University Place

A couple things before I start the program. First of all, I'm going to be mostly talking about monarch butterflies today, but what I say about monarchs can be translated to all the pollinators. We know that the monarchs are in deep, deep trouble. Their numbers are diminishing greatly, and we're not in danger of losing the monarchs, but we are in great danger of losing the migration. And that is a fantastic happening every year. And, secondly, I want to give you a little bit of background of where I'm coming from. I'm a retired elementary school teacher, and when I retired in 1998, I started getting interested in native plants. And I joined the Wild Ones organization in Milwaukee there where I'm from and started learning about native plants, started putting them in my yard. Traditionally, my yard looked like everybody else's. A lot of grass, some bushes, a few trees, and in the last 15 years it has been transformed. I have hardly any grass left. I've got a lot of native plants, a lot of native bushes, and a few trees. And my yard doesn't look like anybody else's on the block, but that's all right because they've got to see it being done somewhere before they do it themselves. In 2005, I started raising monarchs, and in the following year, I started tagging them through the Monarch Watch program out of the University of Kansas. Dr. Chip Taylor started that program in the '90s. And in 2009, I was able to travel to Mexico to see the monarchs overwinter there, and that was a really, really neat trip. And being a teacher, I was taking pictures all along the way, and I thought, oh, I've got to put these in a PowerPoint and show the kids. So I started talking to school groups, and now I talk to school groups, adults, nature center groups, garden groups, senior groups, whoever wants to hear about monarchs. I talk to everybody. So, that said, we'll start in on the monarchs. Are we going to dim the lights at all, or no? No. Okay. Each monarch butterfly has a life cycle, a cycle within its life. It goes from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. And the monarch species as a whole has a cycle also, stretching from Mexico to Canada and back again. West of the Rockies they will migrate from the coast and go inland. They go back and forth. This is where it began in 2005 for me. In that small garden in the lower left-hand corner is a patch of milkweed, and that's where I first started seeing monarch eggs. A friend said to me, you've got milkweed, you should be raising monarchs. And I said, I don't know anything about that. So I got on the Internet and read, and that's how it began. You can also see the porch on the back of my house. That is the place where I raise them. When I bring the leaves in with the eggs on, they are in there so then they're protected from bad weather, predators, but they still get the normal temperatures. The milkweed has spread all over the yard. I have common milkweed. And in the wet areas, I have swamp milkweed, sometimes called red milkweed. And in the sunny, dry places butterfly wheat. All of these are sources for the butterflies to lay their eggs. I start collecting eggs middle of May, end of May, depends when the monarchs get up to Wisconsin. And I find them usually on the underside of the leaf. Usually one to a leaf, but sometimes they'll be double headers on a leaf. And I bring them inside and that's where they hatch. A female butterfly lives only a few months, pardon me, a few weeks. So in less than a month her whole cycle is over, but she can lay hundreds of eggs. However, not too many survive. I have less than 4% there, but I've heard less than 2% because there are a lot of predators on the milkweed plants chewing, wanting lunch. I also look on the milkweed leaves for tiny holes. That means that the egg has hatched and the caterpillar is already chewing a hole in the leaf. And this is what it looks like when I turn the leaf over. That little, tiny caterpillar has chewed an island for himself. That hot sticky sap that comes out of the leaf when he chews on it could glue his jaws shut, and that would be the end of him. So he makes it a little safe for himself. I bring the leaves in and cut off just the portion where the egg is, put them on trays with wet paper towels so the leaf doesn't dry out before the egg hatches. In a few days, the top of it turns back, you see the caterpillar's head, and the caterpillar will hatch. You can see his eggshell beside him. So he's at his second stage. They're very tiny, and you can't really handle them at this point. They're smaller than the diameter of the lead in a pencil. Most of the pictures in my PowerPoint I have taken. Although, you'll see the grass on the charts obviously came from the internet or from someone else, but they're noted on the bottom. This is from my friend Holly on Facebook. She has a marvelous camera, and she shows what the caterpillar does as soon as he hatches. He eats his eggshell, which is very high in nutritional value for him. And with those little legs, they can move fast. So at this point, I have to put them in containers, and I use aquariums with screen covers. Their eyesight is not very good, so they use their antenna or filaments to find their way around their environment. Long ones on the front; short ones are on the back. They breath through little holes in the side of their body called spiracles. There you can see them on the black stripes. You can also see their feet, which look like they have little suction cups on the bottom to help them hold onto stuff. For the next two weeks, this little guy is going to become an eating machine. He only eats milkweed, and he will eat day and night.

