August 22nd, 2006
sooner or later it was bound to happen
I knew that if I could just be patient, sooner or later I’d manage to catch one of the Monarch caterpillars in the process of transforming into a chrysalis. This evening, it finally happened — and it was worth the wait! What a strange process! Some might even describe it as a little bizarre. Some might even find it rather gross! Let me know what you think.
The main part of the transformation happened in about 4 minutes 30 seconds. About 10 minutes before the real action began, the caterpillar started to squeeze up and down a little, sort of like one of those squeeze-box accordions (the little ones, if that’s what they’re called). I watched and waited patiently, and finally, I could see the hind segments of the caterpillar beginning to collapse together. That’s when I started shooting the .mpeg movie on my camera. Unfortunately, even after compression, a movie running well over 4 minutes is just too much for my dial-up connection to upload into a server, so I decided to take the clip and speed it up by a bit over 4x normal speed. So, what you’ll see if you watch this little MP4 movie (1.9MB), is about 4+ minutes of action reduced to about a minute, along with some quick titles and a © notice at the tail end. Hopefully it will work okay. Btw, the above photo is a frame grab from the footage, so the quality of the shot leaves a little to be desired. I should probably mention that, after the action in this clip, the pupa went on to wiggle and gyrate as you’ll see in the clip. That probably went on for about another 2 minutes or so. Then it became quiet and gradually contracted until it was about the right shape of the chrysalis. I’ll post that little sequence sometime soon.