This is a picture of five Painted Lady Butterfly eggs on the tail side of a Lincoln Penny under a USB microscope at about 30X magnification. The distance between each pillar is about 0.05 cm or 5 mm, and that is the width of the eggs. The eggs have an eerie luminescent glow with fin like ribs. The coating looks like of cellophane wrapper material. What is amazing is how different they are from birds eggs, in that they are not smooth.
The Painted Lady Butterfly eggs arrived from Carolina Biologicals in a small centrifuge tube. I ordered 30 of them but later found out there was about 60 in the tube. The color of the eggs appear to be aqua blue. I found them smaller that I expected them to be, and wondered how they got them off of the growth media so neatly. It seems that they would be hard to find on a host plant, and it would take a magnifying lens to see them. However, the distinctive color of the eggs should make them easy to recognize now that we know what they look like. It would be interesting to learn how the laboratories grow these eggs.
Painted Lady Butterfly Eggs
This project studies the metamorphosis of the Painted Lady Butterfly or Vanessa Cardui butterfly. Metamorphosis is an awesome biological phenomena to study, because of the dramatic change in the insect’s form during its lifetime. The surprising beauty of the butterfly rewards the student with a spectacular product. This butterfly has the advantage of changing from egg to butterfly in about 6 weeks, and that fits nicely into a 6 week course. Besides the butterfly is native to North America and can be released. The releasing of the butterflies is a wonderful grand finale to the project.
Metamorphosis of the Painted Lady Butterfly
Another advantage of studying the Painted Lady Butterfly is that the eggs are available from Carolina Biologicals. This company has been a source for teaching supplies for decades, and still provides quality biologicals. Most butterflies kits on the market provide only the caterpillars. Carolina provides eggs that allows the students to study the hatching of the caterpillar, an interesting bonus. However, one must be ready to immediately place the eggs with the food supply once they arrive by fast two day shipping, shipping that unfortunately adds extra cost. The other alternative is to spend time on field excursions in hopes of finding the eggs on host plants.