Pringles and Olestra

This is Pringles and Olestra.

This, I believe, is their momma, though I only learned about it on hindsight. When I took this picture, I had no idea she had been busy laying her eggs on our celery plant. 

On July 28th, I found this hungry caterpillar on our celery. If you've been reading our blog for a while, you know I don't take well to worms. They scare me; I hate them. I took a picture of this nasty creature and sent it to Zach who was busy at work in the studio. Zach told me to save it for him so I tore off the leaf with the caterpillar on it and stuck it in an old ice-cream container. I shared the picture of my latest pest find on Facebook, and my brother suggested that I keep this caterpillar and watch it transform into a butterfly. I don't know what prompted me to actually go through with his nutty idea, but that was how feeding and caring for this caterpillar came to be.

The very next day, I found another caterpillar on the same celery plant. I chopped off another leaf and stuck it in the same container. I thought the caterpillars needed names, so I studied them real hard and found little "faces" on their behinds. The "face" reminded me of this:

so former caterpillar #1 became Mr. Pringles, and caterpillar #2, Miss Olestra.

Pringles entered the chrysalis stage on August 8th. We had an idea when it was happening, but we missed the entire episode.

Olestra was in less of a hurry to transform. She only became a chrysalis on August 18, ten whole days after Pringles. We slept through her transformation too.

We had no idea how long this chrysalis stage would last. I tried looking up some information, but since I didn't know what sort of butterfly we were expecting, it was hard to get an exact time frame. Then yesterday, 11 days after Pringles became a chrysalis, his metamorphosis was complete. We woke up to see a stunning butterfly eager to be freed. Of course, we missed all the overnight action as usual.

We took Pringles out to our wildflower patch and set him free.

Now we'll wait for Miss Olestra to do her thing.