Monarch Caterpillar Babies Are So Tiny!

Hi everyone! Hope you are all doing great! We have hatched some Monarch caterpillars from their eggs for the first time and I just have to show you how cute they are! And TINY! You won’t believe how tiny! On Thursday, August 13th, I found my first ever Monarch Butterfly egg on my milkweed plant. I was so excited! I am trying to do my part in saving the Monarch butterflies, so I brought the egg inside to keep it safe from predators. Do you see the little round ball on this piece of a milkweed leaf? That’s the egg!

The next day I found 2 more eggs and brought them inside. Then on Saturday, August 15th, the first egg hatched! It was really hard for me to even find the tiny tiny little caterpillar. See if you can spot him in this picture. Look on the left side for the caterpillar…and on the right side and bottom for two more eggs.

Can you see him? His head is black and he is green right now, almost the same color as the leaf. The next picture I took was on Sunday, August 16th. What do you see? The caterpillar is already growing bigger and is a little easier to see. See all those teeny tiny little black dots on the white paper towel at the bottom of the picture? Can you guess what that is? It’s teeny tiny caterpillar poop!! Isn’t that funny? 😉

Now let’s look at the picture from two days later, Tuesday, August 18th. I put a dime in the picture so you can compare the caterpillar’s size to the size of the dime. Even though he is growing fast, he still looks very little beside the dime, doesn’t he? See the little hole in the leaf? That’s where he ate part of the leaf.

Guess what else happened on Tuesday? The other two eggs hatched! But wow, I had trouble finding them! See if you can spot one of them in this picture. If you found the “big” tiny caterpillar, then look straight up from him to find the brand new caterpillar.

The next two pictures are from today, Friday, August 21st. The new babies are just 3 days old. Aren’t they so cute?! 🙂

The “big” tiny caterpillar is just over one week old. See if you can find all three caterpillars in this next picture.

It is so fun and so interesting watching these Monarch caterpillars hatch and start to grow. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing just how very very small these caterpillars are when they start out. Stay tuned for more Monarch caterpillar information next week! 🙂