Virtual Talk with with Ranger Jess, National Park Service
Learn more about Monarch Larva Monitoring, happening at the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area! Join Ranger Jess for a discussion on butterfly monitoring methods. The virtual presentation will include a talk on monarch identification, migratory patterns, park-specific population trends, and future conservation actions.
everyone um thank you all for coming for our very first lunch and learn of the year so little claps CH my name is Emma and I’m the volunteer coordinator at Missi Park connection and I have the lovely um opportunity to introduce our speaker of the day Jess laugher she’s a biotech at the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area where she leads our Monarch laa larve monitoring program as well as habitat restoration events with our volunteers take it away ja thank you Emma for introducing me um I’m excited to talk today about our Monarch lve monitoring project so just a little bit about me um like Emma said my name is Jess L I’m biot here at Mississippi National River and Recreation Area little bit background about me I got my bachelors in biology with an emphasis in ecology and evolutionary biology and that was at uh Minnesota State University of Morehead and then I got my masters in environment and conservation science over at North Dakota State University um throughout my academic career I’ve had um an amazing opportunity to work with some really cool Wildlife um I was hired on as a lead researcher in many different projects um spanning from anywhere from Radio coloring radio coloring squirrels uh we got a lot of weird questions um but it led to great conversations um to waking up um at 5 6 in the morning to go canoeing out and checking out basking traps that we created for painted turtles um and it was just amazing experience and so that transitioned into my master’s program where I looked I was out in the Appalachian Mountains looking at song birs uh specifically looking how physiology influences l Date and home range size in dark Jos so first professional and held a bunch of different seasonal positions um with many different organizations spanning from a couple different states Minnesota Virginia um Hawaii island and uh North Dakota and so that brings me here to uh the park service so last year as as I was a master student I signed on as a student guide and since then I’ve become a biological science technician primarily working in habitat restoration and so last year was my first year leading the mon monitoring program and I’ve been really excited about it um it was such a cool project to see and be a part of and so I’m excited to share with all of you um what our Monarch uh data looks like so let’s dive into monarchs and talk about them oh bet sorry online the screen was not shared there we go uh so monarchs are pretty commonly known especially with their natural beauty um they have um they’re a big Staple in the uh community and in ecosystems so for example their primary food source from for some organisms there are two birds in Mexico that uh it makes up their diet about 50 to 70% and so it’s really really important as a resource in the ecosystem but also as a pollinator so these in their adult stage um of the monarch butterfly they will go around and pollinate our Prairie lands but they’re also significant in uh they have cultural significance especially in Mexico as they’re believed to be a symbol of connecting the living to the dead another strong connection that they have is education especially in youth so one thing that a lot of uh teachers will do will have some type of unit on either enology or um some type of Life transformation so I was just curious out of people in the room and online um how many people had either reared uh reared monarchs in school or at an education center when they were younger so by show of hands or if you’re online do any reaction great so I’d say about 90% of the people in the room um I didn’t see or it didn’t show on my screen for the online portion but um that’s pretty pretty in incredible um it’s pretty um amazing how monarchs especially I mean if everyone attending here is most likely interested in monarchs or natural resources so really gets a foot in the door of um getting out in Wild so let’s learn a little bit about their life cycle they have four main stages first starting off with the egg stage so females will lay anywhere from 300 to 500 eggs and um they primarily lay on milk weed well they only lay on milked as their larel stage will will rely on that as their primary food source and so these females um they like that quote don’t lay all your eggs in one basket these little guys will hatch around 3 to 5 days old depending on temperature so what during warmer days the temperature when the temperature is warmer uh they tend to have an increased increased process and on Fuller days it’s will be more around five days as the process is slowed so next phase of their life is their larel stage and the entire larel stage in monarchs lasts from somewhere between 9 and 14 days under normal summer conditions and so not uh this photo is the largest Lal stage but there’s