Rutgers Gardens, New Brunswick NJ - USA

Caterpillars are the larval form of members of the order Lepidoptera (the insect order comprising butterflies and moths). They are mostly herbivorous in food habit, although some species are insectivorous. Caterpillars are voracious feeders and many of them are considered to be pests in agriculture. Many moth species are better known in their caterpillar stages because of the damage they cause to fruits and other agricultural produce.

The etymological origins of the word are from the early 16th century, from Middle English catirpel, catirpeller, probably an alteration of Old North French catepelose: cate, cat (from Latin cattus) + pelose, hairy (from Latin pilōsus).

The Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is a milkweed butterfly (subfamily Danainae) in the family Nymphalidae. It is perhaps the best known of all North American butterflies. Since the 19th century, it has been found in New Zealand, and in Australia since 1871, where it is called the wanderer. It is resident in the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira, and is found as an occasional migrant in Western Europe and a rare migrant in the United Kingdom. Its wings feature an easily recognizable orange and black pattern, with a wingspan of 8.9–10.2 cm (3½–4 in). (The viceroy butterfly is similar in color and pattern, but is markedly smaller, and has an extra black stripe across the hind wing.) Female monarchs have darker veins on their wings, and the males have a spot called the androconium in the center of each hind wing. Males are also slightly larger than female monarchs.

The monarch is famous for its southward migration and northward return in summer from Canada to Mexico and Baja California which spans the life of three to four generations of the butterfly. The migration route was fully determined by Canadian entomologists Fred and Norah Urquhart after a 38-year search, aided by naturalists Kenneth C. Brugger and Catalina Trail who solved the final piece of the puzzle by identifying the butterflies' overwintering sites in Mexico. The discovery has been called "entomological discovery of the 20th century". An IMAX film, Flight of the Butterflies, tells the story of the long search by the Urquharts, Brugger and Trail to unlock the secret of the butterflies' migration.

Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently. All animals must ingest other organisms or their products for sustenance (see Heterotroph).

Most known animal phyla appeared in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion, about 542 million years ago. Animals are divided into various sub-groups, including birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects.

A eukaryote (/juːˈkæri.oʊt/ or /juːˈkæriət/) is an organism whose cells contain complex structures enclosed within membranes. Eukaryotes may more formally be referred to as the taxon Eukarya or Eukaryota. The defining membrane-bound structure that sets eukaryotic cells apart from prokaryotic cells is the nucleus, or nuclear envelope, within which the genetic material is carried. The presence of a nucleus gives eukaryotes their name, which comes from the Greek ευ (eu, "good") and κάρυον (karyon, "nut" or "kernel"). Most eukaryotic cells also contain other membrane-bound organelles such as mitochondria, the Golgi apparatus. In addition, plants and algae contain chloroplasts. Many unicellular organisms are eukaryotes. All multicellular organisms are eukaryotes, including animals, plants and fungi.

Holometabolism, also called complete metamorphism, is a term applied to insect groups to describe the specific kind of insect development which includes four life stages - as an embryo or egg, a larva, a pupa and an imago or adult. Holometabolism is a monophyletic trait that all insects in the Endopterygota superorder have. This type of development gives the offspring the unique advantage of not competing with adults because they inhabit different ecological niches due to the morphological differences in the different stages of their life cycle.

Multicellular organisms are organisms that consist of more than one cell, in contrast to single-celled organisms. To form a multicellular organism, these cells need to identify and attach to the other cells.

Only a dozen or so unicellular species have cells that can be seen individually with the naked eye. The rest of the nearly two million^{[citation needed]} visible species are multicellular. In particular all species of animals, land plants and filamentous fungi are multicellular, as are many algae. Some organisms are partially uni- and multicellular, like Dictyostelium.

Multicellular organisms —like plants, animals and brown algae— arise from a single cell and generate a many-celled organism. Pluricellular organisms are the result of many-celled individuals joining together trough colony formation, filament formation or aggregation. Pluricellularity has evolved independently in Volvox and some flagellated green algae.

The fauna of the United States of America is all the animals living in the Continental United States and its sorrounding seas and islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago, Alaska in the Arctic, and several island-territories in the Pacific and in the Caribbean. The U.S. has arguebly the most diverse fauna in the world and has many distinctive indigenous species found nowhere else on Earth. With most of the North American continent, the U.S. lies in the Nearctic faunistic realm, a region containing an assemblage of species similar to Northern parts of Africa and Eurasia. An estimated 432 species of mammals characterize the fauna of the continental U.S. More than 800 species of bird and there are more than 100 000 known species of insects. There are 311 known reptiles, 295 amphibians and 1154 known fish species in the U.S. Known animals that exist in all of the Lower 48 include white-tailed deer, bobcat, raccoon, muskrat, striped skunk, barn owl, American mink, American beaver, North American river otter and red fox.