John and I decided it was high time we teach our boys the marvels of nature. We wanted to get some pets-- either tadpoles or caterpillars-- and watch them undergo metamorphosis. I was a little wary of having full-grown bullfrogs in the kitchen, so the caterpillars won.
Day 3
Day 6
Day 10
You'll notice that one caterpillar on the top that still hasn't formed its cocoon-- he had the advantage of tickling all the other guys, and they couldn't do anything about it.
Moving Day
As we were transporting the caterpillars, I asked John, "how did they know what to do? The caterpillars were all babies when we got them-- who taught them how to form their cocoons?"
John put on his lecturer's voice and replied, "That is the grand question of nature! How do spiders learn how to spin webs? How do birds know how to fly south for the winter? How do ants set up a division of labor in order to maximize their productivity? Of all the thousands of miles of beach, how do sea turtles find the exact same place of their birth to return when they need to lay their eggs?"
(In other words, he doesn't know.)
Hours of staring
Our first customer has emerged!
We hope you find this video terribly exciting!
We were patting ourselves on the back at how beautiful our butterflies turned out
Time to send them off to college (the butterflies)
Our littlest butterfly was hesitant to cut off the apron strings
There you have it! I don't think you could find easier pets. John was hesitant to set them free-- he reminded me of the cardinal rule of Biology: never introduce a new exogenous species into an ecosystem (ah yes, that rule), but I think butterflies are safe enough. (It would be different if we were letting a pet piranha loose in Lake Michigan.) However, if you hear on the evening news about a catastrophic butterfly overpopulation in Milwaukee, this blog post will de deleted!
5 comments:
What a great learning experience to get a vivid demonstration of our favorite kids' book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." It was fun to see how fascinated your little guys were with the whole process.
wow how neat! now that's a pretty cool way to teach your kid about nature.
What a great project! You guys impress me so much!!! You are such amazing parents!
I love this! Stacy and Paul did this with Kristen when she was young and Ellie's Aunt Rebekah sent Ellie one of these butterfly farms last year for her birthday but it was too late in the season (May is too hot here to let butterflies go and not fry!) but we remembered too late in the season again this year so maybe next year we won't forget! I just actually posted about our trip to a butterfly exhibit today so when I hopped on over to your blog tonight I got excited! I'm going to show Ellie - she'll love seeing this.
There is also a funny clip from April Fool's you and John might enjoy (I made reference to it in our post and thought of it while reading yours as well, when you wrote about the paranha in lake michigan! - just pray those little butterflies don't come back to attack you, as seen in this clip: http://youtu.be/U2Skghxb7wM
:)
Ellie and Nathan are sitting on my lap this morning and LOVED this post and watching the butterfly video. Ellie says she's going to name her butterflies flippy, flappy, dosa, and posa. This was fascinating for our kids to watch - thanks for sharing! We love you cousins!
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