Wordless Wednesday

How to Choose a Field Guide for a Young Child

A couple of days ago, I went to a nature store to purchase a field guide for my youngest, who is fascinated by butterflies. The store had a terrific selection, so I asked the clerk where I could find field guides for little kids.

"How old is the child?"

"Four."

"Oh, we don't carry field guides for children that young."

I thought this was a bizarre response. At its most basic level, a field guide is a collection of pictures or drawings of a given set of plants, animals, or other natural features (rocks and clouds are among my favorites). Sure, you can buy guides with lots of text and exposition about various features, but you don't have to.

Here are some basic guidelines for buying a field guide for the very young child:

• Choose a guide that is small enough for little hands to hold. Make sure the book isn't too heavy or too thick. I like Stokes Beginner's Guides. 

•  Pick a guide where the specimens are arranged by color. This type of grouping is easy to explain and understand. Pictures will capture the attention of a little one better than drawings. My daughter, for example, loves the section of her new guide devoted to swallowtails. "We've seen that one, and that one, and that one!" she said.

• Choose a book with common specimens over rare ones. Let's face it - little kids are noisy and boisterous and will scare away much of the wildlife you are trying to study. Pick a field guide that is heavy on natural things that are common for your area since you are far more likely to see them.

• Less is more. Pick a guide with just a few features on a page. A large picture of the specimen coupled with a map showing its range is ideal. Symbols for common features are better than words. For example, it's better to show one star out of five to indicate a rare species than the word "rare."

Regardless of which guide you choose, make sure to have your child take ownership of the new book. Write his or her name on the cover - or let your child do it - and find a special place for it on the bookshelf. When you go outside for a nature walk, take your comprehensive guide along with your child's smaller one, and you can have fun discovering nature together.

Princess likes her new field guide.

Make a Butterfly Sculpture!

Today, Kerm and I worked on his extra credit project for school. He had to create a three dimensional butterfly and label the body parts.

The body of our butterfly is made out of three pieces of green foam core: one dome-shaped piece and two circular disks. The proboscis, legs, antennae, and structural supports are pipe cleaners. Kerm cut the wings from construction paper. Our favorite body part, the compound eyes, consist of beads. We anchored the butterfly on a green piece of heavy cardboard and stuck in a few artificial flowers for good measure.


What I liked about this project is that the body was relatively easy for an eight-year-old to assemble and label, once we had all of the pieces handy. But the wings were another story. They were hard to attach and we had to use extra pipe cleaners to support their weight. Kerm hid our ample glue splotches under the "thorax" label. If you try this at home, I would suggest using something lighter for the wings, like tissue paper.


Photo credit: Mama Joules

Butterflies on the International Space Station!

There are butterflies in space! Painted Lady larvae and three Monarch caterpillars are currently orbiting above us, after recently traveling to outer space aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. The "butterflynauts" boarded the International Space Station yesterday.

You can track the progress of the Painted Lady butterflies via Twitter (@ButterflySpace). Teachers can download a free teacher's guide and register for email updates about the mission. There's also a specific thread for teachers on the BioEd Online web board devoted to this experiment.

From the Butterflies in Space website at BioEd Online:

"On November 16, 2009, Painted Lady butterflies [flew] aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station (ISS). The butterflies will spend several months in space as part of an exciting experiment to observe their life cycles and behaviors in microgravity. We invite your class to participate! The butterflies will live in a special habitat, which provides a safe environment, food and water. Photos and video will be transmitted back to Earth and made available here ..."

But Painted Lady butterflies aren't the only insect space travelers this time. Monarchs are up there, too! Through Monarchs in Space, Monarch Watch is documenting the progress of the monarch larvae. You can download some wonderful instructional data from this site along with links to other fun stuff like these recent pictures of the monarch caterpillars in space.

This current set of butterfly experiments builds upon previous work by BioServe Space Technologies, which has designed experiments in space since the early 1990s (including space flights for spiders, ants, and silkworms).

This video describes some of the challenges that the butterflies may face in their new habitat:



Enjoy!

Caterpillars change colors ... who knew?

Two instars of the Common Mormon caterpillar
(This photograph,taken by Sindhu Ramchandran, is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license).
Recently, my 3-year-old was delighted to find a fuzzy black caterpillar crawling across the sidewalk in our front yard. We took it inside and put it into his brother's bug house, which resembles a tiny pop-up hamper with a zippered lid. Both boys took to feeding it leaves and soon we had an interesting puzzle -- our caterpillar is now turning orange.

I never knew that caterpillars could change colors. Poking around on the Internet, I learned that some caterpillars change color in response to temperature (like the Tomato hornworm)(1). Others are affected by diet and crowding. Some species, like the caterpillars of the American Peppered Moth, can even change color to match their host tree twigs. This ability to hide, known as crypsis, allows them to avoid being eaten by birds (2).

Caterpillars can also change colors when they shed their skin. Christmas Notebook has an amazing set of pictures of caterpillars molting (and then eating their own skin!) in butterfly babies.

Each stage between skin-shedding is known as an instar. Monarch Butterfly and Milkweed Mania has a great set of pictures showing the size and color differences of caterpillars at various instars in Life Stages: (determining instars).

Along the way to learning about caterpillar colors, I found this great page from the Royal Alberta Museum on how to keep butterfly and moth pupae over the winter, advice that just might come in handy!

References

(1)Abstract of "Hidden Genetic Variation Yields Caterpillar of a Different Color" by Elizabeth Pennisi as presented in the February 3, 2006 issue of Science.

(2)"A Reversible Color Polyphenism in American Peppered Moth (Biston betularia cognataria) Caterpillars" by Mohamed A. F. Noor, Robin S. Parnell, and Bruce S. Grant, published online September 4, 2008 at PLoS ONE