Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Weirdest thing happened out at the monarch patch, 1 by

wrote:
I posted this in the SFL Galloping Gardeners forum because I read your post. I'll copy it so as to not re-type it all.

The other day I read a post in the butterfly forum in which a member was asking if they have ever seen monarch caterpillars kill their own. I had never heard of it or seen any signs of aggression, but Sunday while I was working in the yard I started observing the caterpillars, and boy are they aggressive with each other. Two large ones were trying to get rid of a smaller one that was eating a milkweed leaf. The most amazing thing was that it seem that the largest of all went through some kind of thought pattern to get rid of the little one. It crawled to the stem where the little one was and began to chew the side of the stem that held the leaf. In no time flat, the leaf and little caterpillar fell to the ground. After this the culprit moved to that area and finished chomping the leaves around the stem. Then (bear with my story please) the other large one moved to that area and the 2 began to fight trying to make one of them fall to the ground. My DH and I were quite fascinated by this because we had never seen this type of behavior. Once again, my DH took some pictures and here they are.

In this picture they are fighting.

Val