For the past three weeks, I've been obsessed by caterpillars. Our friends the Quinns gave Daniel a monarch butterfly larvae from their back yard, where they have a large crown flower plant, the local equivalent of milkweed, the monarch's preferred food. Eventually we acquired two more caterpillars - one for Sophie, and another one that hitched a ride on a leaf that we collected for caterpillar food - and I spent literally hours every day watching the critters, held captive by their exponential growth and voracious appetites. It's pretty impressive to see something that starts out smaller than a fingernail sliver eat several times its body mass and double in size every day. By the end, the caterpillar is about two inches long, and so fat and bunchy it looks like it's going to burst out of its skin. (Which as a matter of fact, it does.)
When the first butterfly emerged, both kiddoes got to hold it. Well, Daniel attempted to hold it, shrieked, and dropped it on the floor. So after that we used chopsticks as a buffer and that worked okay. Sophie was less squeamish, and the butterfly perched on her hand before it got its wings and flapped into my hair. We placed it on a bush outside our house. The other two emerged a few days later, and we released one in our front yard, and the other at Sophie's school so her friends could see it.
Five things I learned about monarch butterflies:
1) Every fourth generation of monarchs lives three to four times long as the other generations (7-8 months instead of 2), so that it can make the annual fall migration -- sometimes transatlantic -- to a warmer climate.
2) As they grow, caterpillars shed their skin several times. Then, they eat it.
3) Caterpillars produce silk, but do not spin cocoons. Instead, they shed their skin; underneath is the green chrysalis. They use the silk to fasten themselves upside down, where they hang until they complete their chrysalis stage. Just before the butterfly is ready to emerge, the chrysalis becomes completely translucent, and you can see the butterfly's wings quite distinctly inside.
4) Male caterpillars have a black spot on each of their hind wings. Females tend to be smaller, and to have larger veins. (Our model here is male.)
5) When the butterfly emerges, he or she expands it wings by pumping in a viscous orangey-red liquid. Some of this liquid drips out. So your butterfly may look like it's bleeding, but it's not.
Bonus fact: Never release your newborn butterfly near a halogen light source. We've seen what happens, and it isn't pretty.
While Ryan's parents were here, we went to the Kahala Mandarin Resort for lunch, some photo ops, and to see its resident dolphins. Six of them live in a lagoon, all born in captivity (the PC term for this is "born with humans"), and taken care of by a staff of trainers and an in-house vet. You can sign up to swim with them for a cool $250 dollars for 15 minutes. We didn't. But we did get a very close-up view of them, and got to see some medical procedures being performed while one of the trainers explained what was going on. One dolphin rotated onto his back, holding his breath, so that his trainers could take a blood sample from his tail fin. Another dolphin held still while a tube was placed down his throat and into this stomach. This was just a training exercise - at other times they send a camera down the tube, or use the tube to sample stomach fluids to make sure the dolphin is healthy.
Five things I learned about dolphins:
1) It's tricky to take blood from a dolphin. While human veins bulge out of their skin, dolphin veins are depressed. So sometimes they're impossible to find.
2) Dolphins are never fully asleep. Half of their brain is always awake. This is because:
3) Unlike with humans, dolphins' breathing is under voluntary control. So if dolphin were to fully sleep, it would stop breathing and die.
4) It is therefore nearly impossible to do surgery on a dolphin, because you can't anesthesize it without stopping its breathing. This is why the staff is so diligent with blood tests and the like. They can't afford to let their dolphins get sick.
5) For one of the few successful surgeries, the dolphin was placed in a specially constructed iron lung.
January to March is humpback migration season in Hawaii, so we took Marsha and Craig hiking at Makapuu, hoping to see a few. We saw some spouting, but not the whales themselves. We did see a three-legged dog. She was bounding up the trail with her owner, not seeming to miss her fourth leg at all.
In keeping with the aquatic theme, Sophie and Daniel just became the proud parents of some fish. Two Bettas, to be precise. Daniel's is reddish purplish and the more aggressive of the two. Sophie's is mellower, with blue fins and a black spot on its pale pink head. I'm thinking of naming them Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
We've been promising Sophie a fish since before we moved to Hawaii. Daniel's fish was part of his birthday present - he turned four this past Tuesday!
Two birthday Daniel-isms: While we were camping on the North Shore on City Church's annual winter getaway (and I use the term "winter" most loosely), Daniel looked up in awe at the panoramic sky and said, "The stars are covering the whole world!" On another topic entirely, he ran up to me excitedly and informed me, "Mom, Mom! Kung Fu . . . is a Panda!"
In ministry news, Ryan has begun teaching the high school boys Sunday School class. It's been a very, very, VERY long time since he was a teenager (even though his wardrobe is essentially the same), so you can keep him in prayer as he tries to remember that far back. He has also put together a mercy ministry committee - its task is to find a ministry model that will be effective for City Church's work here in Honolulu.
The closing image this week belongs to Sophie Joy, who is anxiously awaiting the loss of her first tooth, and doing everything she can to help it along. Meanwhile, she's campaigning hard for higher compensation from the tooth fairy. Dad's told her she gets 5 cents per tooth; she's pushing for 5 dollars. Too bad our new president's put limits on lobbyists. She could have had a future in Washington.
