SCIENCE SUNDAY W/ TESS

Ack! My Swallowtail Caterpillars are Poisoning Me.

My migraine brain is having conniption fits, but I’m not going to give in.

Caterpillars on Parsley ~ Courtesy of Author

Science is hard. Mentally it can be a difficult mind-bending task; physically it can wreck you. I just hate it when it makes me sick.

I was trying to save my dill plants.

When I first saw the tiny caterpillars I was thrilled to discover they were going to grow up to be these gorgeous things! Black Swallowtail Butterflies.

Male Left — Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash and Female Right — Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

So, I let them stay on the dill plants. After all, they were such cute things, and there were only seven of them.

Blurry 1st instar & 2nd instar on dill ~ Courtesy of Author

Then their numbers increased to 11, they got bigger, and my dill started to get smaller. I decided to take them inside, freeing my last crop of Question Mark Butterfly caterpillars to the alder I’d taken them from, to make room for the newbies.