They're kind of like babies

they eat, they sleep, and they poop.

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They're kind of like babies

And within that sticky sap inside the milkweed leaf are protective toxins. They call them cardiomyocytes, and they make, it's a poison that will be very noxious to anybody who tries to eat them. The birds or the spiders or wasps or anything like that. It doesn't kill them, but it makes them sick. So a lot of birds have learned to stay away from these monarch caterpillars. They eat the whole leaf, leaving just the stem behind. What goes in has to come out. Caterpillar poop is called frass, and with a lot of caterpillars, I have to clean out the cages twice a day. I give them fresh leaves and clean up the mess they leave behind. The caterpillar's skin doesn't stretch as ours does when he grows. So he has to shed his skin, and he will molt several times before he's an adult. You can see his skin that has split, and he walked out of it. It's lying next to his body, and his head piece is lying along the side of his body. That comes off last. The filaments are all curled up against his body yet. It's a long process, several hours. So this guy is not quite finished. This photo is from Dr. Karen Oberhauser, who runs the Monarch Joint Venture out of the University of Minnesota. And it's a neat picture because it shows the five stages in the caterpillar. Every time they shed their skin, it's called an instar. And some butterfly people can look at a caterpillar and say, "Oh, that's a second star, that 'sa third star." I just know they're little, they're medium, or they're big.

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They're kind of like babies

This is a neat picture. In two weeks, that little guy on the bottom is going to become full sized. That's like 2800 times his birth size, which would be the equivalent of a human baby becoming the size of a school bus when he's 18. And he does it all in two weeks time. That's about how they look when they're full grown. Then they go looking for a place to make their chrysalis. And he's spinning silk as he goes. You can see it reflected in the glass on the side of the aquarium. He spins silk from their mouth, and that also acts as a safety rope. If they get knocked off a plant or a leaf, they can climb back up on that silk strand. Out in the wild, they go to a nearby plant to make their chrysalis, but inside they will look for a spot and he spins a silk mat with his mouth, then he turns around and attaches his rear end to that silk mat. And then he hangs down in the shape of a J. And he'll hang like that for 24 hours. And then you'll see that the antennae are getting all raggedy looking, the colors on his stripes are getting muddy looking, and you know that it's time for the next step. The skin splits at the head, and through a series of contractions, he pushes that skin up and then it falls off. In the next picture, next slide, you're going to see a series of pictures that I took. I had two caterpillars who made their Js back to back. They were like this. Right next to each other. And I thought, oh, they are awfully close, how is that going to work? So one day when I saw one was preparing to make his chrysalis, or pupating like this one, I sat down and took pictures because I knew the second one would be shortly after him. The one on the left just made his chrysalis; the one on the right is getting ready. Oh, I'm sorry, I've got to go back. I pushed the button too soon. Okay. And this all happens in just a couple of minutes. The skin splits. He starts pushing it up. And there they're finished. I have my twins back.

