A monarch butterfly rests on Theresa Germaine’s finger before taking flight. Photo by Rita J. Egan
A Stony Brook resident is doing her part to help the ecosystem, one monarch butterfly at a time.
The monarch before leaving its enclosure. Photo by Rita J. Egan
Theresa Germaine knew she had to keep busy when the pandemic shut down practically everything in 2020. Pre-COVID-19, the now 83-year-old traveled frequently, and when she wasn’t making trips, Germaine split her time between New York City and Stony Brook, where she shares a house with her sister.
When everything shut down, the retired educator decided Long Island was the best place to be. Shortly after, she decided to grow milkweed, a flowering perennial plant, in her garden and encourage the growth of the monarch butterfly population. Not only did she attract the butterflies with the milkweed — the only place they will lay their eggs on — she also took their eggs and nurtured them.
“There are so many negative things going on in the world that you have to find some way to make yourself feel good about something,” Germaine said.
The butterflies, distinguished by their orange and black coloring with white spots, have recently been added to The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. The environmental network considers the monarchs an endangered species, even though the U.S. itself has not yet added the pollinators to its endangered-species list.
a caterpillar feeding. Photo from Theresa Germaine
When the pandemic shutdowns struck, Germaine read about the monarch butterflies and how to attract and raise them. This year marked the third year of her garden and, once again, she has been busy looking for the tiny eggs, about the size of a pin, under the milkweed leaves where the butterflies lay them. She then brings them inside her home where she puts the eggs and leaves in a container.
After the eggs hatch, they emerge as caterpillars and are very small. Germaine puts them in mesh butterfly tents bought online along with pieces of milkweed from her garden in tubes to feed them. She has a few of the enclosures to handle each stage, from the caterpillar — larva stage — to pupa, where they form a chrysalis around themselves, and then the emergence of the butterfly.
Germaine said once the monarch butterfly appears, it climbs up the side of the cage and needs time for its wings to dry. Once the monarch begins fluttering around the enclosure, she knows it’s time to release them outside. She brings the enclosure outside and allows the creatures to leave at their will.
“I’ve always kind of been a Girl Scout type of person,” Germaine said. “I was a Girl Scout when I was young, and I always had an interest in nature.”
A butterfly emerges from its chrysalis. Photo from Theresa Germaine
While she nurtured a dozen of the pollinators in 2020, last year she released 41 and this year so far, 45. She said she estimates that approximately 10 more butterflies will emerge before the summer ends.
Over the last couple of years, Germaine has purchased more milkweed plants, and the perennials have become more robust over time.
A native of the Bronx, she taught in Manhattan for nearly 30 years, and was an assistant principal for two years in the borough. She retired in 1995, and she said she never chose to get married or have children. Germaine said while many her age may be busy with grandchildren; she was keeping herself busy with her travels and entertainment. The raising of the monarchs has been a welcomed activity.
“As you get older, it’s very important that you have a purpose in life,” she said.
Her hope is that everyone will grow a little milkweed in their garden to help the monarchs. She said while it’s not the most attractive plant, even a small garden with the flower in a corner of one’s property can make a difference. While the eggs have a better chance of surviving inside — more than 80% — just having milkweed can increase the monarch butterfly anywhere between 3% to 10%, Germaine said based on her research.
“If everybody did their part, we would see more butterflies,” she said. “And who does not love to see a butterfly?”
While snipping off shoots from a few tomato plants growing on the edge of the vegetable garden, a fluttering movement caught my eye. Turning to look in the direction of a small stand of Common Milkweed pinched against the garden’s deer fence, I watched as a Monarch Butterfly danced from one milkweed plant to another. After a minute or two she left (in addition to the egg-laying habit of females, you can distinguish male and female by the presence of two black dots on the hind wings of male Monarchs and the thicker black wing veins of females) and I had a chance to see the results of her activity — four tiny white eggs laid on the underside of milkweed leaves.
The butterfly’s dance was a dance of life, for she was creating the next generation. Various milkweed species serve as host plants for Monarch caterpillars, provisioning them with all the food they’ll need to develop into adults.
Feeling a tad bit paternal, I checked on the eggs daily. On the fourth day I was in for a surprise. On the underside of a milkweed leaf was a small caterpillar about a third of an inch long. With the diagnostic colors of white, black, and yellow I knew it was a very young Monarch. As the next few days went by the hungry little caterpillar grew, reaching about half an inch in length.
