Tag Archives: monarch

Look deeply into my maw!

There’s a late summer feeding frenzy in the garden at the moment, as this year’s crop of monarch caterpillars do their competitive best to turn into butterflies.   This is indeed a very hungry caterpillar, and if not quite as adorable a gourmand as the Eric Carle version certainly as ravening.

monarch caterpillar eating

Also, if you’ve ever wondered how a caterpillar manages to cling on while dangling upside down on a windy day  . . . here’s a closeup of the hairy hooks on the bottom of their prolegs (the ones at the back), which I did not know until I just now looked it up are called “crochets”.

sticky feet caterpillar

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The tiny photo bomber

A photobomberpillar?

This morning I was trying to capture an image of the mouthparts on this tiny 3-4mm monarch caterpillar, using my ridiculous new 4.5:1 lens, to see if I could.   I’ve almost nearly figured out the flash settings needed, and this time almost almost had the minuscule in-focus zone right when some sort of bug started messing things up by moving around just in front of the lens.  Pulling back a bit, it turned out we were being photobombed by a much faster and tinier lava of some different species.  It seemed to just want to rear up in front of the front of the lens and wave about, firmly refusing to hold a pose long enough for a decent identifying photo.

Amusing, so long as the intruder doesn’t turn out to be the harbinger of some kind of swan plant mothy doom.  I hope at least some of the new crop of monarchs make it to the butterfly stage this summer.  Since I have this new lens and all.

Caterpillars

Hey, what is this blurry fast blob that keeps getting in the way?  Ah, that fellow.   

20mm, F11, 1/100, iso 400

Caterpillar piehole-equivalent

Today I experimented some more using off-camera flash.  My subject was a monarch caterpillar, and the photograph was taken on a Sony A7ii, using a Nikon 105mm macro lens on a bellows, with a Yongnuo trigger and one flash set to low power, about 20cm away.  The bellows let me focus very close indeed, while the flash meant I could use f/22.  I’ve definitely never got as close and sharp an image of this type of beastie’s mouth parts and ocelli before. But I have also rediscovered that a high f/stop makes every teeny bit of dust on the lens waaay more visible!

monarch caterpillar

Butterflies start to flutter by

Butterfly 2My two-shrub settlement’s worth of Monarch caterpillars have started to emerge as wonderfully gaudy Monarch Butterflies.

These late-season Monarchs will probably seek an overwintering place rather than breed now – and so live three times as long as their summer-born sibs.

If this was North America, they’d be flying thousands of kilometers to Mexico for the great (if threatened) butterfly migration, as in this dazzling footage.  My internet research suggests that these will probably go no more than 20 kilometers to find a sheltered conifer tree.  Even that seems a long journey for something as wind-tossable as a butterfly!

Happy monarchs-to-be

Monarch butterfly caterpillar

I’m enjoying the hungry little caterpillar scenario being played out on the swan plants (milkweed) in a pot at the end of my deck.  The fattest wee beastie set off for a nearby fence today, to start the next phase of its existence.  

They eat weed plants as caterpillars, and as adults, monarch butterflies (formally, Danaus plexippus)  have no particular impact on anything human, except as objects of interest and beauty.   Ideal royalty.

caterpillar eating