For those of you that don't know already my sons love to grow anything (plants and bugs...) so our latest project has been a group of Lady Butterflies. We received them in the larva stage in a plastic tub lined with their food (I did not take a photo of the tub because the food looked like bodily product). Once they had eaten and made a real mess of the container they started to hang from the top of the tub on a mesh disk and turn into chrysalises ready to be removed and placed into the habitat.
Here are the chrysalises. Note that one of them (the very bottom one) is already hatched. Each one before it hatches turns dark brown/red/black (like the top right chrysalis) this is meconium a left over byproduct of the development of the butterfly.
I had placed the mesh disk in the habitat just in time for the first butterfly to hatch. Unfortunatly they don't all just decide to do everything at the same time. This one was already a chrysalis one week before the last one turned. They can only be placed in the habitat when all have converted into the chrysalises.
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