As a child, one of my favourite pastimes was searching the fields around my house for insects. I am sure my first foray into the world of insect collection focused on grasshoppers, but once I caught my first caterpillar, my ento-parental genes kickedin and I knew I had to provide for the caterpillar and try to raise it to adult. Even at a young age, I understood the importance of associating caterpillars with their correct food plant. Even so, I am sure that my success rate in rearing them to adultwas nothing short of abysmal. In fact, "abysmal" gives me far more credit than I deserve, for surely, until I was twelve or thirteen, I don't believe I ever managed to rear a single caterpillar to adult. In my defence, it is likely that the majority of caterpillars I stumbled on were on the ground and therefore, disassociated with their food plant. But even when I did find them on plants and was careful to keep them associated with this foliage, I would generally lose interest in caring for them or theywould escape, much to my mother's chagrin at finding them wandering around the house (or more often, decidedly NOT wandering around the house). It seemed that my enjoyment was mostly limited to the thrill of the chase and nurturing my imprisoned victims was simply not as interesting as going out and finding more and varied prisoners for my dungeons of starvation and dehydration.
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