How NOTto Save Monarchs

Avoid Planting Tropical Milkweed

Why should you avoid planting TROPICAL milkweed?

While tropical milkweed is beautiful, and more readily available and adaptable, it is detrimental to the struggling monarch population for 3 reasons:

It can carry OE disease. The ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE) is a protozoan parasite that infects butterflies that host on milkweed. Its life cycle starts as a microscopic spore that breaks open when ingested by a caterpillar. Within the caterpillar, it grows and multiplies. Because a parasite depends on its host for its own life, OE rarely kills the caterpillar, but the disease affects the development of the adult butterfly while pupating, and adults emerge weak and often with crippled wings. An adult butterfly with OE has no chance of survival when wings are malformed. [Source]
It has a longer blooming season that throws off the monarchs' migration patterns. Some tropical milkweed and monarch enthusiasts will cut back their tropical milkweed to simulate dormancy.
It doesn't have much of the toxin native milkweed has, so the butterflies won't taste bad/be poisonous, which will cause predators to eventually learn to ignore their markings & eat more of them.

Tropical Milkweed

Beautiful but deadly.

OE Spores

They can only be viewed under a microscope.

Malformed Monarch

This is what it does.

Keeping Caterpillars isn't an Effective Solution

Here's a monarch I raised indoors until it finished metamorphosing from a caterpillar into a butterfly. I released it January 11th, 2022. While raising caterpillars indoors until they're butterflies can help the monarch population by keeping them safe from predators, it is difficult to keep them fed with fresh milkweed. They eat so much of it, and the stems will wither if kept out of the fridge after harvesting for more than a couple days (even if given plant food and kept in water), I found myself harvesting stems every other day, which was destroying the milkweed plants I was taking the stems from. It's a much more effective strategy to invest in planting milkweed.

Female monarch butterflies lay 300-500 eggs over two to five weeks of egg laying [source], so the issue if we want to quickly expand their numbers isn't to help them avoid predation as much as it is to help them avoid starvation.

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