Interesting Facts About Storm King

Interesting Facts About Storm King

 Male Monarch

1. Known as the “storm king” because it is almost always most active just before a storm.

2. There are monarch butterflies in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, the Caribbean, North America, Mexico and South America. However, only the Australian and North American monarchs exhibit seasonal movements.

3. The monarch needs no camouflage because it is poisonous to predators; in fact, its vivid colors are designed to ward off critters that may want to eat it. The monarch is poisonous because the developing larvae ingest toxins from the milkweed plant as they feed on the leaves. These chemicals remain permanently in the monarch’s system, even after the caterpillar metamorphoses to a butterfly. The monarch’s survival is closely linked to the chemical defense system derived from the milkweed toxins and the nutrition supplied to the developing larvae.

4. Caterpillars eat only milkweed leaves. Adult monarch butterflies eat nectar from flowers, which consists of about 20% sugar.

5. Monarchs live mainly in prairies, meadows, roadsides, and grasslands. The larvae live and feed exclusively on milkweed plants, but the butterflies hang out on a variety of different plants.The monarch eggs are deposited on the milkweed plant, and the caterpillars live on the plant, eating the leaves. 

6. Monarch butterflies live all over North America, and the northernmost populations migrate south for the winter. Entomologists (scientists who study insects) have divided the migrating populations of monarch butterflies into two groups, one west of the continental divide, which the butterflies cannot fly over, and all the territory eastward. 

7. The butterflies wait out the winter in large colonies south of the freeze line (often Mexico and California), and then return home. 

8. Monarchs, like many other animals, migrate to warmer climes for the winter. These little butterflies fly up to 6,000 miles round-trip between their summer homes in North America and their winter homes in South America and Mexico. It takes them up to two months to travel each leg of the journey. Each butterfly only makes the trip once, and then its great-grandchildren make the trip the following year. 

9. Monarchs don’t have wristwatches, and they can't read maps, so how do they know when to leave and how to get to South America? Scientists think that monarchs use the position of the sun to tell them when to head for Mexico and how to get there. They think they also use the Earth's magnetic field to help them figure out where to go. In Mexico, the monarchs sleep the winter away in the branches and the trunks of fir trees. Sometimes a branch gets so heavy with monarchs that it breaks off and falls to the ground, scattering sleepy monarchs everywhere. 

10. You can tell the male monarch butterfly from the female by the two black spots on his hind wings and the thinner black webbing within the wings. The female's webbing is thicker and she has no identifying wing spot. 

11. One female monarch can lay up to 400 eggs. The eggs are deposited on the underside of milkweed leaves and hatch, depending on temperature, in three to twelve days. The black, yellow, and white-striped larvae feed on the plant leaves for about two weeks and develop into chubby caterpillars about 5 cm long. The caterpillars shed their skin (molt) up to four times while they're growing. Up to three or four generations of Monarchs may be born in one summer.

12. Monarch caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies. The caterpillar attaches itself head down to a twig, sheds its outer skin, and begins the transformation into a pupa (or chrysalis); a process which is completed in a few hours.

13. The pupa is a waxy, jade-green color, with gold trim. Packed tightly inside, the caterpillar 
metamorphoses into an adult butterfly in about two weeks. When the butterfly first emerges from its case, its wings are small and its body is large, filled with lots of fluid. Before it can fly away, the monarch has to wait until the fluid flows from its body into its wings, fullyexpanding them. 

14. Most monarch butterflies only live a few weeks. But the last generation of monarchs, born in late August, is the migratory generation. The shorter days and cooler temperatures of autumn prevent the butterflies from maturing enough to reproduce. This allows them to live for about eight to nine months -long enough to fly south for the winter and back again to reproduce the following summer. 

Female Monarch Butterfly

15. Caterpillars eat milkweed, which makes them poisonous to birds.

16. Thousands of individuals roost in the exact same trees every year along migration routes.

17. No other known insect undergoes an annual, two-way , long distance, large-scale migration.

18. It is a mystery how Monarchs correctly navigate to their overwintering grounds, since no migrants have made the journey before.

19. The monarch is the only butterfly to make such a long, two-way migration, over 2,500 km to reach their winter destination.

20. Butterfly wings are densely covered with scales. Scales help butterflies insulate their bodies and improve the aerodynamic efficiency of the wings.

21. Monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed plants. Wild females probably lay from 300 to 400 eggs over the course of their lifetime, although captive females can lay, on average, approximately 700 eggs in two to five weeks.

22. Milkweed contains cardenolides, molecules that induce nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and cardiac arrhythmia in animals with backbones such as frogs, lizards, mice and birds. As larvae feed on milkweed they sequester these molecules giving monarchs a chemical defense against these predators. 

23. The two bird species and mice that prey on the monarchs in the wintering sites have evolved to be able to either tolerate or avoid these toxins. 

24. Larva molt (shed their skin) up to five times before pupating and when the old skin peels off, the larva eats its old skin before it starts eating more milkweed!

25. Favorite nectaring flowers for monarchs include: Purple Coneflower, sedum such as “Autumn Joy”, Joe-Pyed Weed, Rough Blazing Star,Azaleas, Monarda and Phlox.

26. The overwintering sites in Mexico were “discovered”in the 1970's thanks to an ingenious butterfly-tagging program started by Canadians Fed and Norah Urquhart in the 1930's. They enlisted volunteer “research associates” in 1952 to tag butterflies. Tracking the individual butterflies suggested that northeastern monarchs overwintered somewhere in Mexico and finally in 1975 an American salesman called Kenneth Brugger found the sites with the help of a local peasant.

27. In the past, Purepecha Indians that live in the region where monarchs overwinter considered monarchs the souls of the dead and interpreted their arrival as the announcement of the visit by the dead, since their arrival coincides with the second day of November when Mexicans celebrate “El Día de los Muertos” (the Day of the Dead).

28. Butterflies can see UV light.

29. The collective noun for butterflies is a 'rainbow' of butterflies.

30. Butterflies and moths have an amazing life cycle. They go through a complete metamorphosis  when they change shape from a caterpillar to an adult. To do this, they form a pupa. In butterflies, this is sometimes also called a  chrysalis. Some moths spin a silken cocoon around their pupa.