The Remin Chronicles

The following text appears at the end of the book. The pictures have been added for the web site.

Find Houdin

So, you want to find your own Monarch caterpillar wizard? This section is loaded with information that can help you find the Monarch in any stage of its lifecycle. If you live in the United States, you have a good chance of finding this amazing insect. I can't guarantee that it will talk to you, or propel you on an adventure to another world, but you never know.

Milkweed

Why am I telling you about a weed? The best place to begin looking for the Monarch is on and around this plant. Milkweed is the host plant for the Monarch, and it spends a good part of its life on the Milkweed plant. Did you ever find a caterpillar and put it in a jar with some leaves, only to find out that it wouldn't eat the leaves you gave it? Most caterpillars are very picky eaters. Each species of caterpillar will only eat leaves of certain types. In the case of the Monarch caterpillar, it will only eat leaves of the milkweed plant.

How can you find the milkweed plant? The best place to look is in open fields, abandoned lots, and along the sides of roads. Usually it is one of the tallest plants in the field, towering over the other vegetation. If you break off a leaf from a milkweed plant, it bleeds a milky, sticky sap.

Lifecycle of the Monarch

The eggs of the Monarch are tiny, white and football shaped. They are no bigger than the head of a pin, but they don't look like a pinhead! They have a definite point on top, and ridges radiate down the egg from the point. Monarch eggs are usually found on the underside of milkweed leaves, near the top of the plant.

When the eggs first hatch, the caterpillars are, as in the story, no bigger than a grain of rice. At this first stage they are green and do not yet have any stripes. After a few days, yellow and black stripes begin to appear. As they grow, they molt, or shed their skin, enabling them to grow larger. You will rarely see this discarded skin, as the caterpillar usually eats it. (Yuck!) You may have been told that caterpillars spin a cocoon to turn into a butterfly. If so, you were told incorrectly! Butterfly caterpillars do not spin cocoons. If you see a caterpillar spinning a cocoon, chances are it is going to become a moth, not a butterfly. Butterfly caterpillars actually transform themselves into an intermediate stage called a chrysalis (scientists call this the pupa). This transformation is amazing to watch! When the Monarch caterpillar is ready to become a chrysalis, it hangs upside down in the shape of the letter J. It wiggles around for several hours, until finally its skin splits and the chrysalis emerges where the caterpillar used to be. Now that's real magic!

Initially, the chrysalis is soft and wiggles around quite a bit, but within a few hours it hardens into a beautiful green and gold jewel. To your eye, the chrysalis appears to be just hanging around, doing nothing, but inside the skin it is actually undergoing its final transformation into a butterfly. Towards the end of this period, you will begin to see the orange and black wing patterns through the skin of the chrysalis.

When the butterfly is ready, the skin of the chrysalis splits and the butterfly emerges, leaving an empty chrysalis. When the butterfly first emerges, its wings are wet, so it hangs upside-down from the chrysalis until the wings dry.

It takes about a month for a Monarch to go from egg to butterfly. In the story, Houdin passes through each stage much more quickly because his lifecycle is speeded up by the time difference between Remin and our world.

The Migration

Like birds flying south for the winter, the Monarchs migrate south every year when the weather gets colder and the days get shorter. Every winter, the eastern Monarchs migrate to central Mexico and the western Monarchs migrate to California, where they spend the winter. In the spring, they begin to migrate north again. Butterflies live fairly short lives, so most of the butterflies that go north don't live long enough to make the journey back south again. They lay eggs along the way and their children continue the journey where they left off. I sometimes get lost in my neighborhood, yet somehow these butterflies know exactly where to go, even though they've never been there before.