After some days, the largest caterpillar attached itself to the leaf by the tail, and dangled in a curled position. I knew this was the preparation for the transformation to chrysalis. This posture, too, was remarkably like a monarch caterpillar, in contrast to, say swallowtail caterpillars, which build a silk sling on the side of a branch, or skipper caterpillars, which sew themselves in between leaves.
      If you have ever watched the moment of transformation, you are struck by the fact that, unlike in cartoons, the caterpillar does not form a chrysalis around itself; on the contrary, the chrysalis comes out of the caterpillar! The caterpillar's skin splits at the head, and peels back to the tail, revealing the chrysalis inside. It takes several minutes for the new chrysalis to harden. In the meantime, it squirms, pulsates, and changes shape. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture the moment photographically.
      In the next picture, we see the chrysalis. Again, the resemblance to the monarch is striking, at least in regard to the shape. But the color! The butterflies of the genus Danaus, the monarch, the queen, the soldier -- what I call the "face card butterflies," taking the Jack as being in a soldierly role -- have very similar turquoise blue chrysalides. Now here is a caterpillar with a similar, but slightly different color pattern, and a similarly-shaped but very differently colored chrysalis. And now my evolutionary scenario fills in.
      The Danaus butterflies must all compete for the same milkweed host plants. It must sometimes get pretty crowded in the meadows, if a big butterfly population is competing for a limited milkweed supply. What if some could jump to a different food plant? This would be advantageous; but switching food plants is not so easy to do for a caterpillar adapted to a toxic plant. The monarch type caterpillars are metabolically adapted to the bitter latex of the milkweed; to switch to something completely different would require a major metabolic overhaul. But suppose they could find a plant with a similar defense -- say another plant with milky latex? This is just what they found in the strangler-fig.
      Here is the fully "ripe" chrysalis, just minutes before it opens to let the adult butterfly emerge. The yellow shell has become completely transparent; the colors of the butterfly inside show through. Notice the stubby wings, already fully colored. Again, I was not able to photograph the first minutes of its adult life; but it emerges with a big, floppy abdomen and tiny wings. As the butterfly pumps blood into its wings, they expand to their full glory, while the abdomen, emptying of blood, contracts to its slender form. Then, the butterfly perches still, waiting for the wings to harden. This is a delicate time. If something disturbs the perfect shape of the wings, they will harden misshapen, and the butterfly will never fly.

      I raised all the caterpillars successfully. Here is one of the adults, fully hardened, which I placed back on the strangler-fig. The mystery of their identity was solved. It is the mimic-queen, Lycorea halia, and since this is the Islands, that would make it the subspecies cleobaea, the tiger mimic-queen. And here is where the story gets even more fascinating. The caterpillar and the chrysalis looked a lot like those of the monarch and its relatives; but here is something completely different: narrower wings, with a black-yellow-red pattern very different from the monarch's black-and-orange. How can a caterpillar so very like the monarch become an adult so very different?
      Here we must speak of Müllerian mimicry. Nature tends toward efficiency. If every toxic butterfly looked different, predators would have to learn lots of different patterns, and a lot more individual butterflies would be wounded or killed in the predators' process of discovery. But if several different kinds of toxic butterflies all look similar, they all benefit: the predators have fewer patterns to learn; a predator that learns to avoid one will avoid all that look similar to it. Müllerian mimics all reinforce each other's aposematic coloration. And so what are known as Müllerian mimicry circles form -- a group of toxic butterfly species, all living in the same area and closely resembling each other.
      Here is the "face card" Müllerian mimicry circle. All these are similar in size and shape, all have some variation on the black and orange pattern, all have caterpillars that feed on milkweed, and all occur in this part of the Islands. They are also all in the genus Danaus, probably all descended from one common ancestor long ago. In this case, their Müllerian mimicry is a synapomorphy, that is, a characteristic shared because it came from a shared ancestor.
      The mimic-queen is also part of the Danaine subfamily of butterflies, as the caterpillar and chrysalis reveal. Why does the adult look so different from these monarch relatives?
      The answer lies in the shift in food plant. Milkweed grows in open meadows, whereas strangler-figs grow in the forest. The mimic-queens, searching the forest for their new food plant, traversed a habitat where their ancestral, monarch-type mimicry circle was not to be found. They stood out as different. But in the forest, there was another Müllerian mimicry circle: that of the heliconians. Heliconians all feed on species of passion flowers, which contain toxic alkaloids that make these caterpillars and butterflies toxic, too. Heliconians are well known among butterfly scientists for their numerous Müllerian mimicry circles. In one region, there will be several heliconian species, all resembling each other. In a different region, what look like completely different species; but it turns out that the second group contains several of the same species as the first group, even though the two groups look completely different. Each species has different forms in different geographic regions, but in each region they form a Müllerian circle of look-alikes.
      Into this milieu flew the ancestral mimic-queens. The same drive for efficiency that creates mimicry circles now subjected the ancestral mimic-queens to conform to the mimicry circle present in their new habitat. Over the generations, those that looked less like monarchs and more like heliconians were, on average, better at survival. Today, the adult mimic-queen hardly looks like a monarch relative at all; instead, it could be mistaken for a relative of Isabella's heliconian, Euides isabella, which flies in these same Island forests.
      Now, here is where it gets even more amazing. The monarch relatives and the heliconians are both branches of the great Nymphalid butterfly family. It might not be so unusual for a Nymphalid in one subfamily to resemble Nymphalids of another. But in the picture can be seen a third member of our Island forest mimicry circle, the Haitian mimic-white, Dismorphia spio. The mimic-white is a Pierid butterfly -- from the family of whites and yellows, most of which have rounded wings and nearly solid white or yellow coloration. There are lots of large yellows and whites in the same forests. Why would this one species depart from the rest of its family and join this very different mimicry circle? The details of natural selection are not always easy to parse out. The mimic-white has been cited as a case of Batesian mimicry, in which a palatable species gains protection by looking like a toxic one; but can we be so sure? The genus Dismorphia has been little studied, but at least one species is known to feed on the leguminous guarumo tree. The different species of guarumo are known to produce phenols and saponins, both of which can be toxic. Could it be that the mimic-white, too, is a Müllerian mimic?

