October | 2012 | Kit Hewitt

I have had a bumper crop of Swallowtail butterfly chrysali. We started growing and hatching them in 1995 and have gotten pretty good at it. Every year we get 5-6 butterflys. This year we had to stop at 11 because the aquarium was getting full and we were running out of anise, which is their preferred food plant. But then, by accident, I found out that they really like parsley which is much easier to keep alive in the aquarium.

Here is a series of photos showing their life-cycle. Click on the first image to get a slide show – the captions are a little hard to read (who thought grey on black was easy to read?) but they fill in some of the details of what you will see.:

: The overall setup. The plants are set in jars of water to keep them fresh for the caterpillars. There is a stick for them to form their chrysalis’ on. This year for some reason they preferred using the glass or picked stems of anise that wilted under their weight so I used a clothes pin to tack them onto the stick.

: They start out looking like bird droppings

: As they outgrow their skins, they molt several times keeping this bird dropping coat until they get to be about 1 1/2 inches long

: Bird dropping 2

: I found a few on a parsley plant in the yard and soon the aquarium was full. These ones have molted to their lovely green, black and yellow spotted hides.

: This guy was about 2 1/2 inches long when she went “wandering.” When its time to set the chrysalis they stop eating and frantically wander all over the tank until they find a spot they like. All the time they are leaving a trail of silk on the glass.

: Looking at her underside through the glass

: Hitched up to the glass with the harness around her shoulders. Its hard not to anthropomorphize. I know they have 17 shoulders if they have any.

: A day or so later they shed the glossy green skin so they look like leaves folded on the underside of a twig. The black blob at the bottom of the shot is the discarded skin.