Katrina tried to encase her plants in
mosquito nets to prevent wrongful attacks,
but the technique was not quite successful.
Katrina was receptive of her friends’
experience with raising butterfl ies in their
northern homes. The more involved she
became, the more time-consuming the
hobby grew to be. She recycled plastic
containers and fi xed them up with mesh
tops to provide safe homes for the eggs.
As the population began to grow and
she had milkweed up to her eyes, Katrina
purchased a few screened reptile cages to
maintain them.
“Four or fi ve days after the eggs are laid,
the caterpillars will typically hatch and go
through fi ve stages of shedding as they
grow over the next two weeks,” said Katrina.
While growing to their full extent, the
swallowtail caterpillars create a harness
to hang from, and the monarchs create a
silk button and hang in a ‘J’ shape. After
they unravel, they split their skin and form
a pupae or a chrysalis. The pupae and the
chrysalis are soft to the touch until they
harden and change over time. The orange
and black pattern of their wings become
clearer in the monarchs and the queens
chrysalis. They develop while hanging for
10 to 14 days until ready to emerge and
pump blood from their abdomen to their
wings. The monarchs look as if they’re reinfl
ating themselves.
“It wigged me out when they would form
their chrysalis and begin to split. It always
looked like someone was trapped in a bag,
trying to get out. The more they wiggled
around the more claustrophobic I felt.”
As much as the process made her feel
squeamish, Katrina experienced each
butterfl y emergence like it was the fi rst time
she’d seen it. “It never got old, seeing it,”
she said. Over the quarantine, Katrina raised
and released 177 monarchs, one eastern
swallowtail and nine gold-rim swallowtail
butterfl ies. “I was hoping to raise a pipevine
swallowtail but it died in the chrysalis,” she
said.
64 GASPARILLA MAGAZINE • November/December • 2020
Various butterfl y eggs and minute little caterpillars can be
found attached to leaves of their favorite plants (food), where
they begin their process of evolution into a butterfl y.
Monarch caterpillars consume quite a bit of milkweed in the
garden
An eastern
swallowtail
caterpillar
making its
harness to
pupate
Right, gold rim swallowtail
pupae will eclose in 18-24 days
Bottom, monarch & queen
chrysalis’
Monarch caterpillar
Gold rim
swallowtail
caterpillar