Video of Monarch caterpillar emerging from egg. A Monarch Project Update

Using a macro lens on an iPhone and a whole lot of patience I captured a detailed video of a Monarch caterpillar as it emerged from it's egg. And it's AMAZING.

That's right. A Monarch Project Update. I've decided to make this whole saving the Monarchs project official with its own dedicated space on The Art of Doing Stuff and catchy title.

For those of you who took it upon yourselves to raise a Monarch butterfly, I've come up with The Monarch Project. A little endeavour to raise awareness about how the Monarch is in decline and how easy it is to raise one to help ensure the species lives on.

If you wanna raise a Monarch (cause they're way easier to raise than kids) you can see all my tutorials on it here.

Yeah, I know. Sounds very humanitarian, save the world kind of stuff. The sort of thing Angelina Jolie or George Clooney are likely to be interested in.

That's enough about that.

I wanted to update you on my own Monarchs. At this very moment I have a tiny 2 day old caterpillar, a 4 week old caterpillar and a chrysalis. I brought an egg in for my sister who wanted to give them to a friend to raise. However that friend was busy the weekend the eggs were to hatch, so we left them here and I hatched them. Well, technically I didn't hatch them, I mean I didn't have to squat over them or anything. All I really had to do to ensure they hatched was not throw them on the floor and stomp on them.

I took a peek at the egg a couple of days ago and I could see by the way it was dark at the tip that it was seconds away from hatching. So I grabbed my iphone, the egg and the milkweed it was on and ran outside.

I managed to get a video of the entire thing. The caterpillar nibbling its way out of the egg and emerging for the first time into the world.

Here it is. Even if you don't want to raise a butterfly, this is a great video to watch. I felt very Wild Kingdom doing it.

Wanna know how I got such a close up video on my old iPhone? I happen to have a few jewellers loupes for some reason. It's from back in the day when I was a jewellery thief. I ran back inside and got one and just put it in front of my iPhone lens when I was shooting the video.

It worked great. I have a little macro lens that slips onto my iPhone but it wasn't letting me get close enough to the caterpillar. That's when the idea of the loupe came to me. All of this transpired in about 1.2 seconds by the way because I knew I didn't have much time or I'd miss the whole event. And by now we all know that an event not captured on video is only imaginary.

Which is why I proposed all cameras be banned from George Clooney's wedding.

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