Butterfly Life Cycle
Biology
The Life Cycle of the Butterfly
The life cycle of a butterfly. The butterfly life cycle includes four stages. The egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and adult butterfly. A butterfly starts life as a very small round oval or cylinder shaped egg. Usually a butterfly will lay eggs on the leaves of a plant. When the egg hatches, a caterpillar emerges and begins to eat the leaf, it was born on. In this quick stage, the caterpillar will eat as much as it possibly can to grow and expand.
When I caterpillar is done growing, it then will shed its outer skin and form itself into a chrysalis. From the outside it looks like it is just resting, but it is actually rapidly changing into an adult butterfly in a process called metamorphosis. Finally, when the caterpillar has finished changing inside the chrysalis, a beautiful adult butterfly will emerge within a few hours, the butterfly will learn how to fly away and then we'll search for a mate. Then the cycle will start all over again.