Caterpillar Babies Update

Ended up we had SEVEN caterpillars! Wow, we picked the right plant to start with! They are getting bigger and bigger and eating CONSTANTLY!

May 28: Still on the original plant and growing huge. We're getting a little worried that there won't be enough food before they all take off the make a chrysalis. But so far, so good!

I like this picture because you can see its little feet on the leaf

Another close up. I am amazed by them! I think they are just beautiful and fun to watch as they get bigger.


I got an interesting shot here. The caterpillars shed their skin 3 to 4 times. They eat the skin after its shed, but I saw him before he was able to gobble it up. It was interesting since you could totally see the shape of the body in the skin and even where the legs were!

Later that day we started finding them crawling off on their own. At first we though that they were trying to find a place to make a chrysalis, but we were afraid they would starve it they just got lost. We put this one back in the pot. We had another run away after this. Later in the day we noticed that we were missing the "King" he was so big and had never wandered off, so we're hoping he really was heading off for his next stage. We looked all over the patio and cover, but never found a chrysalis... Paulette said the person she knows who has had a butterfly garden for awhile said that they can move quite a distance to find the perfect spot, here's to hoping...

May 29: So they stripped the original plant! It's clean! We went over to Paulette and she gave us another plant for them to eat. Here are a few of the babies that were moved over. We lost another one over the night. Hope he's a happy little chrysalis somewhere too. That's the hardest part of having them out in the open. We're not sure where they are going... You can see a nice caterpillar poop on the leaf in this one too, John liked that!

We wanted to see what was happening, so we made a little terrarium for them. Louis planted the new plant in there. It's a nice little home.

Here's the original plant. We were told that it would come back, we're going to give it a try

Another view of the new digs...

I was a little stressed though because that plant lasted until around dinner time, they'd stripped it in a few hours!! We went to Home Depot and no milkweed. All the other nurseries I found had just closed for the day. I had another small one in the yard and I started feeding it to them. They were getting violent with each other and flipping their heads up and on each other, yikes! They ended up chilling out and staying in one place all night, maybe to conserve energy? They all survived!

May 30 : We went to Simpson's Nursery and got 2 new plants for them. They looked so happy!! We think they were getting dehydrated since they went right to the place the leaf and the stem meet and it looked like they were drinking. Honest, we're trying guys!! They must feel like they traveled from hell to heaven from no food to a feast!

The new plants! Two just in case!

We thought we'd plant them and still keep one in the terrarium so we could see the chrysalis stage. We have them all free ranging now since they had such a stressful night. Who would have thought that having caterpillar pets would be so stressful!