Those wee little silkworms which you saw in videos last week are growing at an impressive rate.
Here, see for yourself:
They're bigger!
Owing to their voracious appetites, the silkworms have sent us ransacking neighborhood mulberry trees (we've identified three so far)and bringing back a gallon of leaves at a time. They don't last long. At this point, the leaf-munching is loud enough that you can hear it if you hold your ear close to their container.
The day the silkworms molted:
My better half has graciously allowed me to post the picture of the molted silkworm faceplates here:
I suppose these might be fun for ladybug dress-up games.
More like this
We're going on three weeks since the first of the Free-Ride silkworms made a cocoon.
The Free-Ride offspring have been using the silkworms as a springboard for discussions of math as well as biology.
We offer a couple more video sprog segments with the much enlarged silkworms. It won't be long before they're spinning cocoons (we're guessing -- and the mulberry trees are hoping), so these may be the last of their baby videos:
Silkworm breeding:
About half of the Free-Ride silkworms (who you know from