rose_cat | More monarch news: HOLY SHIT.

Well, it took me almost three hours, but I counted the eggs and caterpillars on the milkweed plants this evening.

In the big pot, which is approximately fifteen inches in diameter and fourteen inches tall, I counted thirty-six caterpillars and two-hundred-and-eleven eggs.

In the bed next to the house, which is about one by four-and-a-half feet and contains seven plants, I counted fourteen caterpillars and seventy-seven eggs.

Grand Total: fifty caterpillars and two-hundred-and-eighty-eight eggs.

That's a lot of baby monarchs! Keep in mind, though, that very, very few will make it to the chrysalis stage, or even to full caterpillar size. When a munching caterpillar comes across an egg or another caterpillar that's much smaller, it just keeps on eating. When the caterpillars are bigger and more the same size, they often will fight and the loser gets eaten. Yes, they're savage little things!

I once saw a large caterpillar bump into a much smaller one. The tiny one reacted immediately; it dropped suddenly, hanging from a silk line (they can extrude them just as spiders do) several inches down. Presumably it climbed back up after a while. I also noticed what I thought was a caterpillar shedding its skin. It turned out to be eating another that was almost the same size. (In both cases, I wish I'd gotten a picture.)

Oh, and the caterpillars currently range from 3/16" (about 0.5 cm) to 1/2"(.3 cm) long.