Black Swallowtail And Monarch Butterfly Metamorphosis

 

This post was made to show my footage and photos of part of the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly, and Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly. With both species, I chose to take 5th instar (about to metamorphosize) caterpillars, because they would need to spend the least amount of time in captivity, and require the least amount of care...

...When I was on my trip to Lake Placid, NY, I woke up one morning, at 5:00am, in search of deer and loons. I pulled over at the side of the road suddenly when I saw the distant reddish shape of a young buck, feeding in an overgrown feild. I tried getting closer and closer, until it got spooked, and ran off...

I turned back, and started to walk through the tall weeds, back to my car. The meadow was mainly made up of tall grass, canada goldenrod, daisies, and common milkweed. As I approached a patch of the common milkweed, I noticed something yellow on one of the plants. A 5th instar monarch caterpillar.

                   ...As well as a (2nd instar?) much younger monarch, feasting on another plant...

I took off the portion of the milkweed plant that had the 5th instar monarch on it, and put it in a container to bring home. I put the monarch caterpillar in a bucket, filled with common milkweed leaves and stems. 

About 2 weeks later, after the Monarch had pupated, emerged, and flown away, my coworker Liam found an eastern black swallowtail caterpillar, while we were hand weeding carrots at Silverwood Organic Farm. Just like monarch caterpillars only feed on milkweed, Black swallowtail caterpillars only feed on the leaves of members of the carrot family, Apiacea. This family includes dill, cumin, carrots, wild carrot/Queen Anne's lace, celery, parsley, cilantro, and parsnips. I decided to take the caterpillar home, for a "round two" of my monarch caterpillar experiment. 

I placed it in the same bucket that the monarch had lived in, except this time, with uprooted carrot plants, instead of milkweed leaves. Here are what the 2 caterpillars looked like, feeding on their host plants. Both portraits were taken the day I found them, in my bedroom, with my Sigma DG EX 55mm macro lens. 

Monarch (Danaus plexippus)

Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes ssp. asterius)

Conveniently I found both caterpillars in their 5th instar, meaning that I only needed to care for the caterpillars for a few days, and then they would pupate. Both the swallowtail, and the monarch have 5 growth stages or "instars". At the end of each instar, the caterpillar outgrows its skin, moults, and eats its skin for its protein. For monarchs, the first instar caterpillar is only 2 millimeters, but by the 5th, it is about 2 and a half inches. For the black swallowtail, the first instar is 4.5 millimeters, and the 5th instar is similar in size to the monarch. Both caterpillars spent all day eating, trying to pack in as much protein as possible, for metamorphosis. 

Soon, they got ready to pupate...

My monarch caterpillar attached it's rear end to the plastic wrap that covered the top of the bucket, which made things super easy for me, since I could simply tape the clear plastic to the bottom of my window shade. This created a relatively photogenic scene to photograph the process in. I left my house to go to work, and by the time I got home, it was already dark out, and the chrysalis had been formed. 

The black swallowtail caterpillar's change to chrysalis did not go quite as smoothly though. Several times, over the course of several days, the caterpillar found a spot on the side of the bucket, and started to set up a silk harness, and prepared to pupate, and then would quit halfway through and go back to munching away on it's carrot greens. Eventually, It finally committed to a spot, and fully anchored itself to a carrot stem. I decided to use the same method I had already successfully used on the monarch, and taped the carrot stem to the window shade. The caterpillar spent the whole day hanging from its stem, without making any changes, while my camera ran on time-lapse mode. Eventually, the sun set, and my camera's battery died, still no change to the caterpillar at all. Here's the time lapse...

I'm not sure what happened overnight, but something went wrong. I woke up, and immediately checked in on the caterpillar.

It was gone. All that was left was the caterpillar's old skin, and it's silk harness that it used to anchor itself. It had somehow fallen out. I wonder if this was because of the time the caterpillar escaped it's setup, and ended up in a spider web, getting attacked by the cellar spider and wrapped in silk. I saved it, and took off most of the silk, but I think that the spider's venom may have had a toll on the caterpillar, or the leftover spider silk may have complicated the shedding process. My immediate thought was to look down. There was a diamond shaped, brown chrysalis on my windowsill. When touched, it squirmed, confirming that it was still alive and healthy, despite the fall.

The monarch chrysalis stayed green for 9 days, and then started to darken. A sign that it was getting close to emerging. By the morning of the 11th day, I could see the bright orange of a wing forming...

    

 
...and it emerged. I tried to take a time lapse, with a 5 minute interval, hoping that the butterfly would take longer to emerge from it's chrysalis, but the entire process fell under a single frame, so it appears like the butterfly just appeared outside of its chrysalis...

It spent about 3 hours drying itself, expelling the liquid from inside the chrysalis, and let blood flow into its wings, and then flew off, about to fuel up, and begin it's journey to Mexico.

The black swallowtail on the other hand, had still not come out of the chrysalis after a full month. After doing research, I learned how to test whether or not the chrysalis is still alive. It was. I came to the conclusion that the chilly, Fall temperatures coming through my window were just cold enough to put the caterpillar into diapause, basically meaning that it should stay alive, and dormant in there until May, and then emerge and take flight. It was in hibernation. I thought that this post would be published by September, but it looks like this will be a Spring post.

7 Months Later...

I had almost forgotten about my little brown chrysalis, which had been sitting, seemingly lifeless on my windowsill. On April 3rd, I woke up to a very faint scratching noise. I stood up, and turned to the window. A strange, massive insect was flailing around on my windowsill. Larger than a cicada. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was the butterfly I had been hoping for. The brown, dry shell had split open, and a black mass of legs and hair was anxiously trying to free itself.
 

There was a hailstorm outside that day, which lasted overnight. I noticed that even after several hours of drying off, the butterfly seemed to have zero interest in flight. I think that it somehow knew that there was a storm outside. I was reluctant to release it the next day, because I still hadn't seen any flowers, besides those from red and silver maples, which are dispersed only by wind. I was worried that if I released it, it would quickly starve. I let it live inside my window's screen, with the screen partially open, so It could leave at any time. 3 days later, it was still healthy, but was waiting on the screen. I brought it outside, and left it on a tree trunk.