Life in Entomology: Caterpillar Diary

As an experiment, and for fun, I kept a baby caterpillar, watching it grow throughout its life cycle until it emerged as a moth. These are my observations that I kept in my caterpillar diary along the way. While sometimes caterpillars are considered pests, I found that learning about them helped me learn many things about life.

By doing the caterpillar diary I discovered many things about the life cycle of moths and even more so the life cycle of organisms in general. The development of the caterpillar to a moth was a slow and deliberate process and seeing the change from caterpillar to moth through, day to day, was exciting. I learned that it takes a lot of nourishment and lack of interruption for the life cycle to complete itself successfully. With this being such a controlled experiment I can only imagine how difficult it may be for the caterpillar to complete the process in the face of predatory animals and harsh weather conditions. It seems to me that on a more off-beat philosophical level that the life cycle of a caterpillar is not so much different than that of any other organism. While there are probably things that could be done to speed the process along, such as the addition of heat seemed to prove to me, it seems that the best way for the process to come to fruition was for it to be allowed to grow by its own design rather than through the haste of any outside influences.