It may not be easy to see in this photo, but if you follow Lincoln's line of sight there is a tiny day-old cat on the edge of the uppermost leaf. He somehow crawled up and over the edge of the plastic container behind him - very nearly making off across my dining room table. Why would he do that, when there was plenty of food inside there with him?
The older hatchling (only a couple days) is really becoming quite beautiful. He has assumed the pattern of stripes that he will have for the remainder of this phase of his life. Only his head still seems different from what I'm used to seeing on later instars - it is still black, though appears slightly smaller relative to the rest of his body than when he first hatched. I don't believe that he's molted yet, but perhaps I just missed it.
I am glad they get bigger so quickly. I'm costantly fretting about crushing them by accident because I didn't see them. The one negative aspect of them growing larger is that the amount of frass produced by the older cat is exponentially larger than that of the younger ones. Eew.
A couple of thoughts about the early behavior I've observed. As a new hatchling, the cats seem to move around quite a bit. Very wriggly, and like I saw today, almost seeming to disregard the leaves in favor of running off. Is this because they are constantly in search of fresh leaves? Are they somehow more sensitive to leaf "staleness"? You may note in the above photo that the older cat is munching happily and voraciously on an older leaf, and is ignoring the fresher leaf next to him. But I did notice that the cats will often remain pretty still for periods of time, so perhaps this isn't really a factor. If this isn't the cause, are they attempting to distance themselves from their "egg leaf" for some reason? Or am I just really overthinking/imagining this?
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