I took a couple of photos of some critters on my milkweed plants so I could bring them inside to try to identify them with google. I didn't really think about sharing them until I did a Google Image Search on one of them and the top result was "Macrophotography" so I thought maybe some of my photo loving folks on Hive would find these interesting.
The first one is the one that gave me the Macro Photo result, it certainly is not the monarch butterfly caterpillar I was hoping to attract when I planted the milkweed plants.
See the little white ball with black spots on it? I initially thought it was some sort of egg sac. But no, that's a living thing. As I observed it more, it looked most like the Brain Bug that Neil Patrick Harris had a conversation with in the film version of Starship Troopers.
Fortunately, no, it is not the invasion of the mind suckers. This is the larvae state of the Swamp Milkweed Beetle. Not really a bug I'm excited about having in my garden, but part of the pleasure of planting milkweed I suppose.
This next image was the one that had me momentarily excited.
Unfortunately my phone focused on the leaf in the foreground, making my little visitor a bit too blurry to make out. So I had to back out a little bit, which made the focus better, but he is so small there isn't a lot of detail.
He's probably about 3/4 of an inch long, black with white/yellow lines down his sides.
I don't know a ton about the butterflies I am trying to attract, I just know my wife loves butterflies so I decided to create her a butterfly garden. This seemed like it might be my first success. Alas, a bit of searching showed this guy is not going to turn in to a butterfly. He's a moth to be (assuming the birds don't find him before then). This appears to be an Armyworm who is going to become an Armyworm moth.
There's still time for some monarchs to find my little garden and give us some fall caterpillars, apparently there can be as many as 4 monarch cycles a year, and once they find you once, they will come back year after year. So I'll hold out some hope.