I Haz Monarch Flutterbye!

Mission Control, we have lift off!

In the middle of the night, the chrysalis looked like this, with her colors deepening within the clear casing:



( Tricksy little chrysalis . . . )

I got up in the morning and her body was shiny black, but she wasn't making a move out of her casing and I had a terrible sinus headache. So I took some mucinex and went back to bed for an hour and a half. And when I got up, there she was a butterfly, all pumped up and pretty, and apparently female. I named her Verid, after a Joan Slonczewski character from Daughter of Elysium.

Female monarchs have wider back veins on their wings, while male monarch's have two black pheromone spots on their lower wings, so it's easy to sex the butterflies, and Verid looks female. A couple of websites I was looking at said you can sex the chrysalis, which I hadn't known before. They said the females have a little line below a set of black dots on the dome of the chrysalis between the wings. I didn't see it, so I thought she might be male. However, that spot was on the back side from all the pics I took, and I would have had to turn the box upside down to see the spot clearly, so I viewed it through the glass that was covered with some of her webbing. It was probably too faint for me to see through the webbing, or possibly, she doesn't have one and is on the intersexual continuum. Whatever the case, she made sure that her most glittery side was best in view for me to look at and take pics of for us, and glitteriness is more important than which sex/gender you are, so I'm grateful to Verid for making sure to share her fabulousness with me. (-:

( Click here to see more of Verid's fabulousness . . .  )