Today Nathan, Gavin and I took a trip to the Florida Museum of Natural History to see the Amazing Butterfly Exhibit which is a life-size maze that takes you through the life-cycle of a caterpillar/butterfly.
Before we went into the maze we visited a little desk where the boys were able to dissect an owl pellet which is a nice euphemism for owl vomit. Basically it is all of the parts of the prey that the owl can not digest, such as bones and fur.
Nathan actually knew on his own that the bone he discovered was a jaw bone in the owl pellet. The group of us together figured out that it was probably a vole that the jaw bone belonged to as you can see from this picture. Awesome! We had to leave after this so someone else could have a turn. Thankfully the gentleman at this station did give us hand sanitizer as we departed.
Here we go! This is the entrance to the maze. As you can see we walk through a giant caterpillar which doesn't actually make sense since if we are supposed to be said caterpillars starting out as eggs we would really be getting laid by a butterfly, but whatever...
After we were hatched and we decided what we wanted to eat as caterpillars we had to learn how to walk. This took a lot of group effort, but we eventually made it down the ramp.
Next we practiced crawling about on leaves.
We learned that there were lots of wrong turns we could take that were dangerous for a caterpillar to take. The boys didn't like it, but we took all of the directions, wrong turns and right turns, just so we knew everything that could happen to us.
We turned into a chrysalis after we did all of our eating and shedding and eating and shedding and eating and shedding. I didn't know this, but insect skin doesn't get bigger like people skin. It is baggy for a while and then when it gets too tight they get rid of it. Strange how wonderfully created we all are, insects and people both.
Now that we have hatched as butterflies we had to do some math to figure out which flower path had the most nectar. We did the math and created a histogram and figured out that path three was definitely the best path to take for a hungry butterfly.
Gavin got trapped in the spider's web! Oh no! Lucky for us it was just play.
Now that they have eaten it is time for the butterflies to find a mate. Here is Nathan getting his groove on doing a butterfly mating dance. I don't think he really knew what he was doing, but he did have fun shaking his shiny butterfly wings.
At the end of their long journey it is time for the butterflies to go on their migration. Migration at the museum was a short little zip-line across the room. Lucky for my butterflies there weren't a lot of kids around so they got to migrate many times over. Even the multiple times they migrated across the room is no match for the two thousand or more miles that real monarch butterflies migrate down to Mexico. It was crazy to read that some of the butterflies that get blown off course have been known to show up in Great Britain. Amazing!
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