Day 11: the appetite is back

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 11

Does it seem like FDR's smile has grown? He is watching an evolutionary miracle. The monarch butterfly caterpillar has returned to a day of eating. Its appetite appears to be back. At this rate, its final larval molt that leads to pupating is only a short time away.

“It’s estimated that in two weeks, the caterpillar will be 3,000 times larger than the day it hatches,” writes the National Wildlife Federation. 

We are getting there! Stay tuned.

Click for yesterday: Day 10.

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Day 10: slow day

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 10

Waldo, the monarch butterfly caterpillar that we have had our eye on seemed sluggish today. The pace of its eating slowed. It may have molted, it has to four times to make room for new growth while the period between molts are called instars. 

Click for yesterday: Day 9. 

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Day 9: insatiable producer of frass

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 9

Three days ago, the monarch butterfly caterpillar was simply eating small holes out of the milkweed leaves, the caterpillar itself was hardly noticeably. Yesterday, it was chewing out entire sections and now it has grown to be an insatiable eater, it is working methodically on the entire leaf. 

Today, the caterpillar should be brimming with the cardiac glycosides that make it toxic to most birds. There are 14 species of milkweed native to Tennessee. Some are too toxic even for the monarch, some really do not contain enough of the glycosides but that leaves three species the migratory butterfly rely on: common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa).   

FDR seems pleased by the progress. He liked to see things move forward in a positive way. Albeit with all that roughage, Waldo produces the inevitable poo, or to be more proper, with insect larvae it is called frass. 

Click for yesterday: Day 8. 

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Day 8: what FDR has seen

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 8

One full week after the monarch butterfly caterpillar first crawled in front of the dime (below) and today FDR is looking at a distinctly larger larva. The leaves have changed but the dime has not. It's still worth ten cents.

We are at least five, probably six, days away from the beginning of one of the grandest evolutionary miracles in nature. Complete metamorphosis. One life form becomes another but retains its singular identity all the while. And then it has the lepidopteran wherewithall to fly to Mexico. 

Stay tuned. 

Click for Day 7.

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Day 7: see-able Waldo

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 7

Only 24 hours have passed and the holes in the leaf—and Waldo moved on to a new leaf during the night—are much bigger and the 7-day-old monarch butterfly caterpillar is much larger as is its appetite. It will soon becomes ravenous. 

We're at a point where the monarch larva almost doubles its size every 48-hours making it much easier to see.


SPOILER: Nature is not always pretty. Being more see-able has a downside. Parasitic tachinid flies may land on the caterpillar and lay their own eggs. The resulting maggots burrow inside the monarch where they eat, develop and grow ultimately killing their living host. Gasp! 

Click for yesterday: Day 6.

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Day 6: Where's Waldo?

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 6

Very young monarch butterfly caterpillars are hard to spot on a milkweed leaf. You often notice their handiwork first: lots of small holes. But that being said, when they are only a few days old, they are still difficult to find. But, it gets easier as the voracious young larvae continue to eat and grow daily as this one has since yesterday.

To see yesterday, click: Day 5

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Day 5: Bulking up

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 5

Just in case you are sitting on the edge of your seat wondering, our little monarch butterfly caterpillar that hatched four days ago, has now doubled in size since Friday. It is feeding exclusively on common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). 

The bulk it puts on now will aid it in a few weeks during its flight to Cerro Pelón or one of the other Mexican mountaintop sanctuaries.

To see yesterday, click: Day 4 

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Day 4: Show and tell

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 4

Today the minuscule monarch butterfly caterpillar got to be the Show & Tell item on my table at the Ninth Annual Hummingbird Festival at Ijams Nature Center.

If it was the least bit nervous about the educational outing, it didn't seem to bother its focus on the plat de jour: a single milkweed leaf.

To see yesterday's progress, click: Day 3. 

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Day 3: accumulating glycosides

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 3

The cluster of divots to the left of the monarch butterfly caterpillar is where the 3-day-old larvae has been eating.  They consume milkweed leaves to take in the cardiac glycosides—the milky sap—the plant contains. Monarch moms want their young ones to grow up and be toxic.


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Day 2: tiny hair walker

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 2

It's the first day out of the egg, the first day of the new life and so tiny the monarch butterfly caterpillar can only walk across the hairs that protect the milkweed leaf, not yet able to reach the leaf surface itself. 

So how does it get by? It eats the hairs first. 

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Day 1: Today's the day

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Metamorphosis Watch: Day 1

You can tell when the monarch butterfly caterpillar is about to hatch when the tip of the egg turns dark. Essentially, it's the head of the small larva about to emerge. The first thing it does after it crawls out is to turn and eat the tiny eggshell. It's good protein.

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miracle of metamorphosis

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"There are only two ways to live your life: 

as though nothing is a miracle, or as though 

everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

There is only one way to view this: It's an evolutionary miracle. 

How this tiny egg I found in a wet, muddy ditch off John Sevier Highway that hatched into a remarkably small caterpillar, can in a matter of weeks grow and go through metamorphosis and produce an adult monarch butterfly that will fly all the way to the mountain tops in southern Mexico. As John Denver put it: "Going home to a place it has never been before."

That tiny—smaller than a pinhead—brain holds the map for the flight of thousands of miles.

The only way you can view this is: It's a miracle.

I will be speaking tomorrow morning at 9:30 about monarch butterfly metamorphosis, From Egg to Migration, at the Hummingbird Festival at Ijams Nature Center.

Thanks, Jennifer.

