How many of you can say you have a cocoon growing in your house? Maybe that isn't the right wording, but that's what we have growing at our house. Ya gotta love having boys. You never know what you're gonna get! Tanner had an orange and black caterpillar in a container in our house for a few days and I finally felt bad enough for him that I let him go. A couple days later I noticed he was in a container in our house again. I left him there for a few days and released him again. . . poor critter! I don't especially like having to be responsible for all the critters that Tanner likes to collect for pets, so I decided to release the caterpillar and let him live once again. Well, this happened a third time and I decided to let him stay. We put him in this container with plastic over the top with holes in the plastic. The next day he was fully encapsulated in this cocoon. It was fascinating to see this. I let Tanner take the "cocooned" caterpillar to school (I thought it was a pretty cool process and thought 4th graders might think so, also.) Tanner brought it back the same day and before I knew it, there was another caterpillar the very same colors living in this container. Before I knew it, he was building a cocoon around himself. We didn't get to see the first caterpillar go through this process, but we watched several times a day as the second one went through this process. He would pull his hair from his body and build his cocoon with his hair. The really cool thing about it is you can see the one caterpillar from the outside of the container. He is living in there. . . hairless! I hope he's warm enough in his cocoon in our house. I have no idea how long the cocoon process takes, but we will soon be having a moth or a beautiful butterfly and we are looking forward to watching that process!
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