Today for my English class I am writing an essay about, The Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly!
The Monarch butterfly starts out, like every other butterfly does, as an egg. The Larva is what is inside this egg. The Larva stays in the egg up to 48 hours, the least amount of time is 24 hours. Once the Larva is ready to leave the egg, they eat their way out of the egg. The egg provides them with their first meal and nutrients to go on with their life. Milkweed is the only plant that monarch larvae will eat. Larvae is plural for larva. As the larva gets bigger, it begins to “outgrow” it’s skin, sort of like outgrowing clothes.
At this point in the Larva’s life, he is in the molting part of it’s life. This is where the old skin splits, revealing the new skin underneath. The larva wriggles free of the too-tight skin. After freeing itself, the molted larva often eats its old skin before moving on to more milkweed leaves. Much like eating the egg, the old skin is very nutritious. They do this about 4 times in their life cycle. The fourth time is different from the others, because at this stage they eat more, and they get bigger and bigger. Then, they move away from the milkweed and seek for a place where they can make their pupa, also known as a cocoon. When the larva finds the right spot, they go into a J shape and their skin molts for the last time. The skin on the had splits open and the skin splits behind the head, and the larva wiggles while it hangs upside down to remove the old skin. This final molt is the trickiest, because the larva must shed its old skin and still hang onto the silk button. Once the larva embeds a hook-like structure at its rear end into the button, the rest of the skin can slip off.
When the skin fall off, the larva becomes a pupa. The monarch has no eyes and no antennae. It has no legs, and it cannot move. All the major changes in body shape, size, and arrangement happen. In monarchs, this stage can last up to a week. At the end of this stage, an adult butterfly will emerge from the chrysalis.
A newly emerged butterfly will wait two or more hours before it can fly. New wings are small and shriveled, so the butterfly pumps body fluid through its wing veins to make them get bigger. Then, the monarch must wait for air to replace some of the fluid. Until this happens, the monarch cannot fly, and its wings are easily damaged.
After the wings have hardened, the butterfly flies away to find its first meal. From this point on, the monarch drinks all of its food. The butterfly will visit several different kinds of flowers to get its nectar dinner.
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