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They're kind of like babies

It takes a couple hours for that soft, squishy chrysalis to harden, and it becomes hard like the outside of an eggshell. And then that chrysalis will hang there for two weeks, 10 days to two weeks. And this is what the inside of the screen top looks at any given day. You see caterpillars laying straight, getting ready to make their J, caterpillars who already are in the shape of a J, green chrysalis, and then the dark ones. The dark ones where you can see the orange and black of their wings, I know that tomorrow all those will be butterflies. They will hatch out. And this is the beginning of the hatching. They call it eclosing. The chrysalis splits at the bottom. His butterfly's head is there, and he's going to flip out in a somersault kind of way. He grabs onto that slippery chrysalis with his feet, and immediately you'll see him, his very fat body, which he's going to use to pump his wings up, it's filled with fluid. But you'll see him do something with his proboscis. See if you can catch in the video. The proboscis, when they're born, comes out in two strands. And, in the next couple hours, he has to zip those two strands together in order to make that proboscis work like a straw or like a sponge to soak up nectar. If he doesn't do it, he'll never be able to eat. So when he turns sideways, you'll see that proboscis. He'll flick it out, unroll it, and roll it back in. There it goes. It just comes out. And now it looks like he's got a pretty good hold on the chrysalis. Then they start pumping up their wings. They pump up the hind wings first, the little wings. Then they do the forewings. And then they seem to rest there for several hours. The wings have to dry and harden, and the rest of their senses finish developing. During the summer, I keep track of how many butterflies are born and how many males and how many females. Usually it's pretty close to 50/50. And you can tell a male from a female by looking at their hind wings. The male, on the left, on his hind wings you'll see two black spots. Those are two scent glands. And the veins in his wings are rather narrow. In the female, hers are, she has no black spots, and her veins are thicker, wider. So it gives her an overall darker appearance. Okay, test your knowledge, male or female? >> Male on the bottom. Female on top. >> Okay, male on the bottom is right. On the top is also a male, but it's a little more difficult to see his two spots. There is a female hiding in the picture. He was mating with that female that's behind him. Yeah, it worked. I keep the butterflies 24 hours. Instead of releasing them as soon as their wings are dry, research has told us that they're much more able to take care of themselves and escape predators if you keep them 24. So I do and let them out the next day. Now, there are some predators on my porch.

LAUGHTER

They're kind of like babies

My cat, Frisbee, when I took his picture, I focused the camera and I said, oh, she's on the outside looking in.

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They're kind of like babies

Frisbee never really bothered them other than watched their wings flutter. But she's in cat heaven now, and the two I have now...

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They're kind of like babies

Are much more interested. So I had to build wooden tops for the aquariums and put heavy screen on the back. So they can look, but they cannot touch. The monarchs, at the end of their legs, have little, tiny claws called tarsi, which they use for holding and grasping and also for tasting. So the monarch can land on a leaf, drum his feet on it, and know if it's milkweed or an unsuitable plant. There's his proboscis, and you can see him unrolling it, getting ready for a snack on that Joe-Pye Weed. Sometimes when I keep the monarchs a couple days because of bad weather, I have to feed them. After 48 hours, they need to eat. So I can give them watermelon, mashed up banana, some kind of fruit, or I can make sugar water and put it on a sponge. But sometimes the won't unroll their proboscis, so I very gently take like a straight pin, unroll it until the proboscis touches the food source, and then they're fine. Or I can put them outside for a couple hours, harden them off a little bit. But eventually it comes time I got to let them go. And to help me in this are the neighborhood kids. They love to help release the butterflies. It's also a good time to take pictures because butterflies are rather docile yet. You wait too long and they fly away too fast. That little gal there in the picture, she was one of my best butterfly helpers this summer. The summer butterflies up here live only about a month. And it's the late August ones that will migrate to Mexico, stay all winter, and start back. There's the pair mating. Finally got a picture of them. In Wisconsin, we get only about two or three generations, depending on how early they get up here in the spring. Come mid-August, they start moving out of Canada, funnel the way through Texas into Mexico. There is a population that will fly to Florida and back up the coast in the spring. West of the Rockies, they will fly to the coast. There is a little intermingling. Some of the California butterflies will fly to Mexico. But generally, the Rocky Mountains separates. This is the time of the year that we tag monarchs. This is the monarch tagging program that I told you about. I buy the tags in late August, and it has Monarch Watch's telephone number on it in case you find that butterfly and it has the butterfly's number on it. It's made out of very light propylene, polypropylene, about the size of the pencil eraser. And it doesn't interfere with the butterfly's flight at all. After the season is over in the spring, volunteers from Monarch Watch will go down to the mountains in Mexico and search the forest floor for any dead butterflies that have a tag on them. And then the Monarch Watch people will redeem these from the locals who have collected them during the winter. And that helps the local economy, helps them supplement their income, and it gives information to the monarch scientists about their migration patterns. Any of the monarchs that are found will be entered into the database. So I can go online and look and see if any of my butterflies have been found in Mexico. And so far none have. One was found in southern Wisconsin. I don't know if it was dead or alive, but it made it part way down. This Methuselah generation of monarchs is really amazing. These little guys, who weigh less than a paperclip, will travel 2500 miles to a place they have never been before. Their great-great-grandparents were there, but they never were. And they used just the GPS elements that they have in their brain and in their antenna to help them find the way. And along the way, there are

