Life Cycle of a Butterfly

Life cycle of a butterfly

Butterflies are flying flowers they add beauty to nature but do you know what happens after a butterfly lay its egg? The stages that they go through is very amazing and after they pass through the stages a beautiful butterfly come out. They have many species of butterfly like Malachite, Sulfur, Blue Morpho, Longwing, Postman, Swallow tail just to name a few. All of them go through the same process of turning into an adult but not all of them take the same amount of time to turn into one. The Butterfly goes through four stages to turn into an adult the stages are egg, larva, pupa and adult.

A butterfly starts life as an egg and egg can be round, oval, or cylindrical. They don’t lay their eggs on any kind of plant each species of butterfly has its own host plant. If you want to look for a butterfly egg you have to know the plants that they lay their egg on and the egg shape also depends on the butterfly species. When the butterfly is ready to lay egg it will start to look for its host plant and after they lay their egg it will take about five days for the egg to hatch. The eggs are really small and they are close together you will know that the eggs belong to a butterfly.

When the egg hatches most people think that a butterfly will emerge right? That’s not the case after the egg hatches you will see a tiny worm come out. This is the second stage which is the larva also known as the caterpillar. As soon as it comes out of the egg it starts to eat and that’s one thing with caterpillars they like to eat and they grow so fast. The caterpillar won’t eat another type of plant leaf it will eat the one that they were born onto. This is very important because if you move

the caterpillar to another type of plant it won’t eat it because it doesn’t like that plant. That’s why each butterfly species has its own host plant. The caterpillar stage last