said “should be good to go this afternoon.”
And in fact, I barely got them home before they were clinging to the top of the container (see the photos) and trying to stick a strand of their strong silk to the ceiling to hang by. By evening, they had “become the letter J,” as I’d been told they would. And by morning, they were full-on cocooned critters, hermitically sealed and vacuum packed for fresh flavor. Not really…but they were in there pretty good.
Beside the sparkling fresh chrysalis hung the dried-out exoskeletons of the caterpillars, like crusty old (full-body) socks that had been slipped off and discarded.
Except that one poor little guy had trouble with his cable, which broke and allowed it to fall to the leaf-covered bottom below. I didn’t know what to do about that, so my instinct was to do nothing. This proved to be a bad instinct, probably, because in a couple of days that chrysalis had grown blackish and I figured the developing butterfly inside had died. I wasn’t sure the reason for this, but considered that maybe the position of the caterpillar’s body was crucial to the various cells knowing where to go as the butterfly developed. In developmental biology, up-down/left-right cues are vital to the various cells—heart, skin, wings, legs, eyes, etc.—getting to the right spot and forming properly. Had falling on its side disrupted the information needed for the caterpillars “inner engineer” to make those decisions? I don’t know. I’ll look into it sometime.
Even though I lost one chrysalis, the other one seemed healthy and I thought I saw some very slight changes over the course of several days. At least I had no reason to think the caterpillar was NOT becoming a butterfly in there!
One morning a few weeks ago I looked in on the chrysalis and saw a dramatic change—the colors and patterns of a monarch were clear through the chrysalis, pressed against the interior wall!
After work that day I came home to find that the butterfly had emerged, and not too long ago. It was still a little moist and soft from being inside the chrysalis. I was glad that it had not been trapped in the too-small container like this the entire day, because I think that might have restrained its wing development, cramping them from spreading out properly.
I took the container with the butterfly in it outside, near the lawn behind my apartment complex where some young neighbors were playing soccer. Many of my neighbors are Mexican-American, and seem to love soccer the way I as a kid loved American football. When they saw what I had in my hands, they stopped their game and came over to watch. They asked a few questions, about where I had gotten it, what had happened to the other one (I had left the blackened chrysalis in the container), what I was going to do with it, and so forth.
We looked at the empty shell of the chrysalis, still stuck to the containers inside top cover.
We watched the butterfly take its first few flaps together. It looked like it was trying to get used to its new body, and we could almost sense how strange it might be to have wings for the first time. After a few minutes, I took the new butterfly to an open field nearby and left it to complete its preparations for flight on its own, because it seemed to me that with all of us watching, it was perhaps acting shy.
In the days since I released my little butterfly friend, I’ve done some reading and Internet research on the lifecycle of the monarch butterfly. It’s truly fascinating and a little strange. I outline the key events below.
Four By Four: The Complicated, Convoluted Life Cycle of the Monarch Butterfly
Four generations, with four stages each, per year. The stages are egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. The generations are a little more complicated.
In early spring—one source I consulted said February, but that couldn’t be for Minnesota, at least not in the winter of 2014—hibernating monarchs emerge from their long chilly nap and find a mate. Ah, romance is in the air, carried on regal stain-glassed orange wings! Once fertilized, the eggs are deposited on milkweed leaves, and hatch into tiny caterpillars in around 5 days.
Do you know the kids’ book,
The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar? That’s these guys. Sporting the B&W fashion sense of a penguin or zebra (they’re bodies are white, ringed in black lines--but to be fair, many sport lemon or lime colored accents), they do nothing but chomp. Milkweed for breakfast, milkweed for lunch, milkweed for after-milkweed snacks, milkweed for dinner. Short break; more milkweed. This plant, which gets its name from the sticky milk-looking juices that ooze out of any tear of cut in their stems and leaves, helps to fatten up the caterpillars. And it does something else. It makes them taste super bitter, so that birds avoid them. (There is a very tricky butterfly that is actually delicious [I hear], but looks so much like a monarch that birds avoid it, too, not wanting to risk a mouthful of yuck. More on that another time).
A couple of weeks of this constant chowing down at the all-you-can-eat milkweed buffet, and our little friends are fat enough and old enough for Step 2: The Chrysalis.
This is a most amazing structure. Attached to the underbelly of a milkweed leaf by a tough, semi-flexible bungee cord, the chrysalis dangles, its thin, leathery surface initially hiding the incredible changes happening inside.
Until the last day or so. Then the transformation becomes visible through the translucent shell and the spots and veins and colors of wings are clear, pressed against, the inside, eager to burst forth into a very different, less gravity-bound world. This happens about a week to 10 days after the caterpillar produces the chrysalis.
The hatching is awkward and looks uncomfortable. There is no single “ta-da” moment, no instant revelation of a brand-new outfit, on and fully functional. No. The wings must unfold, and they must be pumped up, and they must dry and solidify, stiffening in preparation for flight. What would it feel like for a sausage to become a kite? Of course an insect has no such strong sense of itself, is not conscious as we would be of this metamorphosis, but it is hard not to project ourselves into an imagined monarch mind, and fantasize about what that would be like—going to bed a worm and waking up an angel.
And now the monarch that had been an egg, a caterpillar, and a chrysalis-dwelling changeling will become ready to lay eggs of its own, to produce the next of the four generations.
This second generation will hatch in May or June in Minnesota, go through the same process outlined above, and then produce the third generation, which will go through that process yet another time, and bring us to the fourth generation, which is different than its predecessors. It will be a butterfly in September or October, but it will not die after six weeks as the previous generations. Instead, this generation of monarchs will migrate, flying to California, or Mexico, where it will live for six months before starting this whole process all over again.
I wish that when I was talking to my young Mexican-American friends I would have thought to discuss with them the long flight our new hatchling might have ahead of it, possibly toward the land of their ancestors. I can only hope that some of them might have seen this wonderful article in the local Spanish-language publication, Vida Y Sabor:
http://issuu.com/lcnmedia/docs/vidaysabor-529/5?e=1298139/9115554