lots of obstacles

bad weather, traffic, predators, and so on. And along the way, they have got to keep eating. They need a lot of nectar plants along the way to fuel up for their flight because that takes energy, but also to store fat for the whole winter because they will not eat all winter long. They will drink but no feeding goes on. So this little guy will weigh more when he gets to Mexico than he does when he leaves Wisconsin. This is where they go, the mountains of Mexico. It's a perfect climate for them. It is cool, moist, the right altitude, and trees in the forest act as a blanket to keep them warm and as an umbrella to keep off the worst of the bad weather. Most of them will get down to Mexico by early November. November 2nd, the Mexican people celebrate Day of the Dead. When they see all these monarch butterflies streaming through the villages and going up the mountains, they celebrate that. They have huge parades and celebrations. They believe those are the souls of their ancestors coming back to visit. And these guys will stay there through the winter, all five months. For a long time, we did not know where the butterflies went exactly. And a Canadian scientist, Dr. Fred Urquhart, and his wife studied monarch butterflies their whole life, and they searched Mexico. They were not successful in finding their overwintering grounds. So they began to engage citizen scientists, and a pair of people, Catalina and Ken Brugger, now they have Wisconsin ties. Ken Brugger was originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and relocated to Mexico. He met and married Catalina, and they had read an ad in the paper that the Urquharts had put in there. So they started searching. They searched for a year and a half, climbing mountains and not being successful at finding the monarchs. But one day in January 1975, they climbed a mountain and found millions of monarchs. They notified the Urquharts, who were absolutely thrilled, and then the following year National Geographic came down and did this spread with Catalina on the cover. However, Urquhart did not want to share that information with his fellow scientists. Dr. Lincoln Brower and Dr. Bill Calvert were young scientists at the time, monarch experts. But he wouldn't tell them. So that's Dr. Bill Calvert. He was one of the guides on the trip that I took down there. So they looked at the magazine article and figured out from the clues. They knew it was in the state of Michoacan, and they knew the altitude. So they figured it could only be about a dozen mountains where the monarchs would go to. So they started their search and eventually mapped out all the locations where the monarchs congregate in the winter. In 2012, this story was told in the movie "Flight of the Butterflies". It's an IMAX movie, and if it ever comes to your city, make sure you see it. It tells the story of the Urquharts as well as the monarch migration. And this is Catalina, 38 years after the event. She was at the Austin premiere of "Flight of the Butterflies". These are the 12 locations in Mexico. Mexico City is over there on the right, and the monarchs always go to the same location every year. Now, with the declining numbers, they do not always fill up, and there might be only six of them that are occupied this year and each year slightly different. I visited two of the sanctuaries. Sierra Chincua was the first one, and there we could ride horses halfway up. Then we had to park our horse and hike the rest of the way. And when we got to the top, we saw trees that looked like they were covered with brown leaves, like in the fall here. But on closer examination, you saw that they were huge clusters of monarchs. And when the sun would warm them, their wings, they could fly off to get a drink of water, but they cluster together for warmth and for protection. The biggest dangers down there are cold weather and predators. The cold weather they can take about down to 32 degrees, but not if they get wet. Wet and freezing will kill them. And the predators, there are some nasty orioles that will dive bomb into the clusters and, you know, eat them up. And those that fall to the ground and can't fly up or climb up get eaten by the little mice that are running around there. So there's always mortality in the sanctuaries during the winter. The second one I went to was a larger one called El Rosario. And in this one, we had to-- there were no horses. So we had to hike the whole way up. It took us a couple hours. And along the way, we would see underground springs seeping across the path where the butterflies would come to drink. And they cluster at the edge of the water, and they suck up the minerals in the water from the mud there. This is what it looked like when we got to the top. You couldn't go in among the butterflies. That rope there was the edge of the path. But they marched across the grass, seeking the moisture. They basked in the sun and the trees. And they were flying. Everywhere, just everywhere. And I was there the first week in March, so they were active getting ready to head north. There were quiet moments when they posed for us.

