Please can you help

[VixS]

I am writing a children's book about the process of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, I need some technical information as to how this happens - Kids know about metamorphasis, but I want to explain exactly what this is - please can you help, since I need to know too.
I understand that it is a degenerative pathological change in the structure of a particular body tissue, but I need to know a bit more about the details (if we even know) of 'what' changes and perhaps even the order in which the caterpillar changes inside it's cocoon

Thank you
Vix

[VixS]

...or does anyone know how I can find out?

[Monkey Orchid]

At the risk of saying the obvious, if you Google something along the lines of "metamorphosis within pupa" or terms such as "histolysis and histogenesis" you'll bring up quite a lot of information.


Just a sample cut and paste from one website:

"When the caterpillar has eaten enough it turns into a pupa. It stops eating and finds somewhere safe, becoming very still. It then moults its skin, just as it did when it was growing - only instead of another larval skin it secretes a pupal skin, (inside its old larval skin) that is much thicker and stronger. Generally this pupa then breaks out of the old larval skin, though in many moths the pupa remains inside the old larval skin. You can often find the remains of the caterpillar skin around the tail of a Butterfly pupa.

Inside its new pupal the first thing that happens is that most of the caterpillar's old body dies. It is broken down by the same sort of juices the caterpillar used in its earlier life to digest its food; it would not be far wrong to say the caterpillar digests itself from the inside out. This process is called ‘histolysis'. Not all the tissue is destroyed however: some of the insect's old tissue passes on to its new self, the amount varying between different insects (not very much in the Lepidoptera).

One particular sort of tissue remains: in a number of places in the insect's body are collections of special formative cells, which have played no part in the insect's larval life and have stayed hidden or protected during histolysis. Each of these groups of cells is called an ‘imaginal bud' or a ‘histoblast'. The job of these histoblasts is to supervise the building of a new body out of the soup that the insect's digestive juices have made of the old larval body. This they do using the same biochemical processes that all insects use to turn their food into part of their bodies. This rebuilding process is called ‘histogenesis'. During this time the insect is very vulnerable because it cannot move away from predators, and this is why insects try to choose somewhere safe to hide away when they are going through this incredible change."

I'm guessing that you may have already done the Google thing and found at least this basic information. If you want more detail, maybe an entomologist or lepidopterist on WAB will be able to oblige you with more details. There are various scientific papers on the Internet which look at specific aspects of histolysis, but frankly I wouldn't know where to start with those! I suppose it will also depend on what age group of children you are pitching this book at.

My other suggestion would be to contact Butterfly Conservation at info@butterfly-conservation.org and see if anyone there can furnish you with either more information, or perhaps suggest resurces to look at either on the Internet or in conventional publications.

[VixS]

Thank you for that - I have googled it but I didn't find anything as good as that excerpt! I think my googling skills could be better!

I would like to know more of the details, and I should have made that clear from the beginning, sorry, so yes if there are any experts out there who are willing to give me some of their time to explain in more detail I would be most grateful!

I have sent a message to the conservation contact, so now I wait...

Thanx again
Vix