I read that a monarch egg has only a 1 in 10 chance of making it to the butterfly stage. Even though the monarch caterpillar is toxic and bad tasting to almost all birds, the eggs are eaten by ants,mites,spiders and wasps. In my area it seems a tachinid fly is the biggest problem . The fly lays it's eggs on the tiny monarch caterpillar. It grows inside along with the caterpillar, feeding off of it, and when it's ready to leave it kills the monarch. Unfortunately I have seen this in my hatchery, it often happens when the caterpillar is hanging in it's J form getting ready to change. It's important if you have this happen that you find and remove the fly larvae from your hatchery. I have newspaper in the bottom, and it is always under the paper.
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| Fly larvae that exited monarch caterpillar. See the telltale slime trail? If it had been still hanging there would have been a string dangling from the cat . I call it the dreaded death string. |
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| White is the fresh larvae still crawling around, the red is the pupae waiting to hatch into a new bad fly. DESTROY THESE! |
I won't go into all the details here, if you google Monarch Butterfly you can learn all kinds of interesting facts about the life of a Monarch. Here are a couple sites, but there are many more:
http://www.monarchwatch.org/biology/pred3.htm
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/search/Monarch.html
for kids:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterfly/species/Monarch.shtml
I'll show you a few pics of my hatchery and all the pretty green with gold chrysalis .
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| Green chrysalis "growing" butterfies! |
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| Hanging in the J form, getting ready to form the chrysalis. It's pretty gross and amazing at the same time. |
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| These guys eat like pigs! And poop like them too! (see below) |
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See that dark one? Well it's been dark too many days, and will have to be removed if it doesn't hatch today. Most likely the parasite has killed it, or it just didn't make it for another reason. I've read you never want to let that break open.
Rotten eggs don't compare. Just put it in the trash, carefully! Hopefully there won't be many of those. Usually just a couple each year.
This one didn't connect very well, so I'm going to tie it with string. I've never had this happen before, so far 3 haven't connected their chrysalis well. 2 fell and I found them on the bottom. This one was wobbling on a teeny thread so I carefully took it down. and will put a string on it and tie up. If the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis on the ground, it can't hang and pump up it's wings. When they emerge their belly is fat and the wings are tiny and crumpled. They pump the fluid into the wings to stretch them out fully. There is just a short time to do this before the wings dry. If they can't do that the wings dry all deformed and the butterfly will never fly.
(Yes that's caterpillar poop on the right! Only a TINY fraction of what they've produced!)
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