      Here is a clearer view of one of my mimic-queens. Count the legs. Notice that no matter how carefully you count, you only see four; but surely you remember from grade school that insects have six legs? This is what sets the Nymphalids apart from other butterflies. Big monarchs and fritillaries, delicate heliconians, and tiny woodnymphs, the presence of only four walking legs defines them all as Nymphalids. Now, this could create a problem for those who believe in Special Creation. Why would the Creator make such a wide range of butterflies with the same, unusual trait? For that matter, what logic could there be behind the rest of the mimic-queen's traits? There is no inherent reason why caterpillars that feed on strangler-fig should look like those of a monarch; the daggerwings (also Nymphalids) in these same forests also feed on strangler-fig, and their caterpillars are wholly different, covered in a harlequin pattern of diamonds. The only answer that makes sense is that the mimic-queen and the monarch used to be the same; that the ancestral mimic-queen switched to a new host plant -- choosing one to which it was preadapted, i.e. with milky latex -- but did not face selective pressure to change the original caterpillar template. The adults, by contrast, did face selective pressure to change, to conform to the mimicry circle of the forest instead of the meadow.
      The mimic-white would also be problematic for Special Creation. Most of the Pierids do just fine with their clear white or yellow coloration. They are among the most frequently seen butterflies in these forests. What pressing design need required the Creator to create just this one branch of the Pierids to look like heliconians, but still have the usual six walking legs of most insects? Were there not enough heliconians? If not, why not just create more heliconians? But natural selection has no end goal in mind; it does what works at the time. Having a wing pattern like heliconians was advantageous for the ancestral mimic-whites; but there was no need to change the number of legs.
      Here is a wider view of the strangler-fig. A lot of people do not really notice nature; the famous butterfly scientist Nabokov observed that most people seldom notice butterflies. They would walk past this scene, and notice the strangler-fig, perhaps appreciate its beauty, or its shade on a hot day. But most would walk on by without ever noticing the butterfly perched on the side. And that, perhaps, is why Creationism still gets traction in some circles. I read a blog critiquing Creationism for its unscientific worldview, and the blogger commented that in his experience, Creationists are not curious about the world around them. If their Good Book says it, they feel that is all they need to know. Most creationists would reply to the questions I posed above with words to the effect that we cannot know the mysteries of the Creator's mind. But if that were so, then logically it would make no sense to seek to know the Creator's will, either.
      For some of us, that will never be good enough. Most scientists I know were curious from childhood. I know I was. I was one of those kids who would rather look at rocks and wildflowers than play games outside. I wanted to know all about them. My books were field guides and books about how nature works; but I remember being frustrated that after reading all those books, I felt like I still wanted to know so much more. To the congenitally curious, the 31 lines of Genesis 1 say so little. They say nothing about why there are so many kinds; nothing about why we find different kinds in the fossil record than now; nothing about why different parts of the earth are so different. The congenitally curious will never accept being told that we cannot or are not supposed to know. To us, that is intellectual laziness. Probably this is why there is so little communication between Creationists and mainstream science. The two camps talk past each other because they are not even talking about the same thing. Neither side can effectively reach the other unless they make an effort to understand the other's priorities. To some extent, mainstream science has begun making efforts in this direction, attempting somewhat to address Creationists' moral, ethical, and spiritual concerns. Will Creationists make similar efforts, affirming curiosity about the world as a valid pursuit?

      I leave off with one last picture, this time of two adult mimic-queens that emerged on the same morning. I have walked by that strangler-fig many more times, but never again have I found caterpillars there. They may have been higher in the branches, beyond reach; but I still see adult mimic-queens flying through the forest canopy. Butterflies are more patient than I. No matter how long I sat and waited for them to fly, they did not; but if I walked away to do other things, they were always gone when I returned. Nature is more patient still. She takes her time to shape a butterfly. The steady, plodding crawl of a caterpillar munching its way along a leaf; the deceptively quiescent chrysalis, so busy on the inside; but even more, the long generations of natural selection that eventually shape a monarch to look like a heliconian, by way of competition for milkweeds and the serendipity of a fig tree.