I finally got a caterpillar to morph...

Mr Bear was disgusted with my interest in caterpillars. He felt that I was being unnecessarily cruel to them because I kept trying to keep them. Actually I wanted to keep them so that they would morph into butterflies and pollinate my garden. It is a long flight to reach where I live. So far I have encountered some moths in my garden, and one giant butterfly (which was rather scary). While I rushed in to get my camera, it disappeared. Such a waste.

So far, I had 3 failures in rearing caterpillars. There were the two which I picked up from my new herb from the nursery. They were eaten by the cunning birds that live upstairs (they also have a very annoying taste for portulaca and enjoy lining their nests with my lime leaves). Then there was the one that fell on Bär's backpack. It died of starvation. It was then I realised that pennywort is inedible.

Two weeks ago, while coming back from a very trying meeting, I came across a caterpillar dangling from the roof of a shelter. So I picked it up, against the disgruntled shrieks of my team and carried it back to the Büro. This time I also remembered to pick up a leaf. 

The caterpillar ate around the leaf and "died" overnight. I forgot to bring it home to feed it sweet potato leaves. Well it just stopped moving the next day, even though there were still a lot of leaf left. I was like oops. Maybe it was thirsty (ok I am stupid), and dripped some water in. It started moving a bit. So I thought ok, let's bring it home. 

The cocoon after the moth has emerged

The next morning, I woke up to find the caterpillar inside a brown cocoon. I was ecstatic to say the least, because it was practically expediting my desire to have a pollinating butterfly. Well, what happened was that seven days later, during the worst of the haze, it emerged from its cocoon to reveal a moth...

Talk about anticlimatic. Oh well, I was glad I got to take a photo. After that, I wandered off to have dinner, sure that it would not be able to escape the apartment, because we had closed all the windows due to the haze. I was sure that it would pollinate the flowers in my balcony. 

The moth. Looks like one of the common species. Disappointing.

I hadn't seen it since. Hopefully it didn't get eaten by the lizards....