When I next checked in, it had molted its skin for the first time, which sat like a tiny rumpled shirt stuck to the leaf surface. I anticipated seeing several more molts before the caterpillar was fully grown. However, when I inspected the next day there were no signs of the caterpillar, not in the form of nibbled milkweed leaves, nor the caterpillar itself despite an extensive search in which I turned over every milkweed leaf in the small stand of plants. It was gone. Disappeared. Nowhere to be seen.
Plant common milkweed to help Monarch butterflies thrive. Photo by John Turner
The disappearance of this caterpillar serves as a metaphor for the species, as the Monarch butterfly is disappearing before our eyes. The Western Monarch population which overwinters in southern California is critically endangered with a few thousand butterflies separating it from extinction and in the past two decades Eastern Monarchs have declined by 85%, primarily due to the loss of milkweed in the Midwest, killed by herbicides designed to reduce competition with agricultural crops like soybeans and corn.
Here the story turns to Monsanto, the chemical industry giant. Monsanto developed, and for many decades manufactured, ROUNDUP, the most widely used herbicide in the United States. And while herbicides can kill unwanted weeds, they can also have a negative effect on crops, a problem Monsanto solved by developing genetically engineered corn and soybeans, immune to ROUNDUP’s effects.
Now, Monsanto could sell both countless tons of soybeans and corn kernels and the herbicide that’s effective at eliminating competing plants, like milkweeds, all made the easier by the farmer not having to worry about the herbicide killing the crops. Spray away!
Not surprisingly, in the past twenty-five years ROUNDUP use has increased 20-fold. The result of all this spraying? The Midwest has lost 99% of its milkweed stands. Wonderful profits for Monsanto but deep peril for Monarchs — so deep that a petition to have the butterfly added to the federal Endangered Species List has been submitted to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and accepted with merit.
The life cycle of the Monarch is complex, unique, and remarkable. By the middle of March adults begin to disperse northward from their overwintering sites in Mexico with virtually all funneling through Texas. These females lay eggs on milkweeds and the young that hatch out become the 1st generation; the adults die but the eggs hatch, the caterpillars grow and the adults move north before repeating the process.
The butterflies repeat the process, several hundred to a thousand miles to the north, so by the time we’re seeing Monarchs here on Long Island it may be the 3rd or 4th generation of butterflies for the year. These northward bound generations are much shorter lived than the southbound generation, individuals of which can live for six months. Few other insects undergo such long-distance migrations or have generations part of an annual cycle that behave so differently.
In autumn, the last generation of Monarchs move south, leaving the eastern United States (we see them as they flutter past or perhaps nectaring on fall blooming wildflowers) on their way to one of a dozen or so major colonies situated in the oyamel fir forests scattered in the mountains of central Mexico, where, for the next five or so months, they’ll overwinter.
The climate conditions in these evergreen forests are ideal for Monarchs, a range of cool-to-cold temperatures that allows them to enter a metabolic pause. This can be risky though, as sometimes temperatures drop below freezing and the butterflies perish in huge numbers.
These winter colonies provide another way to measure the Monarch’s status: by looking at the extent of their collective size, measured in acres. The colonies are assessed annually and the trend in the last couple of years has been cause for alarm. This past winter (2020-2021) the colonies covered a little more than five acres, the lowest amount in five years; in 2019 they totaled just shy of 15 acres.
Once Monarchs arrive on Long Island females quickly seek out milkweeds on which to lay eggs. And here an ages-old battle plays out between the plant and the animal. The caterpillar eats leaf tissue that the milkweed doesn’t want to provide. So milkweeds, living up to their name, defend against this by leaking latex-like sap, a poisonous liquid containing cardiac glycosides in an attempt to gum-up the works. This sometimes works with newly hatched caterpillars occasionally dying, not from the poisons but from the stickiness of the sap. But the caterpillars have a trick up their sleeve — they feed in a pattern that blocks off the flow of latex to the portions of the leaf upon which they subsequently feed, without the worry of sticky sap.
Monarchs are unaffected by, and in fact are immune to, the poisonous sap, with recent research finding the species has undergone three mutations that negates the damage caused by the liquid. Remarkably, the caterpillar is able to incorporate the plant’s poisons into its own tissues making it poisonous and highly distasteful to birds, a fact quickly learned by inexperienced birds and which is reinforced by the bright and bold colors of the Monarch (you can imagine this lesson being lost on birds if the Monarch was an indistinctive, brown-colored butterfly).
Young birds quickly associate the butterfly’s bright coloration (known as aposematic coloration) with their poisonous qualities and leave them alone.