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WVLT: Kestrels on the decline

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Todd Witcher, WVLT's Alan Williams and Doc with his care-giver

This morning we were the guests of Todd Witcher, Executive Director of Discover Life in America and interviewed by Knoxville's own Alan Williams on WVLT-TV. It was Doc's first time on TV but he was smooooth! 

Doc is a non-flighted, state-permitted male American kestrel that was brought into the University of Tennessee Veterinary Hospital last January. He had a badly broken and infected right wing and sadly, will never fly again. He was treated by Dr. Cheryl Greenacre and it was the Doc's good care that brought him to me after he spent time on antibiotics with local wildlife rehabilitator Lynne McCoy. 

Doc is now a wildlife ambassador for the State of Tennessee under my care and state education permit. He makes routine public appearances to raise awareness of kestrels and their current status in the wild.

Weighing only 4 ounces, kestrels are the smallest falcon that lives in the Americas.

The kestrel subspecies (Falco sparverius paulus) found in the American Southeast has suffered a population decline of 83 percent since 1940 and no one is completely sure why but many grassland birds are dropping in population. Habitat loss and pesticide usage undoubtedly play a role. Species like northern bobwhite, eastern meadowlark, grasshopper and field sparrows, horned lark, snowy and short-eared owls are all declining, having lost well over 60 percent of their numbers in the past 40 years.  

Does Doc feel the pressure of representing kestrels everywhere? So far, he hasn't shown it.

Todd Witcher, Executive Director of Discover Life in America, 
welcomes Doc, a survivor. 

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anuran mystery solved

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Thank you, Mary Holland for your wonderful blog. 

This little anuran mystery baffled me for a while. I kept finding very (smaller-than-a-dime) kelly green frogs on my outdoor Queen of the Night houseplants, according to everything I had been taught, the American green tree frog is not found in my my part of the state.

So what were they?

Then I bumped into Holland's Naturally Curious blog, and found this about Cope's gray tree frog which live all around my woodland home...

"Upon metamorphosing into a frog, the Gray Treefrog turns a bright emerald green and gradually develops into a mottled greenish-gray adult which can change its color from green to gray in about half an hour to match its environment. The two color phases of the maturing frog (solid green of the young, and mottled gray or green of adult) are so different it’s hard to believe that they are the same species."

Yes. Indeed. Mystery solved. 

Check out her book and for the rest of Holland's post, click: Naturally Curious. 

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when is a leaf, not a leaf?

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One of the groups of singing summertime insects we looked at last Saturday night at the Sugarlands were the katydids. On a nighttime walk to Cataract Falls we heard lots of common true katydids calling from the treetops on our trip back. katy-did-it, katy-did-it, katy-did-it 

There are many different species of katydid, so its a design and lifestyle that is successful. Most species do not fly or fly very little. Instead, they walk or hop to wherever they want to go. Being in the order Orthoptera like grasshoppers and crickets, they are excellent jumpers. 

Common true katydids tend to live high in the canopy and are also utterly defenseless to anything that will eat an insect and many things including birds do. So perhaps the most noted trait of the katydids is their ability to blend in, their camouflage. They are excellent foliage mimics.

Even if you have a bug-phobia, it is simply hard to look at a walking leaf and not smile.  

Thank you, Dana with the Great Smoky Mountains Association for inviting us to walk in your woods. 

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nascent cricket catcher

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Nature programs have a way of surprising you with unexpected moments, like the pleasure of watching an 8-year-old boy attempt to catch a field cricket for the very first time.

"No. They do not bite. But they can jump a long way and are really hard to catch." 

Nature never disappoints. And if you can get a young child hooked on the joy of being in nature, they will become naturalists for life.

Thank you to all who came to my Summertime Singing Insects program last night in the Sugarlands Visitor Center classroom. We learned a bit about cicadas, crickets, tree crickets, katydids and grasshoppers and then walked out into the twilight with our ears open. 

On our walk back, we found lots of small field crickets.

Our hats off to Lang Elliot and Will Hershberger for writing the remarkably wonderful book, The Songs of Insects. 

Thank you to the Great Smoky Mountains Association and member event specialist Dana for inviting us!

And thank you retired third grade teacher Cindy for lending a hand. 

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UT's Butterfly Festival

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Thank you everyone who attended the Butterfly Festival at UT Arboretum near Oak Ridge. It was a great time, especially the finale: the release of 300 monarch butterflies that had everyone chasing them around the beautiful location to get photographs.

Focusing on hands-on and experiential learning, the fourth annual Butterfly Festival offered three educational sessions including mine and two viewing tents containing monarch and painted lady butterflies. The UT Insect Zoo, operated by entomology and plant pathology professor Jerome Grant and UT graduate students, showcased preserved and live insects found in Tennessee and throughout the world.  

And thank you to everyone who attended my opening session: Monarchs! From egg to migration. I just love speaking in the arboretum's new auditorium and it was just great fun being around so many bug-loving people.

The UT Arboretum is a project of the UT Forest Resources AgResearch and Education Center. The 250-acre research and educational arboretum is part of a greater 2,204-acre research forest. The arboretum serves as an outdoor classroom to university students in a variety of fields and as a community resource with numerous interpretive nature trails and ecological points of interest.

AND, if that wasn't enough. I got to visit with Josie and Lucy, two of my former summer camp kids, now all grown up. Well, certainly too old to be called "summer camp kids." It just seems like only yesterday that we were catching crawdads in Toll Creek. Thank you, Mom Sara for taking our photo!

Thank you Michelle, Janet and the rest of the arboretum staff! Great job!

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