LAUGHTER

lots of obstacles

Living up to his name, butt- erfly.

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lots of obstacles

Along about February 14, which we are celebrating this weekend, the monarchs come out of sexual diapause and become sexually active. So there will be a mating frenzy for several weeks before they head north. And they will head out of Texas, and they will, the females will lay their eggs in

that lower chair of states

Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, that area. And it will take a month for those butterflies, for those eggs to become butterflies. And then that next generation will populate the northern section. They go up as far as the yellow on the map, which as far as the milkweed grows. And on the west coast, they will fly inland. They have been keeping track of the monarch numbers, this is Dr. Chip Taylor from Kansas, since the early '90s, and the numbers are going way down. You can see some very bad years. Those were the result of winter storms when we lost like 80% to 90% of the population. But it has been going steadily downward. The first 10 years, they averaged about six hectares of monarchs. They can't count individual monarchs. They measure it by area that they occupy, and a hectare is a little larger than an acre. The second 10 years are down to three hectares, and last year, if you look at the second last bar on the right, last year's population was the worst. If you took all the trees that the monarchs were on in Mexico and put them together, they wouldn't have covered one football field. So the numbers are way down, into the millions rather than billions. Now, this year, the very last bar, there's been a modest increase, and right now the forecast in Mexico looks good. No big, bad storms coming before the monarchs move out, which will be in a couple weeks. This year, most of them are on the one site. The yellow part is El Rosario. So most of the monarchs concentrated in one of the sanctuaries. Why are they declining? Well, the biggest reason is their loss of habitat. And if we look at Mexico, what's happening there? You look at the mountains, and you can see that there are an awful lot of sections that have been clear cut. They're cutting the forest down, and that lowers the temperature and the butterflies can't survive. There's also climate change going on all over the world. The higher temperatures are stressing out their fir trees and killing them off. Also, the bad winter storms. The other thing that the Mexican people have to work on is the tourism industry. Everyone likes to go down and see the butterflies, but they have to manage it carefully so they don't degrade the sanctuaries. There are some efforts to reforest the region. This is a nursery we visited. And the people down there in those villages are pretty much low income, and so they depend on the monarchs for their survival, from the lady who cooked our meals to the man who made these beautiful baskets from pine needles. So they need the monarchs. They need those forests preserved. In the US, we have a much different story. A lot of the monarchs habitat has been wiped out just by development. We build cities and roads and subdivisions and shopping centers and take up the land. So 6,000 acres a day disappear just because we're building something on it. We've also lost a lot of

