The Anticipated Metamorphosis | Yuko Takeda, Dean, Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care
2019.12.10
For those of you who found the title suspicious, rest assured. It's about metamorphosis.
In a small plastic insect cage on a windowsill on the north side of my house sits a green chrysalis that pupated last week. My daughter has loved insects since she was little, and we've had many objects that would make most mothers scream, such as a container full of pill bugs and a box full of cicada shells. Fortunately (?), I had a similar childhood, so this has not caused any friction in our household. This small insect cage is still used as a protective shelter for various insects, even now that my daughter is an adult.
In the summer, stag beetles and rhinoceros beetles that fall from the hill behind our house are our main short-term residents (the latter probably escaped from somewhere they were being kept). Many are found and rescued in the early morning. Exhausted from wandering aimlessly at night on the tiles where there is no tree sap, they are given insect jelly and returned to the hill once they become active again.
From fall to winter, caterpillars stay with us. Some are captured in the planters on our balcony, but many are also discovered in our organic vegetables. As depicted in the classic picture book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," green caterpillars eat a great deal until they reach their final instar. An inchworm discovered in a miniature rose pot last year devoured the buds overnight as if they were delicious cabbages. Most of the caterpillars that have emerged in our home have been moths; the only butterfly was a Chinese windmill that we received from a neighbor, along with a branch from a mandarin orange tree, when my daughter was in elementary school. Even with moths, watching them undergo complete metamorphosis from caterpillar to pupa and then take flight makes one feel the mystery of life. The involvement of hormones and the relationship with temperature have been explained in relation to metamorphosis, but it seems the detailed mechanisms have yet to be fully understood.
The green chrysalis was discovered crawling on the kitchen counter after falling off a locally grown cauliflower from Fujisawa. The green caterpillar ate its fill of cauliflower, suddenly stopped moving after about a week, and pupated. Judging from the shape of the chrysalis, we suspect it might be a cabbage white butterfly, and we are hopeful for the birth of a butterfly after a long time.
Just as butterflies undergo metamorphosis and take flight as the seasons turn, many students will leave our campus in the spring. These days, I find myself hoping that my own daughter will soon spread her wings and fly.