Studying the Life Cycle of the Fritillary Butterfly

As decisive as any gardener planting seeds, the mother frittilary placed her eggs lightly on the leaves of our Passion Fruit Vine. My middle daughter and I watched, transfixed, as she did it. Rarely more than one egg per leaf, lightly landing on the leaf, she stayed long enough for each deposit and flew to the next leaf. (This happened Sunday July 15, 2012.)

The yellow dots on the Passion Fruit Vine leaves are the eggs
of a frittilary butterfly. 

After this amazing display, I took all the children out to the garden to show them the frittilary eggs. We examined them under our new pocket microscopes, and noted again that not more than two eggs reside on each leaf, and most leaves only have one. Several leaves don't have any at all.

I have 2 types of Passion Flower vines planted. One of them has purple flowers and 3 pronged leaves. The other has simple leaves that come to a single point (lance shaped according to one leaf identification site.) So far, the caterpillars are only on the purple-flowering ones, though we saw eggs on the red-flowered ones.

On July 27, I saw the first frittilary caterpillar. Spiny and fierce-looking, it had already eaten the end of the leaf on which it resides, though I cut that part of the leaf off the picture.

frittilary caterpillar

We will continue to monitor the frittilary butterfly. It is wonderful to have such a close up vantage point for observation!

We are submitting this post to the Outdoor Hour Blog Carnival with Barb from Handbook of Nature Study.