Meet M

Meet M who will be the star of my Monarch Chronicles this year.  In this photo, M has just emerged from his (or her) egg.  Once free of the egg case, the tiny caterpillar turns around and eats the egg case, as seen here.  I'm not sure if there is any nutritional value to the egg casing, or if the primary reason is to get rid of something that might attract a predator.  Either way, it's fascinating behavior and I was pretty happy to be able to capture it.  

Technical stuff:  The photo was taken with a 105 mm macro lens and a 36 mm extension tube, mounted on a tripod.  I used a ring light to get good light on the cat and then took about 20 shots.  Only a couple were well focused, even using the timer.  The caterpillar was just impossibly small to focus on!  To give you context, the egg is about the size of the tip of a fine-point pen.  Then, I cropped the image by about 80%.  Yikes.

So, M is the caterpillar I am going to follow throughout its journey to becoming a Monarch.  My plan is to photograph M every day, recording the growth and the various instars.  I won't be blipping M every day, but may blip certain milestones along the way.  Meanwhile, I've posted a photo HERE on Flickr of an older cat eating it's shed skin - fascinating behavior!

The Monarch nursery sustained some damage last night as high winds came through and Hubs found the two containers tipped over this morning.  Amazingly, when I did a count, it seems that I only lost two tiny first instar cats.  There are still 10 busily eating milkweed, seeming unfazed by having been tossed around.  More eggs gathered in the garden this morning.  

The rest of the day will be spent pottering around outside.  I need to finish weeding my new garden and do some deadheading in the other two gardens.  It's still pretty windy out there, but temperatures are pleasant and the sun is shining.  So, a nice day to be outside.


Thanks for all the love on my pair of dragons yesterday!  I realized when I posted it that the view might be a little confusing, but if you looked at the side view that I posted on Flickr, hopefully it made more sense!


xo
Debbi