actually five different stages that they go through starting off being a really tiny little uh Speck in the world uh they’re pretty distinguished with their black head and their grayish yellow body um their first food source is going to be their egg H their eggshell that they’ll eat and then they’ll they’ll start their strict diet of milke weed and so when we’re monitoring you’ll typically see a small um uh small cutout in the milk bead in the middle of the leaf and then as they grow big here they’ll start branching out and so each each stage they will mul their skin and then they’ll grow new features and um exaggerate that color pattern so that color pattern is pretty familiar in the wildlife Community when you have vibrant yellows and oranges it usually means hey I might be toxic um so Wars predators of toxins and that’s because milked is actually toxic to many space and so they have a little bit of defense against some predators um but some of their natural predators are immune to uh immune to this and so they’ll grow to when we’re monitoring we’ll monitor uh for each stage of the laral of the larva and once they get to their fth stage we will start uh leave the milk looking for a place to p also uh one thing I wanted to highlight is only about 5% of Monarch monarchs will make it to this fifth state and they’re not even full butterfly yet so it’s pretty um pretty hard life to be a little a little caterpillar so um after they are in their fifth stage they’ll go out and try to find a sturdy area typically on a branch and they make that signature J shape that many people are familiar with and the L will hang upside down and spin of silk uh mat from its spinnerette which is kind of near the head and then in this in this stage they’ll grow their wings and other adult organ uh organs and they’ll continue to develop and um in this Crystalis stage for about 10 to 14 days so until they become a beautiful butterfly um their adult lifespan is typically around 2 to 5 weeks and I have a little asri there because um there is a generation that survives longer but I’ll talk about that a little bit later so they made made this huge transformation to get to only living two to five weeks as an adult um which is pretty crazy so as an adult their primary goals is to drink nectar and pollinate um they Roost they reproduce and repeat and repeat um throughout their lifespan and so when it comes to adult monarchs um they are actually sexually dimorphic so there’s a couple differences in them the male will have uh these two black dots on their hind wings and that’s typically they’ll release like a chemical pheromone during uh breeding season where the females on this left side you can see that uh they don’t H have those black dots um this photo is kind of hard to see but females do typically have uh more bold black lines on them when compared to the male and sometimes a deeper red reddish orange um their abdomen also can vary but it’s kind of hard to see when they’re just flying by so the best way to tell is H the two black dots of the mail so uh next I want to talk about their migration because it is pretty wild so there I just want to preface that there are two populations um here in the United States one uh Western population they live west of the uh Rocky Mountains and so they do a shorter migration from Canada um migrate up and then migrate back but we’re not going to focus on that population we’re going to focus on this um Eastern migration uh mostly because they’re the ones that come to Minnesota and so I’ll talk a little bit more about this later too but they will like or they will overwinter in Mexico by The millions um and so that there’s some really cool photos coming up here so what’s interesting about them is they have a multi-generational um migration pattern so um when they overwinter in Mexico they will start migrating up and start laying that first uh batch of eggs and so these uh these adults will then die off and the next generation of eggs will um survive and then make their way up again further north and so this these species will live two to five weeks again reproducing um reproducing and then their eggs will grow up migrate North and repeat and repeat so it takes about four to five generations for them to actually get here which is pretty incredible and so when they are here that’s that last Generation Um and what’s really special about the eggs that we find when we’re monitoring this season um is that they’re they’re gonna have if if anyone’s heard like Minnesota born like strong Hardy um maybe I’m just biased because I’m from here um but they’re actually pretty Hardy as they live to be um they can live up to nine months because they have to make that entire migration back down to Mexico and so where they overwinter and then start that next generation and so they’ll fly um between 2,500 to 3,000 miles and so I was thinking about this last night laying in bed and instead of going to sleep I was like uh you know things that you think about at so this is equivalent to a uh if you’re thinking body length to uh distance ratio it’s equivalent from a Rob for a robin to fly all the way to the moon and half the way back