A Butterfly's Life Isn't All Roses

The word "metamorphosis" is intriguing. The process appears mystical.

A friend asked us how we manage to attract so many butterflies to our yard. We admitted we have no idea. Maybe it's the colors. Red, yellow, orange, pink and purple blossoms all abide there.

We decided to revisit what we learned about butterflies as school children. To sustain butterflies; a garden must contain plants that serve the needs of all four life-stages of the butterfly. They need a place to lay eggs, food plants for the larvae (the caterpillars,) next a place to form pupa or chrysalis, and then flower nectar for the adults (the butterflies.)

We read about a day in the life of a Monarch butterfly egg. It seems that mother butterflies abandon their eggs the instant they lay them. The father butterflies are long gone. After a single mating, a female can lay eggs her entire life, which may be a matter of days or months.

If you're a butterfly egg, your mother cannot afford to raise you. You're one of several hundred siblings and you're on your own. The best she can do for you is find the correct host plant for your species. If you're a Monarch, that would be a milkweed. It's the only food you'll eat when you hatch into a caterpillar. She'll attach you with a sticky substance, so you won't fall off the leaf. Hopefully, she'll place you on the leaf's underside where you're hidden from strong sunlight and less visible to predators.

If you're the only egg she lays on a plant, you're fortunate since you'll have it all to yourself. By choosing a young milkweed plant, she'll be providing you with the freshest leaves possible. Once your mother places you on a leaf, she moves on to lay more eggs. Her main activity is reproduction. When you hatch into a caterpillar, your main activity will be eating.

Gardeners seeking to attract butterflies need to "grow" caterpillars or there will be no adult butterflies inhabiting their gardens. Caterpillars of a species feed on only a limited variety of plants. Most butterfly caterpillars don't cause the damage associated with some moth caterpillars such as bagworms, tent caterpillars, and gypsy moths. That's good news. But what kinds of plants do we buy to feed butterfly caterpillars?

A mother butterfly knows instinctively what plants serve as suitable food for the hungry caterpillars that will hatch from her own eggs. Red Admirals like nettles. Viceroys prefer willows. Black Swallowtails lay eggs on parsley, dill, and sometimes - citrus leaves. The list goes on.

We found all we needed to know at www.thebutterflysite.com. We clicked on "gardening." Another click on the U.S. map at the bottom of the gardening page revealed a list of butterflies in our state, pictures of each species' life-stages, counties they exist in, and plants that attract them. It's a site worth visiting.

As a caterpillar continues to eat, it grows and molts four or five times before becoming a pupa or chrysalis that hangs from a twig or some other support system. When the last stage growing inside is complete, it emerges with wings to grace our gardens.

It all still seems like some fairy tale story in which a tiny being is abandoned by its mother, turns into a weird-looking eating machine called larva, becomes immobile pupa that seemingly just rests in one spot, and then finally morphs into an enchanted creature that is capable of flying free - the delightful butterfly. Sound familiar?