Garden: A couple give the Monarch Butterfly the royal treatment

from House & Home: October 31, 2021

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Joanne and Don Lightner are dedicated to saving the reign of the endangered Monarch butterfly. The O’Hara couple are actually raising them as way to help maintain their numbers in North America.

“We are down to 10% of what the population used to be worldwide,” said Mrs. Lightner.

Monarch butterflies face a host of dangers new and old. “Pesticides, GMOs, habitat destruction, other insects, birds and climate change are all having an effect on the butterflies,” said Mrs. Lightner. “The wildfires on the West Coast have impacted that migration route.”

Mr. Lightner is a retired architect who now spends his summer days hunting butterfly eggs with a magnifying glass. “I go out and find either eggs or very small caterpillars and bring them in to protect them,” he said.

The reason for these extreme measures is that in the wild there is only about a 5% chance they make it from egg to full butterfly.

The couple feed them until they turn to chrysalis, and then protect them until they emerge as butterflies.

“This year I released about 18,” said Mr. Lightner. “We then release them into our gardens.”

“Last year, we released 38 butterflies. We have over a 90% success rate,” noted Mrs. Lightner.

Their garden features much of what the Monarch thrives on, including common milkweed and swamp milkweed. There are also plenty of native lilies and wild flowers.

Two years ago, a friend in eastern Pennsylvania got the couple interested in this rescue mission. “I said, ‘We have butterflies,’ and she encouraged us to get started,” he recalled.

The Lightners were already gathering milkweed seed for Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve and its native plant center. As volunteers, they gather and sow native seeds and propagate plants for sale.

Milkweed is critical to Monarch butterflies’ life cycle. Monarch caterpillars feast on milkweed leaves in a cloud tent. Monarch caterpillars feast on milkweed leaves in the Lightner’s cloud tent.

“It is the only thing the larvae eat, and it is the only plant they lay their eggs on,” Mrs. Lightner said.

The couple have lined their driveway with the plants and added them to their impressive garden. An added benefit of milkweed is that it makes Monarch caterpillars taste bitter, she said. “If a bird eats a caterpillar, it will vomit. They only do it once.”

Free milkweed seeds are available at Beechwood for people to plant at home.

The Lightners do much more for the butterflies than just plant milkweed. He brings Monarch eggs inside and places them on a leaf in a mesh tent. Their nursery, also known as a cloud tent, contains water-filled beer bottles that hold cuttings of milkweed plants.

“We wash the leaves when we bring them in to feed the caterpillars because there can be a virus on the leaves,” Mrs. Lightner noted. “You have to bring them in before they get parasitized.”

In the wild, only three of 100 Monarch eggs turn into butterflies because a fly lays its eggs on the larvae, and the parasitic maggots kill many young caterpillars. “This is why we bring them in and protect them,” she added.

Once safely inside the tent, most eggs hatch caterpillars that eventually emerge from chrysalis pods as butterflies. Many schoolchildren are familiar with the amazing process. The chrysalis goes from green to dark green to clear. When the butterfly is ready to emerge — in 10 days to two weeks — the chrysalis becomes very clear, and you can see the butterfly within.

On the Lightners’ kitchen table are two empty 10gallon aquariums where recently emerged butterflies hang onto the clear capsules, drying off and gaining strength. It can take six generations for Monarchs to travel from the Mexican hills of Michoacan to the northeastern United States.

“They fly across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas, where they mate, lay eggs and die,” she said. “Then that brood will fly a little farther north, and they do that at least four times.” It takes two generations for the return to Mexico.

Monarchs winter in the El Rosario sanctuary in Michoacan, where they are protected by men with machetes. Guides take small groups on horseback to see the sleeping butterflies and insist on silence as you pass through a forest of trees covered in millions of butterflies. It is part of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Saving the Monarch is important to our ecosystem because like bees, they are pollinators. They are also a food source for other insects and animals.

“You never really know when you take something out of the ecosystem what effect it has, and you weaken the entire system,” said Mrs. Lightner. “So when you protect the Monarchs, you are saving an entire ecosystem.”

Monarch Butterfly The Royal Treatment

Above: Don and JoAnne Lightner in their O’Hara garden where they rescue Monarch butterfly eggs and raise them to release them. Below: Caterpillars feast on tender Milkweed leaves in the incubation tent at the home of Don and JoAnne Lightner in O’Hara.

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