A few weeks ago, when Hubby & I ran out to purchase more milkweeds for our caterpillar friend Big Boy/Go Girl (as I chronicled in Update on Our (No Longer Tiny) Little Friend, Part 1 and Update on Our (No Longer Tiny) Little Friend, Part 2), we (of course!) made sure that the milkweeds we brought home also had Tiny Little Friends (TLFs—Queen Butterfly larva) on them!
One of these TLFs (I’ll call it “Newbie” for now) was actually not too tiny: Newbie was already over an inch long. A day later (Saturday 1/27/24), thanks to being a ravenous leaf-eating munching machine, Newbie had grown to a whopping 1.375” long!
On Monday 1/29/24 Newbie was topping out at 1.5” long—the size our Queen Butterfly larva friends have seemed to reach right before pupation (turning into a chrysalis). So we weren’t too surprised that on Tuesday 1/30/24 Newbie disappeared, probably to pupate elsewhere.
On Wednesday 1/31/24, Hubby spotted Newbie—motionless and stuck on a spine of a nearby cactus!!! Boooo hoooooo! 😢 We were so bummed!
But when Hubby gently touched Newbie with a dead twig from a milkweed, Newbie MOVED!!! It was alive!!! 🤩 We were so excited!
Hubby had the brilliant idea of snipping the spine between the cactus and the caterpillar. Once Hubby did that, he was able to relocate Newbie (with a partial spine stuck in it!) back on one of our new milkweeds. We decided to rechristen Newbie as Watney, in honor of Matt Damon’s character in The Martian. (By the way, I highly recommend not only the movie but the book the movie was based on: The Martian by Andy Weir).
Here’s a photo of the cactus Watney got stuck on. The offending spine is circled in yellow.
Watney started crawling around its new milkweed, although I saw Watney fall off the plant a couple of times. Perhaps Watney was having trouble gripping on to the milkweed due to the location of the spine? Since Star Trek’s Prime Directive doesn’t apply in this situation, I had no issue with using a twig to gently relocate Watney back on its milkweed/salad bar.
On Thursday 2/1/24, Watney created a silk mat in the morning, and then hung from the mat in a chrysalis-precursor “J” shape in the afternoon! 🤩 Woo hoooo!
Friday 2/2/24 was a rainy, cool day so we didn’t see much action from our Watney “J” (since insects are cold-blooded they need warmth from their environment to be able to move).
Finally! Saturday 2/3/24 was the ✨magic day✨ when Watney pupated!!! And—best of all—when Watney shed its stripey caterpillar skin during the pupation process, it was able to shed the cactus spine as well! The cactus spine seemed to leave its mark on Watney, however—we saw a red area on the chrysalis and assume that’s due to the spine.
Whew! WOW! Was that exciting!!! 🥰 Watney pupated only 5 days after Big Boy/Go Girl pupated! So once again I was fortunate enough to be able to say “WOW—that is TOTALLY going to be my Perpetual Journal entry this week!” not just once but twice in one week!
I’ll answer the question I know all of you are asking at this moment: have Big Boy/Go Girl and Watney turned into butterflies yet? The answer is, as of Wednesday 2/14/24: not yet! But of course I’ll keep you posted! 🤗
All this caterpillar excitement reminded me of a quote I read recently:
“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”
- Robert Brault
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What a good episode of this ongoing visual story taking place in your backyard! It captivates and expands my awareness of "all creatures great and small!"