What can you do to help an endangered species? For Mark Hughes and his partner, Steve Beacham, it is by adopting Monarch butterfly eggs and providing a safe environment that allows about 90 percent of the caterpillars to transform into butterflies, versus their 5-10 percent chance of survival in the wild.
Mark and Steve expect to grow and release about 350 butterflies this year. They are on their sixth year of rearing Monarchs, a hobby they find fascinating and rewarding.
People who love Monarchs are encouraged to plant milkweed, the only plant that Monarch caterpillars use for food. Caterpillars outside are prone to predation, including being killed by a parasitic house fly that can lay eggs in the caterpillar.
Mark avoids that by bringing in the butterfly’s eggs, the size of the top of a pin, and putting them in plastic bins until they turn into caterpillars. As they grow, the caterpillars are arranged by size and moved to various mesh pens from the “nursery” to “grade school” then to “high school” and later into “college” when they are large enough that they can eat butternut squash instead of milkweed.
Mark grows some milkweed and gathers from other places around town where property owners allow him to harvest the food source. He uses floral tubes with water to keep the leaves fresh, and plants the tubes into a swim noodle that is placed into the mesh cages.
The creamy white eggs are generally underneath the leaves. Mark said you have to be systematic working through every leaf carefully looking for eggs. It can help if you observe the female butterfly while she is laying the eggs. The egg takes three to four days to hatch. The female might come back the next day and lay another round of eggs.
Once they are ready, the caterpillars go to the top of the mesh hamper and hang upside down in a J-shape, and pupate quickly into a chrysalis.
“Once they pupate it’s a relief for us,” Mark said. “That is one less mouth to feed. They are delicate, but they can get jostled a little. I had a pen with 20 on top that I took down to Clear Spring School for the kids. All they have to do is watch until they hatch out, open the pen and let them out. That makes it really easy.
“It blows their minds. The regeneration of so many species is not as miraculous as these guys. Mammals look like adults as an embryo. Butterflies go from an egg to caterpillar to a chrysalis, but then come out of that and have wings. They go through these amazing transformations. To let them out and set them free is really exciting. It is an easy thing for kids to understand.”
While it can be a lot of work cleaning out the pens and moving caterpillars and chrysalis, Mark likes that he keeps learning and getting better at it. This year a chrysalis fell off its thread while it was in the J-formation. Mark quickly wrote his Facebook monarch group and was told to massage the caterpillar’s anal gland with a Q-Tip. By massaging it, the caterpillar closed up on the Q-Tip cotton and Mark was able to hang it back up to turn into a chrysalis.
“Massaging a caterpillar’s anus with a Q-Tip is something I never thought I would need to do, but it worked,” he said. “It is nice to get better at it, for things to be familiar and for you to know what to expect.”
Sometimes the chrysalis hangs in an inconvenient place making it difficult to open the pen. If you pull one down, it can pull down a whole line of them. So, he carefully uses tweezers and scissors to take them down and restring them on a line with clips.
After they hatch, they can’t stay in the pen for more than 30 hours. Generally, they hatch in the morning, and he unzips the bag and lets them out. If it is cold or stormy, he lets them out the following morning.
It is an inexpensive endeavor with zipper pens costing as little as $10 to $20. The floral feeding tubes and swim noodles are also inexpensive.
“It isn’t expensive, but what it does take is dedication,” he said. “If you go on vacation, someone will have to feed them. If you get a lot, make sure you have enough food.”
One of his favorite milkweeds, Asclepius tuberosa, has an orange blossom in June. But that plant doesn’t attract butterflies like it used to. The butterflies are migrating later now, probably due to climate change. The butterflies might eat nectar from the Asclepius but they don’t lay eggs on it. Also, the leaves of that variety have gotten tougher and furrier.
The perennial swamp milkweed (Asclepius incarnata) is a favorite. Mark also grows annuals that he starts from seed in a greenhouse.