The Painted Ladies at Caterpillar Camp

It kind of sounds like a western. We saw the Painted Ladies at Caterpillar Camp last week. It wasn't a movie and the painted ladies weren't working.

We volunteered at the EmilyAnn Theatre and Garden's Caterpillar Camp to help them prepare for this year's 13th Annual Butterfly Festival. The EmilyAnn Theatre was founded in 1998 by Ann and Norm Rolling to celebrate the life of their daughter, Emily Ann, who lost her life in a car accident. It has since expanded to include a series of natural areas, trails, and gardens. The centerpiece of the Butterfly Festival is the live release, every thirty minutes, of hundreds of butterflies. It's a great, fun event. You should check it out. This year it's on Saturday, April 16th.

That's where Caterpillar Camp comes in. As part of our Master Naturalist volunteer work, Mary and I have been helping at Caterpillar Camp for several years. The work involves placing approximately 2500 Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) caterpillars in containers with their food, in preparation for raising them into butterflies and releasing them at the Butterfly Festival. Painted Ladies are the caterpillar of choice because they are relatively easy-going about what they eat and are easy to raise in captivity. They occur naturally in the area as they regularly migrate through.

Caterpillar Camp volunteers preparing containers

The containers are small clear plastic tubs, with lids. They look like what you might use to take catsup or tartar sauce out of a fast-food restaurant. We smear a small amount of a dough-like food on the sides of the container. The bottom is left clear to allow the caterpillar droppings to accumulate. We then coax, with a small paintbrush, a single caterpillar out of another container holding dozens of them into the prepared container. The containers are then placed in cages and distributed to schools and businesses throughout the area. You can see the workers wearing gloves to minimize contamination. The caterpillar are susceptible to bacterial diseases. Even with about 30 volunteers the work took about 5 hours. The distribution team is called Cages for Classrooms and is also one of our Master Naturalist volunteer projects.

Last year, the Cages for Classrooms team delivered 40 cages to pre-K, elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. They also made presentations to 800-1000 students on the life cycle of butterflies and the care of the caterpillars. In addition, 67 cages were delivered to individuals and other groups throughout Hays County, reaching over 100 adults and children. These cages provided awareness, education, and outreach to the public.

Mary's classroom cage

Mary has a cage in her classroom, holding 15 caterpillars. You can see the small containers sitting on the bottom of the cage. The cage needs to be relatively large so it can comfortably hold the 15 butterflies.

After one week, all but one of the caterpillars have formed their chrysalis. They climb to the top of the container and attach themselves to the lid and then enter their chrysalis stage. Here's the one which is still in caterpillar form.

The late bloomer

You can tell he's getting ready to transform because he's on the lid. You can also see that they've eaten almost all the food. The sides of the containers were coated with the food. The caterpillars were only about 1/4 inch long a week ago. They've done nothing (well almost nothing) but eat since then.

Their development rate is very temperature-dependent. The hotter it is, the faster they develop. Caterpillars have exoskeletons, just like all insects. You normally don't think of that because they're soft and squishy. In order to grow they have to shed the exoskeleton and form a new one. Each stage of this development is called an instar. Painted Ladies normally go through 5 instars. These started a little larger than we've seen before, maybe at the third instar, because the date of Caterpillar Camp was so close to the Butterfly Festival, on April 16th. The timing of all this is actually pretty tricky and it has to be right or there won't be 2500 butterflies at the Festival.

Here's one that has formed the chrysalis. They are about the same size as the caterpillar but are hard and smooth. They hang from the lid by a thread. When they've all transformed, Mary will remove the lids and move them, with the chrysalis' hanging on, to a wire rack where they will wait for the final metamorphosis.

Ready to go

They should emerge as adult Painted Lady butterflies in about 10-12 days, just in time for the Butterfly Festival.