and so I was thinking about that and I was like this is pretty crazy but what about humans so I’m here I am pulling out a calculator in the middle of the night human equivalent so the human equivalent uh body length ratio to distance would be about a 210,000 mile journey and traveling about 3,500 miles per day so these monarchs will migrate anywhere from sometimes 20 miles some sometimes 100 miles every day I couldn’t imagine going you know maybe 10 miles Max for me um I can imagine doing 100 miles a day let alone our body weight ratio to 3,500 miles so this is what keeps me up at night so that last generation of course coming back down to Mexico so how is the Eastern Monarch population changing over the past 30 years so um I wanted to talk about how they do monitor for these uh Monarch populations so the actually look at total area occupied um in hectares so when I mentioned in Mexico um they gather by the millions sometimes um they estimate about 21 million monarchs per hectare and so when they’re in Mexico they have they take a plane and fly over the OM o uh fur forest and they’ll do a popul survey and so on the Y AIS here we have the total Forest Area occupied by Monarch colonies and then on the x-axis we have that wintering season um by Years starting in 1993 and uh this was actually updated this week to the 2004 population um so we get to see some brand new data um so this is what the general trend is looking like between 1993 and uh 2024 and as you can see it’s not looking very good um it’s a pretty uh General Trend downwards have a laser you won’t see it on the TV okay okay um so it’s a pretty General Trend downwards uh which is pretty sad um we’ve seen this in a lot of different species but especially in insects so we we’ve seen 80% loss in entire population since 2005 and that was um so that was in 2005 but you can see the general Trend was already spiraling down um so in 20 uh 2014 on a national leveling a petition to with these species and as endangered but it wasn’t accepted uh primarily not due to the fact that they aren’t declining um just that there are other species that are more critically endangered um and need more immediate help and so in after after the new news about their population now they’re going to try USF wildli is going to re-evaluate that those numbers and see if they should be on uh as endangered species whether it’s vulnerable or endangered um also one thing I wanted to note is this um reddish orange line across the middle of the graph so that’s about six hectares and that’s about the that’s the estimated population that it’s needed to fully sustain itself that’s what scientists believe that if they’re below that threshold they probably won’t be able to sustain their own population and as you can see um we’ve been below that threshold almost entirely in the last like 20 years and so I was also looking on the international level um of of these species and in 2021 they were actually listed as in dangered but that was retracted in 2022 to uh realist them as vulnerable and again not due to the fact that their species are growing it’s due to the fact that other spaces are taking priority right now so big question why are these populations plummeting so a monarch faces many different threats um some include habitat loss chemical treatments climate change ined species and natural enemies so I’ll kind of uh talk a little bit about each one of them uh as far as having that loss we’ve lost about 96% of prairie habitat in the United States we’ve been about that last 4% and That’s pretty drastic especially for a species that lives out on the Prairie and one thing to especially make note is this this species is a multi-generational migration so that means that they need they need their primary habitat in every state throughout their migration and so if any St doesn’t have that perfect habitat anymore it makes an incredible Cascade where if the first generation doesn’t have enough habitat then um then they’ll see less numbers and less numbers will be able to migrate another thing are insecticides and herbicides pretty self-explanatory insecticides um have been uh targeted or can Target uh the any state of the Monarch but also the herbicides they’ve seen issues with growth of milk weed um there’s a bunch of studies on that but I won’t go into detail on those um but those are some issues that they’re running into and of course climate change is a big factor for many many different species um these species rely on environmental cues for reproduction and also for migration so environmental cues have been uh changing especially with the change in the climate and also changing climate has influenced unpredictable weather patterns and when you’re tiny like 4 inch insect it’s really hard to live outside with unpredictable weather patterns uh introduced enemies whether they’re Predators parasitoids or diseases uh I highlighted two here um whether they’re uh could be plants or animals one plant I wanted to talk about that’s thankfully not here in Minnesota but they it’s been coming across the East Coast I believe Michigan in state is black and pale swallow work so it is a European milre species that’s made