time-lapse, part 7: butterfly hatching

remember the previous time-lapse project that i published?

all the pupae hatched about 3 weeks ago. actually, when the first one hatched on july 20th, i decided to slow down their final steps of development and caused a not so unusual (just think of today’s climate) …cold-weather period. ok, i put them in the fridge. they were not harmed, but didn’t hatch until i had the time to watch over them, two days later.

when i got home on friday, i quickly set up the equipment and placed the pupae in front of the camera. because there were 5 pupae and i didn’t know which one would hatch first, i had to take (bigger) overall-view photos and crop the interesting part later.

i had relocated the pupae onto a nearly planar twig when they were done pupating, so i could focus on all of them at once.

the whole process of one peacock butterfly (inachis io; tagpfauenauge) hatching only took about 14 minutes (including the unfolding of its wings), so it was at least three times more exciting to watch them hatch live.

i was shooting at a higher resolution (so i could get all of the pupae in the picture and still have detail) and the “temporal resolution” (interval: 4 seconds) was pretty high too, so although i had 5 pupae, only one video turned out the way i wanted…

 
here’s the video:

butterfly hatching (download video)

i also put up a few of the single photos as an overview:
[view photos: time-lapse, part 7: butterfly hatching]