milkweed where it used to grow

in the cornfields. Farm fields used to have milkweed growing down the rows, along the edges and so on, but that is gone because of the planting practices. We have genetically modified corn and soybeans now, so that means the farmers can plant their corn, they can spray their fields with Roundup, which contains the chemical glyphosate, and that kills everything in the field, every plant in the field except the corn. So there is no more milkweed in the Midwest. Then in 2007, we got the ethanol mandate. So even marginal lands that the farmers weren't using became called into production for corn and soybeans. 24 million acres we lost, which is about the size of Illinois. And then we have to look at what we do on our roadsides. We spray and we mow a lot. This is a very telling map. The green area shows the spring breeding grounds where the monarchs will come up from Mexico, lay their eggs, and there's not as much glyphosate or Roundup being spread out there. But if you look at the Corn Belt, near us, there's hardly any place that has not been sprayed. And Dr. Chip Taylor has been spearheading a movement. If we want to save the monarch migration, we've got to do something. We've got to get milkweed out there. So he proposed establishing 10,000 wayside stations stretching from Canada down to Mexico, and these way stations would have the host plants, the milkweeds that are native to that area of the country, as well as the nectar plants. The monarchs like it in my yard because they love the Joe-Pye Weed and the Liatris and the Coreopsis. It's like a smorgasbord out there for them. This is my butterfly garden in the front yard, and I have it registered with Monarch Watch. At the end of 2014, if you look up in the upper right-hand corner, there were 9,000-plus way stations registered. And I'm sure there are others that haven't been but are in existence. But that is very fragmented. We need longer strips. So far we've been putting them in yards and public places, businesses, schools and so on, but the latest push has been to put these way stations using our road system. When you think of the thousands of miles of roads and railroads and electrical right-of-ways, all those could be planted with native plants. This is a picture of Iowa. Now, they have mandated that along their roadsides, a native seed mix be used. So that is going to benefit not just the monarchs, but all the pollinators, and also the ground nesting birds. There are a lot of critters that could live here. And it's a lot prettier to look at when you drive down the road than what we're looking at now. So, if you plant it, they will come. That's my front yard. And I'll leave you with, oops, sorry, not quite the end. Some helpful websites, if you want to learn more about monarchs. Monarch Watch, the one out of Kansas; Journey North, which tracks the migration of many animals not just monarchs; Monarch Joint Venture has wonderful programs in place; Wild Ones, the native plant group; and the last one, The Monarch Trail, is a local group. Now, I live in the suburbs of Milwaukee, and in Wauwatosa, where this group is active, they are trying to preserve a small area from being developed. There were a hundred some acres, and the monarchs would come down every fall from Canada and roost there in the Fall. They'd nectar in the fields during the day, roost in the trees at night, and you could go out there and see hundreds of monarchs there. And now the development has taken over, and they're down to like 10 acres. So wherever you live, there are groups of people who are doing what they can to protect monarchs. So find somebody in your area or do it in your own yard. My final thought I will leave you with.

LAUGHTER

milkweed where it used to grow

And if any of you didn't pick up brochures and bookmarks and packets of milkweed seed from the back table, you can do that before you leave. And if you want to plant the milkweed seed, this is all common milkweed, you can plant it now. You can throw it out in your yard in the snow where it will eventually get to the ground. Don't plant it on the grass. Plant it where there's dirt underneath it because they need the freezing and thawing of the winter. They have to be stratified in order to sprout. Or you can plant them in a container. You can take a milk jug and drill a couple holes in the bottom for drainage, cut it in half, and put your dirt in, put the seeds in, a little dirt on top, water it, and then put the top of the milk jug back on but leave the cap off and put it out in the snowbank, and it will germinate. I tried it last year for the first time, and every single milk jug that I put out there had lots of plants in it. They'll come up in the spring. You'll see them getting taller and taller, and I couldn't plant each individual plant. They were very fragile yet. Just tiny little seedlings. So what I did was just took a clump of it out and planted a whole clump of it. So, that's all I have to say. Are there any questions?

APPLAUSE