its way over here and so our female females have notic this species and have started laying on them well unfortunately they don’t substance that the that the lar eat and so in the lar uh hatch they have no food soce and so they’ve seen a lot of die off due to that another thing was a pretty traumatic experience that I found this summer um this photo is taken by myself um I was excited to take one of our Rangers out our seasonal Rangers out last year uh Cassie at the science museum like it’s really cool I definitely saw two Lara here last week maybe we’ll see something cool I mean that’s pretty cool to see but um we only found one larve that day and this is what it what it was um but this is an introduced species a paper wasp we have a few different wasp spes here um that are introduced and they prate on the louder um but it ended up being a beautiful day so no worries we we were all happy um and then of course they have their natural enemies um predators peroids and diseases so how are those doing in our so we are we monitor our species through the monri larve monitoring project and this project is a a joint partnership between University of Wisconsin Madison and the Monarch joint venture um their mission is to better understand the distribution and abundance of Bri monarchs and to use that knowledge to inform and Inspire Monarch conservation and they’ve had over 20 years of Publications um spaning from contributions of Citizen science survival ship rates uh parasitism natural enemies temperature effects agriculture impacts Etc um they have over uh uh 20 plus Publications um due to the research that we’ve been doing at our park so uh what does mon monitoring actually look like and what does it mean so a lot of times it’s like a needle in a hay stack um well actually it’s even more difficult than that because it’s a living creature so if you’re looking for a needle and hay stack you can’t just search um blindly um it’s very methodical and so Monarch joint venture and H has a list of um trainings that we have to take before we go out so a lot of times some of our places will look like this middle photo where um there’s just hundreds and it’s a little overwhelming so we monitor in two ways one is uh transect so instead of monitoring all 300 of them uh we’ll do transect through it and monitor just some of them um the other thing is when they’re more widely dispersed and less dense will’ll just monitor the entire population and so on the far the one you can see two eggs uh that was laid on that milked and then in this one um how many people spotted the larvae in it can you spotted I’ll point it out on on the screen wonder I probably can’t do it online but it’s directly in the middle so and this is a stage five in Star and so the fact that um it’s hard to see at its full size it’s really hard to see in it’s really tiny form um but we have incredible volunteers that help us um manage all this milk weed um so we have forms and they um take regular me measurement data like uh which instars we seeing at which stage if we’re seeing eggs adults presence um whether aphids are present which um uh and different I believe it has different SP on there that we monitor for and then what’s blooming around us um especially when it comes to seeing the adults emerge so we have six different monitoring sites here I’m going to see if I can do this yeah um I’m G to have to do this uh okay actually I think it’s sharing on there okay okay this will just be really awkward for the people in the room um okay so we’re gonna look at a first site at North Mississippi um so this is our site if you’re familiar with the area we have our paddle share station um and it’s just north of the crony Nature Center um one thing that was uh unique about this site is that we used to do over the years we were monitoring at this lower site here um but it uh it has a bunch of Canada thistle so in the last couple years they’ve been doing a lot of um Mowing and different techniques to try help um get rid of Canada thistle so a few years ago our volunteers showed up and there would be nothing but cut grass um so we decided to stop monitoring there and so last year was the first year that we wanted to still monitor in the area but we just picked a new area and so that area is about three uh 3.62 Acres okay the next down the chain is M RS Park uh wait for that it looks a little different right now um so it’s right across from St Anthony Falls um this one actually has the most milked we have seen it’s one of the smallest sites at 0 2 Acres but it actually has one of the most uh abundant milk weed which is really cool um for a small little uh plot right in the middle of minneapol so there we go there’s St Anthony Falls next we have two plots at cold water spring so the first one um is what we call the parking lot plot which as you’ll soon find out is surprise right next to the parking lot um so this area is about half an acre of monitoring and that’s one of our longest monitored spots in addition to a small pollinator plot here that’s just south of the um of the reservoir and this one’s a little bit smaller at Point 2 Acres next we come over to Minneapolis or to St Paul uh