Metamorphosis



On April 23rd, Eric found a woolly bear caterpillar crawling across our driveway while we were out working in the yard.  You can see it in the flowerpot above.

We scooped it up, put it in a jar, and fed it leaves for a little more than a week.  (The websites I found about them said they ate grass, but ours preferred yaupon holly leaves, with crabapple leaves for a change of pace.)  When I checked on it one evening, instead of quickly climbing up its twig to the top of the jar like it normally did when I opened the lid, it was clinging tightly to a blade of grass at the bottom of the jar and wouldn't move.

The following morning, I couldn't find it!  I had to take the jar outside and dump all of the twigs and grass out before I noticed a shiny-fuzzy sheen in a clump of dirt in the roots of some of the grass.  I expected a butterfly-like chrysalis hanging from a twig; these woolly bears do a much better job of camouflaging themselves than butterflies!

I moved the jar from the kitchen to the garage, partly just to get it out of sight and out of mind in case it never came out of its chrysalis.  Nothing looks deader than a woolly bear chrysalis in a clump of dry dirt after a week or two!  I had just about given up on it and decided it must have died, which made me feel guilty for its demise under my care, even though I personally had chased away a mockingbird hopping after it before we jarred it as a caterpillar.

Last night, I went out in the garage to pull the trash bins down to the curb and went over the check on the jar, as I did once or twice a day.  I almost dropped the jar when I noticed a beautiful white moth sitting at the mouth of the jar just under the lid!  I went and got the kids out of bed, and we took the jar outside to let our moth go.  Below is a picture of it under the tree in our front yard. ]

So, hey, science projects work once in a while!  We had better luck with our caterpillar than we did with cress seeds.