Pet of the Month: Silkworms
October 4th 2009 21:00
Photo by Fastily. Used in accordance with the terms of Wikimedia Commons’ GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
I read in last Friday’s Daily Telegraph that silkworms are currently the pet for children. Accompanying the article was a photo of a brother and sister holding some large silkworms that were eating leaves. Funny how larvae-phobic me noticed them straight away. I gasped in horror and my colleague looked at me, wondering what was going on. He looked at the photo and told me they were cute.
“You sound like Fred,” I said, referring to my larvae loving friend. “He loves grubs. He used to put one on his finger and chase me around the garden with it to scare me.” Stephen is another friend who loves larvae. When he went to school he had to look after some silkworms for a school assignment. Thank God I didn’t go to the same school! That said, my school wasn’t any better; the science teacher inserted a big tube into a pair of cow lungs and she wanted me to blow into the tube to demonstrate how the lungs would inflate!
Still, I can understand why they would make a good pet for children: they are inexpensive, easy to look after and, compared to say, dogs, don’t make much of a mess. As they undergo the metamorphosis from worm to moth, they teach children about the cycle of life. I’m all for it: as long as they are kept in a tight container and there is no possibility of them escaping until they have reached maturity. Hey, at least I’m not afraid of spiders.
Silkworm factsheet
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