Hey guys,

So I had a little baby monarch caterpillar on my milkweed, I monitored it for a while ... I got worried once because I thought it was gone, but then I found it on a different piece of milkweed at the base of the plant (cute and fat). I hadn't checked on it for a bit, and now it isn't there. Might it be off in a chrysalis somewhere? How far will they crawl to find a spot to pupate? The milkweed plant is tucked back by the woods and near a shed, so it could probably be in any of hundreds of spots depending on how far it would go.

If first found the caterpillar on the 7th:

So I'd guess it hatched a bit under two weeks ago. Is that long enough?

Also, are swallowtail eggs ever ovoid? There's a little white oval attached to my bronze fennel, and my mum says there was an Eastern Black Swallowtail female sunning herself the other day nearby. Might my blob be an egg?

Having trouble getting the camera to focus on what I hope is an egg rather than literally anything else, but it's the white speck, and it's on the end of a bit of frond, not the stem behind.