we have two spots that are kind of near each other upper Landing Park is one area and that’s about 6 acres and it’s a wide stretch and then we have the Science Museum and the science museum was also added this year um it was added because I was out on break one day and I was just enjoying they have a little nature spot and I saw an instar and I was like what this is so cool and so I was like well break time over and so I was just casually looking and I found two in one site and for our monitors or for our volunteers they’ll know how pretty significant that is but a lot of times when we go out and monitor uh we’ll find nothing so sometimes it’ll be weeks of nothing sometimes um we’ll find maybe one egg maybe one instar but to find two in one day that was just Serendip it this um so for some reason it’s not loading but but it covers the entire section of these three plots um pretty pretty small area again 0.12 but I’m am going to ruin a surprise but it did have the most activity out of all of them as far as eggs and Lara so that was really cool back to the PowerPoint okay success okay so how are each spots doing so uh North Mississippi and the science museum were technically only one year worth of data um so they’re going to look a bit different I just put them in a bar graph and we have the quantity number on the y axis and then the life cycle on the x axis so this is what we found at North Mississippi this year we found two eggs one instar uh the one instar in the photo uh that was really hard to see was actually from here so that was a really cool sting um this this site also had the highest number of adults seen um which was really cool to see I think every time we went out we saw at least one adult the milked is primarily common milked and butterfly weed and World milked here um and their milked density was about 96 when we did our milked uh milked population survey so the other oneye data again was the science museum um this is what we found like I mentioned uh this had the highest number of eggs that’s 16 which blows all of the other places um out of the waters which is really interesting because if you remember what it looks like it was a very small area um so I’m wondering if those uh could be multiple things but I’m curious if the female was just primarily focusing on that area to lay her eggs and then good moving on um so 16 eggs were found six instars and two adults the next one is we’ll go to cold water Springs starting at our pollinator plot so now this is across several years so again we have that quantity number on the Y AIS and the year um you’re just going across the x-axis and so I have them colorcoded eggs are blue Lara state is a pink uh all ads are yellow and no feed is green and so this is the general Trend at our pollinator plot and um anyone who’s interested in stats um I didn’t run any fancy stats but I looked at the R squar value um and a high r squared value means that um there’s some type of um there could be some type of statistical significance of the general Trend um that’s about as far in stats I’m going but uh so eggs and milked I put a little monarch above it to symbolize that they had some type of um they might have some type of statistical significance and so you can see our pollinator plot lost a lot of milkweed um and seen we saw a lot a very small amount of adults there and I just wanted to make a note of this too is this is the first year that we monitored World milkweed and I couldn’t find it in the notes prior if World milk weed just wasn’t found there or if it just wasn’t um wasn’t documented because in all the other years World milk weed wasn’t documented at any other site so I’m assuming this is the first year we’ve just monitored that so if I were to just do common milk weed and butterfly weed this last dot in 2023 would only be around 10 um so it’s a lot further drop than we expected so so what about our cold water parking lot spot it’s actually pretty good um relatively I should say it’s pretty stable looking at um the milk weight and all the stages of uh the eggs the larvae and the adult um so that was stared monitoring from 2016 up through last year’s data upper Landing is another site we’ve been monitoring so this one um had some pretty interesting Trends so um milked monitored this year was a lot higher which is weird a lot of our sites had lower milked but it is right by the river so I’m wondering if that has an influence um as far as damp the one thing I was thinking about for our cold water plots is we did face two years of extreme drought and so I was talking to Neil too and he thinks that that may be a factor of why we’re seeing less miled but being right next to the river at least it gets extra moisture so um we don’t see that similar Trend at upper Landing um we did see a general Trend down in larve but it didn’t seem um we’ll see in the next few years to see if that’s significant or not uh M Run’s Park was next um I just wanted to let you guys know this I had to transform the data because uh there we monitored about 150 to 200 milked species and so uh it didn’t fit on the graph so I just log transformed it so it look better on the graph um so uh I just wanted