My garden is full of beautiful plants. My garden is also filled with caterpillars! They come in all shapes and sizes, in various stages of their lives.Caterpillars are voracious feeders and many of them are considered as pests. Here in my garden, they're YK's pets for one fine day, they'll become beautiful butterflies. We have plants and weeds that are attractive to butterflies. After filling up on nectar from the flowers, they lay eggs on the host plants. Soon the miniature eggs will hatch into tiny caterpillars.
Caterpillars are amazing little creatures. These little eating machines have soft bodies that can grow rapidly, like balloons, between moults. They eat leaves all day long, shed their skins generally four or five times, and eventually pupate into an adult form. Measured by weight increase, caterpillars have a very fast growth rate. For instance, a tobacco hornworm will increase its own weight ten thousand times in less than twenty days.
It's a wonderful hobby really. Thanks to YK, we have a yard full of colourful butterflies fluttering about in the sun.
2 comments:
Neat. Have you ever seen them turn into butterflies? That would be beyond magnificent I imagine!
Yes, sometimes YK would collect the pupae and put them in a special tank and we actually watch the butterflies emerge slowly. The wings would be crumpled and soft, and as the blood slowly pumps through the body, you can see the wings stiffen. They would fly away when they are strong enough. The entire process takes a couple of hours.
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