Monarchs

Monarch on milkweed.

I am volunteering for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, which only requires that once a week I count monarch butterfly eggs and larvae on a patch of milkweed. I am volunteering through the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, and they have a rain garden in front of their visitor center at their Beechwood Farms headquarters where I counted them last week. I decided it would be fun to photograph some of my finds.

Monarchs have been migrating for a while, with some egg-laying adults spotted as far as Canada weeks ago. But most of them tend to lay their eggs in mid-July. The project is important because it helps provide useful data to scientists as they try to save this amazing and beautiful species. It's pretty simple to participate, but Audubon does have several upcoming training sessions on their calendar in case that is helpful. This time I found eggs as well as a handful of first "instar" larvae. Each instar represents a growth stage of the caterpillar between molts. Monarch caterpillars have 5 instar stages of growth before they form a chrysalis. Of course the milkweed had lots of interesting critters hanging out on it besides monarchs. 

First instar monarch caterpillar.

This guy looks like a kind of black fly to me. Its wings were slightly iridescent. 

A monarch egg. They have a characteristic shape and have tiny ridges.

I think these must be mud dauber wasp egg cases.

Crab spider.

Red milkweed beetles. These beetles and their larvae eat the milkweed plant for the same reason that monarch caterpillars do; in order to fill their bodies with defensive toxins that make them taste yucky to predators. 

Asian ladybug larva. It appeared to be attaching itself to the milkweed to form a cocoon.

Red milkweed beetle.