Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly Metamorphosis

Time Lapse – Phoebis sennae Butterfly Pupates-Emerges

In this video, a Cloudless Sulphur caterpillar pupates and emerges as a butterfly.

Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas held its annual open house Sept. 6, 2008, in its home at Foley Hall. Hundreds of visitors toured the building, greenhouse and Pollination Garden where hundreds of thousands of flowers were in bloom. Visitors could see the Cloudless Sulphur butterfly and its caterpillars in all stages of metamorphosis. It was a little rainy, which didn’t bother the caterpillars, but made the butterflies find cover.

Children threw around words like metamorphosis and proboscis, and hundreds of them took home monarch butterflies in chrysalis form. I’ll be posting photographs of the open house, including many of its star caterpillars and a few of the brave butterflies that came out in the rain.

Entomologist Chip Taylor is the founder of Monarch Watch, which is dedicated to the education about and conservation of monarch butterflies. Hundreds of other kinds of pollinators benefit, too.

Almost 80 percent of the food we eat depends on the work of pollinating insects and animals. Monarch Watch and Pollinator Partnership are on my blogroll, so visit them!

2 Comments

Filed under Biology, Education, Environment, Gardening, Insects, Kansas, Life, Natural History, Nature, Random, Science, Uncategorized, University of Kansas

2 responses to “Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly Metamorphosis

  1. alwaysjan

    Way cool, though I won’t be having any apricot jam in the near future. I’ll have to show this to my students. It has the “Yuck!” factor, but that quickly changes to “Oooh,” and ultimately “Ahhh!”

    Like

  2. Pingback: Cloudless Sulphur Butterflies and Caterpillars « Catherine Sherman

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