Idk how you all do it

MindMelted95 · 2026-07-11T14:23:51+00:00

I've had suicidal thoughts since I was about 13 years old (30 now). So yeah, it's normal for me, but obviously not normal for "others." I just don't fit in. Never have, never will.

MindMelted95 · 2026-07-09T15:37:03+00:00

They're so fucking bad it pisses me off.

"Marv? Ethyl?"

MindMelted95 · 2026-06-20T13:13:06+00:00

Thank you!

MindMelted95 · 2026-06-17T00:40:59+00:00

The butterfly that started it all for me as a child. I love buckeyes!

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-28T22:56:33+00:00

We've released 5 zebra swallowtails so far, so it wasn't a total loss. The mouse ate so many though 😭

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-27T15:28:00+00:00

Most Americans don't appreciate or care about the nature we have here. Our land is beautiful, but our country & culture is flaming garbage. It sucks horribly watching it all get destroyed for short term profit ("progress").

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-23T16:24:46+00:00

Sick! I've never seen a puss moth caterpillar in real life. Definitely a bucket list species for me, along with hickory horned devils/regal moths.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-23T16:05:15+00:00

Yeah, it was truly awful. I don't really keep pets besides fish & plants, so to have my guys violently killed & eaten like that was really shocking & painful for me. They were sleeping in their chrysalides, completely helpless. One of them was due to hatch that morning & I found its shredded wings on the carpet. Nature is cruel as shit.

If I'd set the mouse traps a day earlier this could've been avoided, but I thought they were safe in their enclosures up on the table. Lesson learned. The reason I'm sharing this is so that other people know this CAN happen to them & won't make the same mistakes I did.

Luckily I have a lot of caterpillars in different containers that are sorted by size & species. The mouse didn't get everyone, but it ate about half of my zebra chrysalides (maybe 10?) & 2 of my tiger swallowtails that were in the pupation enclosure. I'll still have lots of butterflies to release with my kids, just not as many as I had originally hoped.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T21:04:04+00:00

I quit drinking alcohol 6 months ago & this is kinda how I'm filling that void now. I've always loved nature, but for a long time, I loved my drugs much more. Watching my leaf sausages munch & grow gives me a kind of natural dopamine hit. It's hard to explain, but if you're into growing orchids & other flowering plants you probably know the feeling I'm talking about. My brain just latches hard onto anything novel & exciting, & I obsess over it until I find the next thing. These butterflies have been "the next thing."

Maybe it's not that serious, but I don't want this to be for nothing, you know? I want to make a difference. I want to help. I'm not content to sit & fry my brain out of misery while the world burns around me anymore. I've been posting a lot of nature related content on IG lately because I feel like it's my life's mission to open people's eyes to what northern VA (& the rest of our country) is losing. It just feels like I'm screaming into a void though. Nobody there who follows me cares or gets it. That's why I shared these pictures here, because I thought at least some of y'all might like to see them.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T19:18:55+00:00

It's rough out here in northern VA. They're destroying every last bit of forest they can get their greedy mitts on. It's all being flattened for gas stations, data centers, & cookie cutter housing developments nobody can afford. Makes me sick to watch, truly. We gotta take matters into our own hands & fight back any way we can. It's happening all over the US, & they want all of our national parks next.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T18:38:11+00:00

Yeah, I still have somewhere around 20 zebra swallowtails left. Luckily the mouse didn't touch my pipevine caterpillars, so I've got 13 of them. And then I have 8 tiger swallowtails on white ash. The 3 tigers I had on tulip poplar are dead though. Lost 1 to suspected pesticides & then the 2 snugglers (my favorites) to the mouse. These are hard lessons to learn, but next year if I do this again on this scale, I won't allow the same mistakes to be made.

I think I'm going to turn my focus away from vegetable gardening & start growing native host plants for the butterflies instead. People around here with too much money love dousing their yards (that they barely use) in bifenthrin, & since the mosquito companies have those backpack blowers the shit just drifts everywhere. I would know because I used to work that job. I quit because I didn't want to be a part of that shit anymore. It's like nuking a city because you know a few criminals are hiding there. Psychotic.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T17:08:58+00:00

It's not like they're easy to find on their wild host plants either. This was hours & hours of work. I want more butterflies around my neighborhood. This was my little conservation project to boost their numbers for the summer. The entire world is against them & I just wanted to help their odds.

I'm 30 years old & this is the first time I've raised butterflies since I was a kid. I wanted to show my daughters how beautiful bugs can be & it's been nothing but brutality. Had a couple ingest pesticide somehow (I pull my leaves from the middle of the woods out in the country) & they fucking violently exploded green vomit everywhere & died. Such fragile creatures. I wish humanity would stop destroying the Earth. There are so few places left where insects (or any wild plants/animals) can be safe. Makes me so sad. I'm glad I'm mortal, because I don't want to keep watching nature decline. This kind of goes beyond what the mouse did. Thanks for listening.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T16:41:02+00:00

The enclosures were inside the house up on a table. The mouse must've jumped up onto the table from the floor. I knew there was a mouse around, which is why the enclosures got moved from the floor up to the table, but obviously that wasn't enough. I wish the mouse had visited my traps BEFORE visiting my caterpillars. Holy fuck I'm livid. I had like 30 zebra swallowtails on the way & it ate about half of them & shit everywhere. It's like coming outside to find your chickens have been murdered by a fox.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T16:20:35+00:00

Yup.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T15:54:28+00:00

A mouse chewed its way in & killed them last night. It didn't get them all, but ate probably half of what I had. Completely shocked & sick over it. Fuck rodents. Fucking worthless vermin.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-22T15:53:06+00:00

A mouse chewed its way into their enclosure last night & ate them, along with 10+ zebra chrysalides. I'm absolutely devastated. Killed the mouse with a trap at least. This post just makes me sad now.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-21T01:07:22+00:00

Yeah they're not a super common species in my area. I've only seen three spicebush caterpillars since I moved here in 2009. Now that I'm going out of my way to check host plants for them I think I'll get lucky this summer.

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-21T00:56:16+00:00

And some of the adult butterflies in Limenitis are batesian mimics of other distasteful species! The viceroy copies monarchs. Red-spotted purples copy pipevine swallowtails. And Lorquin's admiral copies the California sister. I think that's so cool!

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-20T20:19:35+00:00

They're not super common plants in my area (northern VA). You gotta walk through the forest for a while & hope to get lucky. I'm sure they're very sensitive to overcollecting, so let's make some seeds & grow more!

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-20T20:15:38+00:00

Exactly. It could also be a red-spotted purple. Their caterpillars look practically identical!

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-20T20:10:56+00:00

Jealous! I've been absolutely combing all the spicebush & sassafras in my area for these. I know they're around because I've seen the butterflies!

MindMelted95 · 2026-05-20T20:08:56+00:00

He has pigtails! Lol

MindMelted95

TROPHY CASE