Hi, my name is Cortney, I'm from the forest lab here on the third floor and I'm here to
talk to you a little bit about monarch butterflies
Now, most of you know what a monarch butterfly is. You can tell them from their orange
background with their black stripes through them
but what you don't know about monarch butterflies is that they're a species at
risk. So to understand why monarchs are a species at risk, we have to understand a
little bit about their life history. First of all, monarchs begin their life
as a teeny tiny little egg, which their mother lays on the underside of a
milkweed plant.
That egg hatches into a tiny little caterpillar which eats, and eats, and eats,
and grows, and grows, and grows.
It grows up to twenty seven
hundred times its body weight. That would be like us growing, or starting our
life as a six pound baby and growing into an eight-tonne school bus. So this
little caterpillar grows up and becomes this big caterpillar. Every time it grows,
it sheds its skin to accommodate its new body. It does the shedding of the skin
five times and each one of those we call an instar. After its fifth instar, the
caterpillar crawls up to the top of a tree and hangs itself upside-down in a
"J"-formation. It pulls its chrysalis from its head to its feet and it turns into this
beautiful green chrysalis with the gold flecks all around the surface.
When the butterfly is ready to emerge from the chrysalis, the
chrysalis turns into a see-through colour to reveal the black and orange butterfly
underneath.
After the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, it takes about five minutes to
pump the fluid through its wings. Then once the wings are dry, it can fly away
and it lives for two to four weeks after that.
So now we understand a little bit about monarch life history, we can understand why they're
a species at risk.
So because of habitat loss, monarchs are in decline all over the world.
Things like milkweed destruction in North America and illegal logging of forests
in Mexico
means that the habitat for monarchs is degrading.
Here at Science North,
we've created our beautiful Northern Garden full of native wildflowers to
help build the monarch population.
It's full of these native flowers so that the adult monarchs can drink the nectar
and they can lay their eggs on the milkweed that's planted just behind me here.
Our Northern Garden is also a registered monarch waystation which
means that we can tag monarch butterflies here. We take their caterpillars and bring
them inside where we rear them from their caterpillar stage, all
the way to their chrysalis and adult stage. And when they turn into an adult butterfly
we take a little tiny sticker and put it on the back of their wings. This sticker
has a unique ID, which we then enter into the monarch watch database. This
helps scientists to be able to track where the monarchs are heading, whether they're
heading down to Mexico, how far they go, how long they live and when they arrive
at their final destination. For more information, you can come up to the third
floor and find me or any of my colleagues and we'd be more than happy to answer your
questions. Until next time!
This plant is the monarch - no, it's not the monarch plant,
not the monarch plant. It's not. So the adult -
It's not an adult caterpillar.
See, the black cater- ugh!
IT'S NOT A CATERPILLAR, IT'S A BUTTERFLY!
Is somebody watching me? Okay, good. Are you sure?
...also habitat, their habitat, their habitat, their habitat...
[imitating cricket] prroop, prroop, prroop,
prroop, prroop, prroop, prroop, prroop.
I'm crying... [chuckles]
There are tears in my eyes...
Ooooh... [giggles] It's...
[giggles] I just need to take a break...