My Life As A Caterpillar

As a cater­pil­lar, I’ve got a lot of work to do! Mainly, I eat a lot. In fact, I’ll eat up to 27,000 times my weight! And like many other cater­pil­lars, I can only eat one type of plant. So there needs to be a lot of that one plant around.

Think about that for a minute: if only one plant dis­ap­peared from the earth, I’d no longer sur­vive. That’s how it is here on this planet – plants, cater­pil­lars, but­ter­flies and humans all depend upon one another to live.

So, back to my main job, eat­ing. I must store up a lot of energy before meta­mor­pho­sis can hap­pen, so I need some seri­ous equip­ment for eating.

My mouth

My jaws, called “mandibles,” are strong eat­ing machines – for the sim­ple rea­son that munch­ing is my life!

My legs

I need to crawl to eat. Straight along, and up and down. So I’ve got six­teen legs – six for mov­ing me around and the other ten for grab­bing those leaves.

My eyes

I have twelve eyes, and I can only see light and dark. And that’s good enough since all I really need to see is my food source.

Thanks for vis­it­ing me in this life. It was sim­ple and good. Now check out the next one…