to also note that in 2013 we had two Rangers instead of one person monitoring so we doubled their efforts and so in this in the graph you can see that we did find more eggs but I’m not sure if that was due to uh higher efforts or not um that would be a statistical analysis that I’m not going to go into um so but we did see an increase in eggs and adults this year and so um those were all all of our sites at the park and so I also wanted to put together a graph of what uh what’s happening generally in Minnesota not looking too good either um so the general population I mean the r squ Valley wasn’t too high but so you could say stable stable SL declining and our national population is steadily declining so um I think I mean as a park at at our sites having mostly stable and declining is a lot better than some places so um what are we doing to help monarchs and maybe what more can we achieve um we’ve had a lot of conversations about how we’re going to revamp this year um and here are some suggestions that we might be implementing um over maybe the next couple years I should say so I the top three I had in mind were education and spreading awareness monitoring populations and conservation and restoration so the first is education and spreading awareness um in in order to know that you need to conserve a species uh it’s kind of important to know what a monarch is and why we need to conserve it so education and spreading awareness is a huge key so something like doing a lunch and learn about monarchs is important I know during some habitat restoration events when we have them at some of our sites I’ll talk about monarchs in our program and how they’re doing um and I know some Rangers will include an incorporate Monarch string uh any of their Ranger talk Ranger Le talks as well um so um another a further bullet I wanted to uh potentially go into is maybe partnering with different agencies uh we definitely already do partner with agencies especially as um those a lot of those sites are on Partner lands um but Ranger cast and I last year had the amazing opportunity to go over to us fish and wildlife at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge and tex some butterflies and so we were given Nets and they said go and net some butterflies and I felt like a 5-year-old child and I smiled for the rest of the week it was amazing um so so we both ended up we had had a volunteer with us too and we both we all ended up catching a butterfly uh we brought it to the station and they were putting these tags on them so it’s a very small thin sticker that they put on the wing and that way um each one has a unique number designated to them and so as they start migrating down they’ll have other stations or even the public can if they see a tagged Monarch they can say oh we saw number 2643 in uh say Tennessee this week and then they can calculate how long their migration is doing and maybe pinpoint some of their migrational patterns um so it’s a really cool program I don’t think any of our sites I’m like maybe North Mississippi could have a high enough population to actually tag um but maybe maybe we could do some tagging um with some of our Partners uh the next one is to monitor population of course uh we’re continuing to monitor the populations through our park and I just want to highlight this awesome photo that our volunteer Elizabeth had of a monarch flying across the cold water spring he C like two two photos of them and it’s it perfect um so what some of those moments you’re just like I’m here for a reason this is the Sun so I looked at the map to see how many how many spots are actually being monitored around here and this is what it looks like and my jaw dropped I was like oh wow okay it’s being pretty heavily monitored but that actually wasn’t the truth because I went into each site and I found out that majority of them didn’t have any data on them so um you can register a lot of people will register their backyard plot be excited and monitor for for a year maybe two years um but then not updated you know for a 10year span and so a lot of these data points will have um you can either monitor for one time a year um so some of them have one data point some of them have one to two in a year um but not long-term data and so one thing we could do is um add more sites along along the river all the way down and up north to get a better estimate across the entire 72 mile stretch um instead it just six sides so maybe adding an extra extra site or two for long-term data purposes and of course conservation and restoration um definitely important to um definitely important to conserve a species and so I know at uh we’re doing a lot of restoration and conservation our entire crew is working every day out there um so one thing I was thinking about is focusing on restoring some milked populations in order to do so we have to know a little bit about the milked we have so we have four different species here we have common milked swamp milked world and Butterfly um that’s the four species in the uh Northeast region that I have personally observed in our uh Corridor so um how are these speci using um using them to lay eggs so a study done