Science Lesson

In an earlier post I talked about Levi's obsession with caterpillars and our quest for catching them, keeping them alive long enough to build cocoons, and hopefully have beautiful butterflies.  Well, we were successful at getting some cocoons, but not butterflies...just moths.  Clarification - 1 moth.  Honestly the moth was a little creepy.  I just shivered writing about him.  Yuck!  I digress.


Several weeks ago we found a bright green bug we assumed was some sort of caterpillar.  It looked just like this:

Since the "normal" looking caterpillar (see below) turned into a moth we thought we might get lucky and this one (assuming he/she lived) might turn into a butterfly.  

Well, literally like a day or two after we caught him we thought he was beginning to make some sort of cocoon, but it looked a lot like this:

Aaron thought it was a cocoon, but I seriously had my doubts and figured we had just killed another poor caterpillar.  This cocoon looked nothing like our other ones or ones I'd seen online.  I mean it literally looked just like a brown, dead version of what we had put in there.  But for whatever reason we just left it there, untouched for the last couple of weeks.

Well last night I saw something flying in the container and low and behold is was a wasp!

We had no idea how it had gotten in there, but assumed it must have slipped through the tiny cracks at home small development stage.  Well today we cleaned out the container to use to catch fireflies and low and behold the brown, dead caterpillar really was a cocoon and the wasp had come from it.  I had never heard of such so thus began my obsession to find out what I could.  Here are some interesting facts you probably never knew and really could care less to know now.  Turns out there is something called a parasitic wasp and it takes over the caterpillar in order to grow.  I don't think this is exactly what happened in our case.  I think our caterpillar turned into a cocoon and the wasp was already inside of it and grew instead.  However, if you really want to be educated you can check it all out here.

So there you have it.  We were hoping for a butterfly, expecting a moth, and got a wasp.  Go figure.