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Stage One: Egg
The monarch mother lays her egg on a delicious milkweed leaf. This is the kind of plant that caterpillars eat. The monarch mother can lay hundreds of eggs in one day. The egg is not round, but oval in shape, like a football. As you may notice it is quite small, but if we look carefully at a milkweed plant, we can spot an egg with our naked eye. Tiny lines can be found on the egg from top to bottom. After three or four days, the caterpillar growing inside of the egg begins to chew a hole at the top of the eggshell. When its body gets too big for the shell, it crawls out through the egg as a little caterpillar.
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Stage Two: Larva
The caterpillar is the larval stage of a butterfly. Once the caterpillar hatches out of it's eggshell, it eats it! This provides the caterpillar with a lot of vitamins. During this stage of a monarch butterfly's lifecycle, it eats and eats and eats! Using its powerful jaw, the caterpillar eats the leaves of a milkweed plant because this is the plant its mother laid its egg on. The caterpillar eats and grows for about a month. Although the body of a caterpillar grows, the skin does not. The caterpillar needs to shed its skin several times as it grows. Pay close attention to the caterpillar's coloring--does it look similar to that of a monarch butterfly's?
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Stage Three: Pupa
When the caterpillar finishes growing, it becomes a pupa. It finds a twig or a leaf and uses silk to attach itself and form a covering, called a chrysalis, around its body. From the outside, the pupa looks as if it is resting. But inside, every part of the caterpillar is changing. Most of its body parts dissolve and re-form into the body parts of an adult butterfly.
At first, the outside of the chrysalis is really clear and you can see the green pupa inside.
But as the pupa changes, the crysalis color will turn brown, yellow, and orange.
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Stage Four: Adult
When the pupa has finished changing, it sheds its skin one last time and pushes its way out of its chrysalis as an adult monarch butterfly. When it comes out, its wings are folded up against its body from being in such a small space. The butterfly pumps blood into the wings to expand them. It then flies away to rest and mate, laying new eggs only to begin the cycle over again.
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Would you like additional information about the Monarch Butterfly? Click here!
(http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterfly/species/
Monarch.shtml)
