Animals: May 2010 Archives

Toddlers!

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OK, not exactly toddlers, but the silkworms are growing quickly. It's lots of fun to sit and watch them walk around and eat.

Older silkworms

See those little dots of black stuff? That's caterpillar poop. You can also see that they're doing a nice job of eating the leaves. They seem to prefer some leaves and will all cluster on those ones, for reasons that are not obvious to me (since I've been putting leaves of same size and age down for them).

I'm using a piece of netting to give them fresh leaves, so they climb up through the net onto the new leaves and I can just lift it out and remove the old leaves.

Only maybe I'm replacing leaves too often, because usually I also have to move several worms off the old leaves at the bottom of the box. On the other hand, I don't want to encourage rot or mold, so changing the leaves more often seems like a good idea. At this point I'm changing them once a day, which doesn't seem like overkill.

Tinier worms

Some eggs have just hatched recently, so I have a mix of larger and smaller worms. I can't decide if I'm going to hate myself for keeping them all jumbled together in one box, but that's what I'm doing.

Babies!

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This morning, the silkworms hatched out.

Silkworms on a leaf, day one

They're teeeny tiny and sometimes they just lie there, and I spent much of the day worrying about them.

Tiny silkworms on a leaf

They haven't make huge inroads on the leaves I gave them, but I'm not sure I would notice, given how tiny they are.

Tomorrow I will move them to a covered plastic container, but for now the little box I had the eggs in works just fine.

About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Animals category from May 2010.

Animals: July 2006 is the previous archive.

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