SANCTUARY ASIA, 2018 MAY 5Fifteen-year-old Rohan Arora is a
wildlife enthusiast with a passion for
birdwatching. He picked up his camera
when he was only six and now has
recorded and photographed more than
500 species of birds.MY FIRST CATERPILLAR
I kept my eyes trained on the lemon and
curry leaf plants. After about four days
I saw a very tiny caterpillar on one of
the leaves, almost too tiny to spot. In a
few days it had grown a little bigger and
looked quite like a bird-dropping, with
a white spot in the centre! I placed this
caterpillar carefully in a ventilated box
and decided to raise this tiny creature
and understand all that I could about its
life. In the next few days it had grown
to about a centimetre long. I took care
to replace the old leaves of the lemon
plant on which I found it with fresh
ones and cleaned the droppings in the
box regularly.
THE EATING
MACHINE!
My caterpillar’s
colour slowly
changed from
dark brown to
(head and thirteen segments) clearly
visible. It had started to look like a
cigar! It had three pairs of jointed legs
and five pairs of unjointed legs called
‘false legs’ or ‘prolegs’.
Once when I tried to touch it, it
curled backwards and from behind
its head popped a bright orange
V-shaped organ, which gave out a
pungent odour. I found out that thisThen, one
fine morning,
I noticed it had
turned darker. In the
next couple of hours, I saw the most
fascinating sight: a butterfly emerging
from the pupa! As it turned out, it
was my favourite – the common
lime butterfly!
FLIGHT TO FREEDOM
Wet and shrunken, the butterfly
rested near its empty chrysalis.
After an hour or so, it started flapping
its wings, drier now. I left the box open
near a plant. A minute later,
with one strong flap of its glorious
wings, it took its first flight into the
natural world, disappearing right in
front of my eyes! I was speechless.
I looked up to the sky to thank the
almighty for this precious experience.
Never will I forget the feeling this
moment left me with. How
many long and difficult
changes it took to turn
into a butterfly!owowleaf-
green
with a false
eyespot* visible
on each side. It had turned into an
‘eating machine’ with stronger, larger
jaws. It demolished every leaf I placed
in the box! Curious to know the reason
for the change in the caterpillar’s
colour, I took to books and found
out that the caterpillar’s body grows
rapidly, but its skin does not grow at
the same rate, therefore it sheds its
skin or ‘moults’. This happens three
to four times during development and
each stage between moulting is called
an ‘instar’.
A ‘DEFENSIVE CIGAR’!
It had now grown almost four
centimetres long, with 14 sections
was a protective adaptation and
the organ was called ‘osmeterium’.
All swallowtail caterpillars have this
defence against predators. After that I
did not try touching it again.
TRANSFORMERS
After six days I saw that ‘my’
caterpillar was no longer feeding
or moving. It had anchored itself
using its last pair of ‘false legs’ onto
one of the branches. Its head was
bent and it had started spinning
threads of silk around its body. For
the next 10 hours, it was in this
position – motionless with its head
down. Its colour had changed again- from bright green to a dull green.
Something very strange happened
next; the skin split at its head and the
mouthparts and legs were discarded
along with the skin! The body
had shrunk and within minutes it
disappeared into a chrysalis
or pupa, bearing no resemblance
to the caterpillar it used to be. I
could hardly believe my eyes!
A FRESH LIME
The pupa now appeared almost
lifeless and inactive. I waited patiently
for the next seven days and did not
notice much change in the pupa.