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Eric Bunnell's People: Keep an eye out for monarch butterflies

Don’t you know but there’s a bit of a blitz on right now.

Don’t you know but there’s a bit of a blitz on right now.

Until Sunday Montreal-based Mission Monarch is asking citizen-scientists to sign up and report monarch butterfly sightings as part of a continent-wide count aimed at saving the migratory populations of this endangered species.

Eric Bunnell's People: Keep an eye out for monarch butterflies Back to video

Click through mission-monarch.org to a website that’s full of information about this fascinating insect.

And maybe, just maybe, the next monarch you spot will be one reared on the kitchen island of the St. Thomas home of Frank and Effie Lattanzio.

Since 2016, the retired couple has been collecting monarch eggs, raising caterpillars, and watching them pupate into the spectacular, orange-winged butterflies they become.

“They are not called monarchs by accident,” Frank says.

“They’re the royalty of the insect world.”

Last summer, Frank and Effie, who are members of Monarch Watch, another monarch organization, reared and released 85 butterflies. They expect to do about the same this season, if not more.

They start looking in July for eggs laid on milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars eat.

They raise the caterpillars in terraria until they enter their pupal stage. They transfer the jade-green pupa to a “chrysalis tree,” a small, counter-top metal sculpture of a bare-branched tree, and wait for butterflies to emerge.

“The process … is just amazing,” Effie says.

“You can see it open up and the butterfly flops out and hangs upside down. The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, we have a really deformed monarch butterfly.’ Because it’s like all body and no wings. But then the juices in the body start to make the wings fill out. It takes about three hours in total between the time it emerges and it’s actually ready to fly.”

Early in the season, those butterflies will continue to reproduce. But their lives are short. However, the next generation eventually will migrate to winter quarters in Mexico, where they will sexually mature and mate, living as long as eight months.

In the wild, a female monarch may lay as many as 300 eggs, Frank says, but the end result will be only a few butterflies.

“The thing is in the wild, the female lays between 200 and 300 eggs and the number that make it to maturity is three, maybe four. It’s a real crap shoot for those eggs to........

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