Caterpillar

Last week Anna found a caterpillar on the fence at school. When I picked her up, she came running over to show it to me, keeping it safe in a bucket lined with leaves pulled from the nearby tree. Her teacher said she could keep it and could bring the bucket back later in the week after we made a bug box of our own for said caterpillar. How do you tell your sweet girl that even though your teacher said you can keep it, you can't keep it after all? So, we kept it, Anna clutching the bucket and talking to the caterpillar (or callerpillar as she calls it) all the way home. I reasoned to myself that it would be a good opportunity to teach about butterflies. We transferred it to another bucket at home, cut out some screen-wire for the top and rubber-banded it on. Since the tree on the school playground was a pecan tree, I figured the caterpillar would eat pecan leaves, so we went to the grandparents' neighbors' house to get fresh sprigs for it. Anna named the caterpillar Cinderella. We made plans to purchase a "real" bug box at Petsmart over the weekend. We read books about butterflies and metamorphosis. We found that caterpillars generally had about 2 weeks from egg to pupa stage and emerged from the chrysalis as a butterfly after about a week. We made plans to release the butterfly once it emerged. All seemed well. Then....

Anna began to worry and express great sadness over losing the caterpillar eventually--saying she did not want it to change and that she wants to keep it forever. To complicate matters, internet research revealed that the caterpillar will actually turn into a moth, not a butterfly, and that it is a "web worm" (click here for photo), which is a PEST that gardeners and landscapers want to eliminate due to the damage it causes trees (i.e. release needed far from home!). Additionally, we discovered that not only do caterpillars eat a lot, they poop a lot, and require daily maintenance of the environment if kept in an enclosed space, like for instance, a bug box!

Well, the FINAL piece of information was discovered tonight, namely that instead of the week-long cocoon stage, this little critter takes all season to emerge from the cocoon as a full grown pesky moth. We will be waiting until late summer for the end of this process.