in 2018 looked at all of these species to see which ones they were laying eggs on and they found uh um the highest in our region were common milked and swamp milked and they saw low low amount of eggs being laid on butterfly weed and World milk weed so what about larel survivorship that’s pretty important too to I mean only 5% but that 5% is pretty important the good news is here in Minnesota all four of these species have high survival ship there is I just want to make a note there is one more species of poke milked um I haven’t observed it in our area it’s more southern Minnesota um maybe it’s observed elsewhere in Minnesota but I haven’t seen it in our coridor and then of course the adults U will have been known to pollinate all four of these species as well so it’s important for them as a food source too so overall um these are the three bullet points I’ve been primarily focusing on and they 100 or they will try to combat all of these threats so I pulled up that previous slide with the horrifying was beating the larae just to remind you of which slide that was um so as far as habitat loss goes we’re tackling that um by conservation and restoration obviously um chemical threats it be great in education and spreading awareness would be really um key factor in combating that threat climate change uh can be all of them monitoring population you can see how climate change affects them uh conservation and restoration and obviously spreading awareness um about climate change it maybe help combat some of the threat and then I uh introduced enemies and natural enemies um goes with all three of those bullet points too um education spreading awareness of these introduced species and their natural enemies monitoring populations we do monitor for introduced species and other species found on the leaves and then obviously conservation and restoration uh we spend a lot of time removing introduced species um and restoring their native habitat so we are doing a a lot of work here at the park so I just wanted to give a special thank you to all of you for being here um and a special thank you to all the Rangers who have helped and the volunteers who have helped in the past um because we definitely wouldn’t have been able to monitor all this milkweed um without without all the help and so this is a real I created that was on our social media page so please enjoy uh if you’re interested in volunteering with us we are going to look to recruit some volunteers um whether you’re a new volunteer or um repeating volunteer I’ll probably send out an email to repeating volunteers later um but yeah thank you all it if I’ll open it up to any questions thoughts I don’t know jokes um if anyone’s in the field uh it’d be great to hear suggestions um for maybe future projects or Partners I have a quick question can you hear me I’ve never done one of these classes before Oh okay worri hello uh do you have a question I do I do um I just brought some property up by Moose Lake and last summer noticed along because it’s a dirt road that um tons of milk because I’ve been raising some here at my house when they fall in my lap but the milked was just filled with caterpillars one of them had 13 of all different sizes and then then next day the city mowed the street side so is there anything I can do or legally with them to say hey let me let’s protect this stretch of the road until they’re done H first of all that’s really awesome that you saw so many caterpillars that is that is wild um as far as legally they’re not federally listed um but one thing you could do is talk to the I mean if they’re doing maintenance on the road talk to the township that you’re in and reach out to them direct and because they might have an interest of conserving um conserving these species right and and I guess the other question that goes hand in hand with that if I were to build like a a a screened in porch say the size of milkway that’s three feet tall and one foot by one foot so other other things can get in and out and weather to protect them you know if I stake it to the ground is that a yay or a nay because I’m assuming they would just get eaten all so quickly yeah that’s actually a common question that we’ve been um that scientists have been researching if it’s uh pros and cons of rearing uh rearing monarchs um and of of course there’s pros and cons of both of them so there’s no uh specific data that says absolutely you should or no you shouldn’t um so it’s kind of up in the air on if you should or should not um focus on that maybe I’ll just move the plants off the street and put them in the middle of the property you you can plant some more they’re they’re pretty Hardy so in the uh fall when they start budding you could um manually grab a couple and just plant them in and I bet by next year they’ll um if they’re by the road and happy I’m sure they’ll take up to your uh your area too yeah 20 feet away okay great thanks so much you were wonderful thank Youk you um I don’t know if Amy Le France is still on she had a question about um a group of monarchs from South Carolina I’m guessing in SC uh there’s a link to it I don’t know I’m guessing you probably didn’t do too much