This summer has gone by so fast! Overall it's been a great season for the Monarch. By all accounts they are going strong this summer in the midwest and north, hopefully that means there will be an abundant number headed to Mexico, and more to return next spring...time will tell.
I have had so many firsts this year, it's been a season of learning and trial and error.
First of all I will have raised well over 200 monarchs this season, that's about 3-4 times more than ever before. Because of the numbers there have been many other firsts as well.
The NP virus that I believe wiped out 2 dozen or more back early in July. That was a huge learning experience and forced me to change the way I was "housing" my brood. Because I am trying to put fewer cats together, and keep my enclosures cleaner, I have been constantly doing what I have dubbed the caterpillar shuffle, which consists of changing leaves, moving caterpillars from one enclosure to the other based on size and number of cats per enclosure and CLEANING FRASS (caterpillar poop!)
I have also been much more careful about allowing butterflies to eclose (hatch) in enclosures with feeding caterpillars, because that can also cause disease to spread. So not only am I doing the caterpillar shuffle, but the chrysalis shuffle as well, moving chrysalis, or removing tops of cages and replacing them with other tops...which are not always secure so I have butterflies eclosing in my porch that I didn't know were there.
I've also had a chrysalis turn clear, so the butterfly is visible and NOT eclose. So far haven't had anyone else tell me that's ever happened to them. It looks completely normal, but it's been like that for 5 days now....I don't believe it will eclose at this point.
I also had a very small caterpillar that was not eating, or pooping normally, so I removed it from the others and put into a small container, because I believed it might be sick. It never did eat, or grow, but one morning I found it hanging in a J and it made a tiny little Chrysalis. I will test it for OE parasite when/if it ecloses....which brings me to another first. I did bleach some of my eggs, and tested butterflies for OE, which consisted of looking at their scales under the microscope. All of the butterflies I tested were negative, so that was very encouraging, and it was a fascinating experiment. I will begin tagging butterflies sometime next week. I currently have about 30 plus in chrysalides, but have had 5-10 eclosing everyday, so I'm not sure how many of those 30 will get tagged. I still have at least 30 plus caterpillars that will form chrysalides in the next week that will all get tagged in Sept.
So it's been an exciting season to be sure. If you are raising Monarchs in captivity you know how much work it is, but it never gets old watching them wiggle into a chrysalis, or eclose into a butterfly, and when I beat myself up for the losses, I remind myself that in the wild those 200 plus caterpillars likely never would have made it to butterfly. After the season is over, and I've got some free time again (haha) I intend to write some letters to DNR, MNDOT and anyone I can think of and encourage our city offices and park services to allow milkweed to grow like it once did, and perhaps the Monarch will once again fly in abundance. So keep up the fight to #savethemonarch
