I Was Waiting for a Butterfly. Nature Had Other Plans
This is a Common Mormon butterfly — Papilio polytes.
This is also what a caterpillar in my backyard was supposed to become.
It didn't!
It Started With a Flicker
One afternoon I was just passing by my curry leaves plant when I noticed a butterfly hovering differently. Not feeding. Hovering close to a leaf, abdomen curled, touching the surface. Laying an egg.
I almost walked away.
A few days later I came back and looked carefully. There it was — a tiny dark speck on the underside of a leaf. Less than half a centimetre. Easy to dismiss as dirt.
But I knew what it was.
Survival, from the very first hour.
That was the beginning of almost one month of watching. I started visiting the plant every day.
Every Day, a Little Bigger
I made it a habit. Morning and night, I would go check on the caterpillar.
In this earliest stage, the Common Mormon caterpillar mimics a fresh bird dropping — matte black with a creamy white patch. Not approximately. Exactly. A disguise so precise that even knowing what I was looking at, I had to check twice.
During the day, it hid — deep inside the plant, completely invisible. But at night I would come out with a torch, and there it would be. Quietly eating through the curry leaves, unhurried, like it had all the time in the world.
And every single morning, it was bigger. Not slightly bigger — visibly, clearly bigger. The kind of growth you can actually see. All those nights of eating were showing.
Then one day, the colour changed. The dark camouflage was gone. In its place — this. A vivid bright green caterpillar, with striking white and yellow bands and large false eyespots that look exactly like a small snake staring back at you.
At every stage of its short life, this caterpillar was pretending to be something more dangerous than it was.
I was checking on it every day now. It had become part of my routine.
Something Was Different
One morning I found the caterpillar out in the open — exposed, bent at an angle, gripping a stem tightly. Not moving. Not eating.
Just holding.
And it looked different. Not quite the same vivid green. Almost transparent in places. Its body was changing from inside. I had read enough to know what this meant — the caterpillar was preparing to pupate. It was purging its gut. The transformation was beginning.
I stood there looking at it for a while. I knew exactly what was about to happen.
Come on, I thought. Just become the butterfly.
The Chrysalis
That night, it was done.
The caterpillar was gone. In its place — a green chrysalis, anchored to a stem inside the curry leaves plant by a thin silk thread. Blending almost perfectly into the leaves around it.
I remember standing there in the dark with my torch, just looking at it. Weeks of watching — the tiny dark speck, the bird-dropping disguise, the bright green snake mimic, the nights of eating, the days of hiding — and now this. A small green shell, holding something that was slowly becoming a butterfly.
I was so excited.
What Was Happening Inside
What happens inside a chrysalis is difficult to believe.
The caterpillar doesn't slowly change into a butterfly. Its own cells dissolve — literally breaking down into a soup — and from that soup, an entirely different creature is built from scratch. Wings, antennae, compound eyes. None of these existed before. The butterfly is not a changed caterpillar. It is something entirely new, built from what the caterpillar left behind.
The process takes around 10–14 days.
Every morning I checked. Every morning I hoped.
The Afternoon Everything Changed
The next day I went to look at the chrysalis and saw something on it.
Something small. Moving.
I leaned in. A tiny wasp was walking slowly, deliberately, across the surface of the pupa. And as I watched — her ovipositor, finer than a hair, pressing into the shell. Withdrawing. Pressing again.
My stomach dropped.
She wasn't feeding on the chrysalis. She was laying eggs inside it.
I had spent weeks watching this caterpillar grow. I had checked on it every single day. I was days away from seeing a butterfly emerge in my own backyard. And now this.
I felt terrible. There is no other word for it.
Who Is This Wasp?
The wasp stayed for almost the entire day. And came back.
On a closer look — she was actually beautiful. Precise, metallic, almost jewel-like. But what she was doing was ruthless.
This is a parasitic wasp — most likely from the family Pteromalidae. A group that has spent millions of years perfecting exactly this.
She finds the chrysalis through chemical signals the pupa releases into the air — like a lighthouse
She doesn't kill the chrysalis immediately. She lays multiple eggs inside a living host. Her larvae will grow inside it, keeping it alive as long as it is useful to them
This is called gregarious endoparasitism — and the host never survives it
Parasitoid wasps make up an estimated 10–20% of all insect species on Earth — they are everywhere, in every garden, and most of us never see them
I watched her and felt two things at the same time — sadness, and a strange kind of awe.
Day Fourteen
I kept checking on the chrysalis every day. Part of me still hoped. Maybe she hadn't laid the eggs. Maybe the butterfly would still emerge.
On day fourteen, I saw a hole.
Small, round, precise — not the split a butterfly makes. A hole.
Around it, around twelve small wasps — metallic, golden-eyed — freshly emerged, moving slowly in the morning light. Some were still feeding on what was left inside.
Twelve wasps. From one chrysalis.
I stood in my backyard and just looked at it.
The caterpillar I had watched from the very first day — the one I had checked on in the dark with a torch, the one I had watched change colour and grow and go still — never became a butterfly. It became the birthplace of twelve wasps instead.
That's not a tragedy in nature's eyes. It's just what happened. The wasp was doing exactly what the butterfly had done weeks ago — finding a place to give her young a chance to survive.
But I had watched this particular caterpillar. Every single day. And that made it feel different.
Mixed Feelings — And One Thing I Know
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I witnessed.
A month of watching. One caterpillar. One backyard.
I saw it all — from a single egg to a tiny dark speck to a bright green snake mimic to a chrysalis to a hole in that chrysalis. I saw life preparing to transform, and I saw that transformation taken. I felt the excitement of being close to something extraordinary, and I felt the quiet devastation when it didn't happen the way I hoped.
But I also saw the wasps — beautiful, precise, doing exactly what they were built to do. And I understood that what felt like loss from where I was standing was, for twelve other lives, a beginning.
That is nature. It doesn't care about the story I was hoping to see. It just keeps going.
I am glad I was watching.
Quick Facts
Common Mormon Butterfly (Papilio polytes)
Family: Papilionidae
Host plant: Curry leaf (Murraya koenigii), citrus species
Larval stages: 5 instars; early instars mimic bird droppings, later instars bright green with false eyespots
Defence: Osmeterium — forked orange gland mimicking a snake's tongue
Pupal stage: 10–14 days normally
Female mimicry: Mimics the toxic Common Rose butterfly — Batesian mimicry
Parasitic Wasp (likely Pteromalidae)
Strategy: Gregarious endoparasitoid — multiple eggs in a single host pupa
Host detection: Chemical signals from the chrysalis
Outcome: Always fatal to the host
Ecological role: Natural regulators of butterfly and moth populations
Scale: 10–20% of all insect species on Earth are parasitoid wasps
Backyard, Palakkad | Common Mormon (Papilio polytes) | Host plant: Murraya koenigii
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Wonderful Observation and wonderfully writing very easy to read.
Information sharing.
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