My grandmother recently acquired some silk worm eggs. after keeping them warm in her bosom, (that’s literally not figuratively speaking, apparently in order for the silk worm eggs to hatch, you have to keep them at an ideal human body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius), the eggs started to hatch letting us see very small slender white-beige wormy little heads (cute? not!).
then she took the little tikes and moved them in a clean shoe box, lined with white paper and fed them sycamore leafs (because apparently not any other leaf will do, picky tiny things they are) and cleaned their droppings every day, until they became fat white-beige worms with weird looking markings over their eyes. kinda like alien worms growing rapidly trying to take over the world! No wait, that’s pinky and the brain.
Anyway, the little parasites kept eating and growing and eating and growing, until one day they stopped eating and remained perfectly still. Apparently this is the stage where they start making their cocoons. And my grandmother was telling me this arched over the worms talking in a low whisper like you do over sleeping babies. I don’t get it! No nurturing feelings what so ever come to mind when I look at them!
Moving on though, it took them about two weeks to make their cocoons and emerge from them as extremely ugly butterflies. Horribly miss shaped butterflies. I thought butterflies were supposed to be beautiful emerging from their cocoons; boy was I a sucker for buying that! Their color hadn’t changed and they were as wormy and unattractive as before with stubby little bodies and very short disproportional wings!
Then they started mating and laying new eggs. So I asked my grandmother if the ones that mated already and gave birth will fly away eventually, and she said very casually, no they mated, gave birth and died! They never get to fly! And I am left trying to process this new information and I say to you:
How unlucky are these creatures? They are born ugly; they are promised a cocoon which will transform them into butterflies and for what? They eat, make cocoons, have sex once, they give birth; die and they don’t even get to fly once! I am not even sure that they even fall under the butterfly category. If I were them I would stay a worm. Who wants to transform into an ugly butterfly that can’t fly? These caterpillars really got the short end of the stick!
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