Janet Raugust, age i4, of Spangle, Wash., for her question:
How do white butterflies find a cabbage patch?
The mourning cloak butterfly with her dark velvet wings tends to hover among poplar and elm trees, willow and hackberry. The gaily spotted buckeye butterfly flutters near plantain and other small plants close to the ground. A certain white butterfly flits through the cabbage patch, and she also likes mustard plants. Each butterfly has its own favorite plant or group of plants.
That dainty creature with the fairy white wings is called the cabbage butterfly. Her slender body is bluish black and so axe her spiky antennae. There are smokey borders and one or two pairs of black spots on her papery wings. Chances are she will be flitting through the cabbage patch or hovering around one of the wild mustard plants.
The pretty lady was born on one of these plants. On the underside of perhaps a cabbage leaf her mother laid a batch of small eggs. They hatched into tiny green caterpillars, and if the hungry little creatures could talk, they would tell you that their mother was very wise to place her eggs just where she did.
All caterpillars are hungry fellows, but they are also very choosey about their food. Some can eat the leaves of only one special plant. The caterpillar of the cabbage butterfly favors cabbage leaves. But the grubby little green worm can also dine on mustard type le8ve8. When the mother cannot find a cabbage, she lays her eggs on mustard weeds.
The mother chooses the type of plant she enjoyed when she was a hungry caterpillar. Each of her youngsters hatched in the middle of a supermarket of his or her favorite food. The wormy caterpillar eats and eats and bursts its green skin several times. At last it is ready to turn into a chrysalis and sleep through its pupa stage.
The boxy green chrysalis is almost invisible on the underside of a cabbage or a Mustard leaf. When the insect emerges, she will be a white butterfly just like her mother. She will never stray far from the cabbage or mustard where she was born.
When time comes, she will lay her eggs on one of these favorite plants, and the next generation of caterpillars will find plenty of the right kind of food.
The cabbage butterfly is a native of the Old World, and the pretty creature is considered a Pest. It Came to the east coast in 1865, and 20 Years later her descendents had spread west as far as the Rockies. Each generation moved a little farther west from mustard plant to mustard plant, from cabbage patch to cabbage patch.