Tiny Tuesday ....

... Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillar.

Yesterday on my way out to the deck I checked some of the parsley that we have for any swallowtail caterpillars.  We keep the parsley out just for that reason ... and we use it for cooking occasionally. 

I was quite surprised when I found some tiny cats that had hatched recently.  We checked all the other parsley plants and found many, many more ... there has to be a dozen at least.  R set up a glass aquarium that we used last year to keep them all safe from predators.  We put all the parsley plants inside and topped it off with a breathable (for them) lid. 

This afternoon I went out so that I could photograph some for today's Tiny Tuesday.  Some of them seemed to have doubled in size overnight! This is just one of many.  I know it's not all that pretty right now but it will eventually look like this .... hopefully.  It's hard to see here but this cat is less than half an inch in length. 

But on a sad note we lost one of our Monarch cats today.  I noticed that something was wrong with it so I quickly isolated it into another small butterfly enclosure.  Then I did some research as to what could be wrong and determined that it has suffered from Anul Prolapse.  It's not known what causes this, but it's always fatal.  This saddens me very much.  We have not had a very good year for our Monarchs and to lose one is heartbreaking. 

Thanks to MaryElizaR for hosting TT this month.