If you wish to protect Monarch butterflies there’s a few things you can do to help ensure the future for “North America’s best-known and most-loved insect.” The first is to plant milkweeds, its host plant. Common milkweed is best but swamp milkweed and butterflyweed work too. Stay away from tropical milkweed which isn’t native and is much less effective at growing caterpillars. While you can buy milkweed seeds, better to collect seed pods from local plants and use the seeds once removed from the pods, making sure to let them become cold hardy.
The second is to plant wildflower species that provide nectar for resident and migrating Monarchs. If you live along the coast, a highly desirable native plant that Monarchs enjoy is seaside goldenrod. Other favorable plants include many aster and goldenrod species, Northern Blazing Star, Bee balm, New York Ironweed, and Joe Pye Weed.
Third, move away from using pesticides and other garden and lawn chemicals.
Two weeks later another female Monarch visited the edge of the garden and laid several eggs. A few hatched and the caterpillars have prospered. So, perhaps a few more Monarchs will survive to soon participate in the southbound journey to the mountains of Mexico.
A resident of Setauket, John Turner is conservation chair of the Four Harbors Audubon Society, author of “Exploring the Other Island: A Seasonal Nature Guide to Long Island” and president of Alula Birding & Natural History Tours.
3 monarch butterflies at West Meadow Wetlands Reserve
By Teresa Dybvig
We almost missed the stunning sight — hundreds of monarch butterflies in one place at our very own West Meadow Beach, or to be more precise, the West Meadow Wetlands Reserve.
If you have walked along the beach recently, you’ve probably noticed the field of seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens) lighting up the edge of the dunes all the way down the beach.
On Thursday, Oct. 4, my husband and I happened to turn away from the water to gaze at the goldenrod glowing in the late daylight. As we approached, we saw hundreds — probably thousands — of buzzing bees and wasps on the flowers. Then we saw a flash of orange, then another, and another. To our astonishment, everywhere we looked, we could see up to 10 monarch butterflies without turning our heads!
We returned on Sunday with a camera and more time. Walking steadily down about a third of the beach, we counted 144 monarchs! I’m sure there were many more; the field is so deep we couldn’t see every flower, and when monarchs fold their wings to eat, they are as thin as a blade of grass from the front. And we didn’t even get to two-thirds of the field. I’m not exaggerating when I say there were, literally, hundreds of monarchs on the beach that day.
If you have ever seen a monarch butterfly, you know it is gorgeous. It also has a jaw-dropping multigenerational migratory life cycle. The monarchs feasting on the goldenrods at West Meadow are fueling up to fly 2,700 miles to Mexico, at an average rate of 25 to 30 miles per day. Some have already traveled great distances to get here.
This generation of monarchs is sometimes called the “supermonarch” because it’s the only generation strong enough to make the trip, overwinter on a cool, damp Mexican mountaintop, and fly north again to lay eggs in the earliest-growing milkweed in the southern U.S. before its life comes to an end. The eggs laid by the supermonarchs will grow into monarchs who will fly north and repeat the process, living only two to five weeks.
The next supermonarchs are the offspring of the offspring of the previous generation of supermonarchs. Sometimes they are the offspring of the offspring of the offspring. So no monarch flying to Mexico has ever made the trip before. Yet thousands of generations have made the journey.
Our eastern monarch butterfly, Danausplexippus is in a heartbreakingly steep and dangerous decline. For every 10 monarchs in the sky two decades ago, there are now only two. Researchers estimate that this species could be extinct within 20 years. If the monarch ceases to exist, we humans will have been the cause.
Monarchs are in danger because of human activities. We have cut down the trees monarchs require to overwinter in Mexico, we have killed milkweed that is critical for monarch caterpillars by spraying fields and their peripheries with herbicides like Round-up, we have paved over land where monarchs used to fuel up on nectar for their spectacular fall migration to Mexico, and we have contributed to changes in weather that can render the monarch’s route dangerous.
But we humans have also been working to help the monarch stay in the skies. People in Mexico are growing trees to replace the ones that were cut. Government agencies and ordinary citizens in the U.S. and Canada are planting milkweed in reserves and home gardens.And we are planting more fall-blooming native plants to fuel the long migration to Mexico.
This is where West Meadow Wetlands Reserve comes in! The seaside goldenrod there is one of the primary foods for monarchs migrating south. The wildflower’s blooming season is relatively short, so if you want to see the miracle in action, keep a lookout next fall in late September and early October.
Walk past the left end of the swimming area until you see the shining field of yellow flowers. Stand facing it for about a minute, and you will see a flash of orange, then another, and another. “We did this,” you can say to yourself. Our community. We set aside land for these flowers to grow, and they are helping these amazing creatures stay in the sky.
