A Butterfly Story from New Hampshire

Eastern Black Swallowtail Caterpillar and Dill  Lin Batkins photo

   This Monday I visited the dermatologist and, as a result of her ministrations, I am hors de combat vis a vis snorkeling for the remainder of the week.  Luckily, a week or so ago, my sweetie was contacted
by a friend who had a caterpillar that needed to be identified.  And in that way we have an exciting story for the blog.

    Lin Batkins and her husband Don, who is Sandra's cousin, live in New Hampshire.  It is likely that Lin and Don are the most far flung readers of the blog. After all, you can't get much further from Hawaii without leaving the country.  On request, Lin texted Sandra a picture of the caterpillar which you see here.  Lin wondered if it was a monarch.  Well, as you can see this wasn't a monarch caterpillar.

Eastern Black Swallowtail Butterfly, courtesy University of Florida

    Being recently hatched experts, we asked Lin what the caterpillar was eating.  The answer was that it was dining on dill that she was cultivating in her garden.  Now, as host plants go, it seemed to me that dill might be quite unusual.  With this in mind I asked Mr. Google what caterpillars eat dill.  The
answer was Eastern Black Swallowtail!  A quick look at images of the butterfly and her caterpillars revealed that  this was a perfect match.   How exciting!  The EBS, as you can see here (courtesy of the University of
Florida) is a big, beautiful black butterfly.  The ventral side of the back wing bears a fantastic constellation of orange, blue and white markings.  How I would love to see one of those!  This is not entirely impossible, for despite the name, its range extends all the way to the left coast.

 One might have thought that the story would end there, but, apparently, one should not under estimate Ms. Batkins. Instead of leaving eating caterpillars lie, Lin captured the caterpillar, put it in a large jar and provided a diet of fresh dill.  Add some capers and mayonnaise and you might have a pretty tasty condiment to apply to your barbecued ahi.  The caterpillar continued to dine sumptuously and after about five days he formed a

Black Swallowtail Chrysalis, Lin Batkins photo

chrysalis.  Here is a picture of the caterpillar in his chrysalis.  Had Lin placed the stick a bit higher, one must assume the chrysalis would be hanging from the stick, as opposed to lying recumbent.  In a few days he will release enzymes and dissolve into what some people call butterfly soup.  Tiny bits of genetic material known as imaginal discs will remain and reorganize the soup into a butterfly, which should emerge as a fully formed adult. 

   I don't know about you, but I am on the edge of my seat.  In the meantime, we are having ahi for dinner and I hope schmoopie remebers to add dill to the mayo and capers.

jeff

In honor of Lin's discovery and her exciting experiment, we whipped up a paper mache model of the Eastern Black Swallowtail. Here you see it with its antennae freshly glued in.   The butterfly should be arriving in New Hampshire sometime next week, following a harrowing migration through the wilds of the USPS.    j