setting up on South car population so but we can always follow up with you later Amy and take a look at that that link so what was the question it was a there’s like a link to um Refuge monarchs and Sparks Discovery uh some we can uh we’ll get to you later on that on that Amy we can respond to that one later I don’t know if we have any information on that right now so um Kathy was asking about uh if we were monitoring at the Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge Herman Valley uh near the Bloomington airport I’m guessing that’s outside of our Corridor so we probably weren’t but they probably had their own site for monitoring that it looks like there’s a bunch of them in the Twin Cities area yeah um so we don’t specifically I’m not sure I know that Minnesota Valley is doing the recapture program um that I showed a photo of earlier but I’m not sure what their monitoring process is um Lori was wondering if you had any recommendations for the best mix of milked or butterfly weed for attracting monarchs and doesn’t make a difference what we pln that’s a good question um so I know a high diversity area will attract more monarchs but also a large quantity of milkweed will um attract them as far as I mean we talked a little bit about whether they’re laying eggs in survival ship back in this it’ll take a long time to get back to that slide um so my my advice would be to plant a diverse amount of both um and also other native species to draw in pollinators and what I would say like what timing are like the adult monarchs in Minnesota for like the adults and making their way back not s to what’s flowering and what’s available for a food source for not just the milk but for the adults as well so yeah so some early spaces that pop up uh because they will start arriving um usually in May um so some early species and then late blooming species too will be important for Our Generation that’s going all the way down to Mexico sometimes they’ll come down from Canada to Minnesota too so it’ll be through their Journey uh I don’t think Kay had a question she was saying that anyone can order monarch tags from Monarch watch and tag monarchs yeah okay yeah that is thank you for commenting that those are some great questions see Mark mclennon uh there is an interesting new paper discussing the status of monarchs and suggesting that people are rearing butterflies and releasing them is not so good for monarchs tropical and other non-native milke weeds popular for landscaping are implicated for the decline of monarchs related to uh OE parasite affecting monarchs so then he also has a link to that article so that’s good news thank you for sharing that Mark so uh Scott and see do you know of any research that studies where population attrition occurs along the M Monarch’s migration path can you repeat that um do you know of any research that studies where population attrition occurs along the Monarch migration pan so any particularly bad areas or hazardous areas as they migrate I assume um I don’t know off the top of my head uh for that question but there might be some out there um I can take a look and follow up with you too I think some of that would depend on like weather patterns and stuff too with like other migrating species like it just depends if there’s a big storm or they get caught off guard that’s that can be fair I know that can be hazardous for other species migrating but I would assume that’s the same for Monarch so but all right Len had a question um I’ve seen hundreds of monarchs on Mexican sunflowers at the arum in the fall is it worthwhile to plant that flower that’s really cool there’s hundreds okay well I know where I’m going this fall um I mean uh Native sunflowers are always going to be great um especially because they do tend to bloom in the later season and so we will get that um uh especially for that last generation that’s going to be moving so they can grow big and strong I think it’d be a good idea to plant some native sunflowers um Kathy was saying Minnesota Valley was actually tagging the monarchs so so thanks and then says thank you um great presentation um I don’t know does anyone in the room have any questions I think we got two couple minutes um so in the summer is there for the adults it’s a mix of migrants coming from the south and Minnesota born uh butterflies is that correct at some point their populations will overlap because we have the early arrivals um who I don’t know how you travel so fast to get there but they’ll lay their eggs and then that generation could be starting while the next wave are migrating up and so they can uh overlap okay cool and when do they leave or like start leaving for the cell uh the typically leave August September one thing that was interesting about this year is we saw a lot of emergence um or butterflies coming here earlier um so that could be another interesting study with effects of climate change oh and I think that’s everything feel free to email me um or Miss volunteer and it’ll make it my way if you have any questions thank you that was great thank you for joining us yeah I didn’t know about um that one that one parasite that you mentioned [Music] earlier