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As we were cleaning the kitchen last night, George said “If I happened to see another caterpillar that had escaped, would you want me to tell you?” Ha, ha, funny guy! No way was I wasn’t going to fall for that! Then he says “Well, what about this one that is crawling on our paper towels? Do you want to know about him?” Arghh! He was right. We don’t have one of those OFFICIAL butterfly houses that zip up at the top. We are just using something we already had and covering up the hole at the top. Someone (probably me) didn’t get the hole completely covered up. Maybe we should invest in one of those houses that does zip up. I’m tired of escapees.

Last night the skin on the 2 cats I mention before looked chalky and we were sure they would be changing soon. George and I brought them into the computer room so we could keep an eye on them as we worked. The cats were literally inches away from us during this time. We glanced over at them every few minutes to see if anything had changed. Over an hour passed when all of a sudden I looked up and one cat was no longer a cat! How dare he! And how in the world could I miss it? His body was smooth and greenish on the top half and light brown on the bottom with his caterpillar stipes and dots still somewhat visible. We assumed that he was in the middle of his transformation and that the rest of his body would eventually change to look like the top half. However, we still had no idea how he had actually transformed. Did his skin somehow smooth out into the smoother chrysalis shape? Does the smooth stuff just ooze out of his body and harden on the outside? Would he soon spin some sort of fiber around his body? We had no clue – so we watched and watched and watched. The greenish stuff never spread out. Instead he slowly turned dark brown his whole body ended up I was waiting for the greenish stuff on the upper half to spread until it covered his whole body. What happened instead was that the whole chrysalis slowly turned dark brown. That was it. I was bummed. I still had no more answers as to HOW this actually happened. (By the way, a chrysalis can either be dark brown with blackish markings like a stick or bright green like a leaf. So far we only have one bright green one, the rest are stick-looking. I was assuming this guy was going to be another green one since part of his body was bright green, but he ended up being brown like a stick.)

Well, there was still one more whose skin was chalky looking. George gave up at midnight and went to bed. I watched as this cat’s skin changed from looking chalky to being almost transparent. I could still see stripes and dots on the skin, but I could see other stuff underneath it too. There was now quite a bit of movement going on inside. After they are hanging upside down, they sometimes they twitch when they get bumped or another caterpillar crawls over them, but this was not the same twitching. It was a slower, stronger, more purposeful movement. It would start at his tail and move up his body. Then his head, which was curled up in the J-shape started straightening out as he pushed his body further up into the skin of his head. So that explains how he goes from a J-shape to the straight look of the chrysalis. He pushes his body up into the head part until it straightens out! Wow. But what about those little pointy parts of a chrysallis that look sort of like small horns? How does he get those things? WAIT!! It HAS horn things now. When did that happen? Uh, where is his skin going? I watches as his outer skin started shrinking and shrivelling down his body. This whole time he keeps moving and squishing and twisting his body to get the skin to move down to his tail. Then when it gets to his tail, it just disappears. Maybe it fell off, I didn’t really see. Amazing! So he sheds his outer layer of skin and a new creature comes from the inside! I always thought that the chrysallis was somehow formed on top of the old caterpillar skin. I had no idea the chrysallis actually formed on the inside – underneath the skin. That does explain why the caterpillar stays in the J-shape for a day or so. I had thought he was just resting and waiting for the right moment. In reality, he IS changing on the inside even though nothing is visible from the outside. I had waited so long to see this event, something that I thought was a 5-minute process. But what I thought was THE event was really just the final phase of a much longer process. I had waited (a bit impatiently) all day for him to DO something. Little did I know he actually was changing the whole time.

It was really cool, I’m so glad I got to see it. The part where he actually lost his skin lasted only about 5 minutes. I videotaped part of it, but the camera battery died and was not willing to leave the show to go get the cord. We gave 2 of our cats away this morning to a neighbor friend with a 3 year old daughter. That means we have 10 left: 5 in a chrysalis (one of which came via USPS), 4 in the J-shape, and one still munching away. I’m hoping that G and the kids will be able to watch one of the other 5. Hoping to get a better video of it too.

Filed under: Adventures, Family on July 8th, 2005