 Hi everybody. Welcome. Welcome to the Spring Fever Garden forums where we connect you, the gardeners, with the experts at North Dakota State University. And my name is Tom Cobb. I'm an extension horticulturist in the Department of Plant Sciences. Tonight is the third of our four Spring Fever forums. And tonight our theme is biology and technology. So let's get started. Now last week we got acquainted with monarch butterflies. And tonight we can learn how to participate in a project to monitor for monarchs in our gardens. And here to share with us with her expertise is Dr. Janet Knoedl. Jan is the professor and extension entomologist at North Dakota State University. And for 25 years she has provided statewide leadership for extension entomology and the integrated pest management program. Jan studies pollinators, including bees, surfid flies and butterflies in gardens and field crops. She works in collaboration with Dr. Esther McGinnis, who's our next speaker, by the way. So let's get started. And Jan, welcome to the forums. Thank you very much for the introduction. And I'd like to acknowledge my collaborators first, Patrick Bozé, my research specialist, Dr. Esther McGinnis, in the issue of extension horticulturists, and April Johnson, extension pollinator technician that you met last week. So monarch butterflies, they belong in the family Nymphalidae, and this family is characterized by having four walking legs, as you can see in the picture here. And the first pair of legs is reduced dramatically and are used for cleaning the eyes and also the antenna and tasting flowers. And this milkweed family Nymphalidae has many different groups, and the monarch belongs in the brush-footed butterfly group. And it happens to be the only species we have in this group in North Dakota. Occasionally, we may get a clean butterfly coming up from the south, but it's very, very unusual in North Dakota. Another characteristic is when they're at rest, the antenna is turned down. So you can see here for the monarch antenna. And also, when they're flying, they tend to fly rapidly and then glide for a long time, and they'll kind of look like a V. Their wings will be turned up into a V-shape. And so this is the only species in the brush-footed butterflies in North Dakota. There's mimicry in this group, and this is done with the viceroy. And as you know, the monarch has the bright orange and black markings on the wings, which indicate that it's toxic to predators. And the male has the black spots on the hind wings, and you can identify the viceroy from the monarch by this line on the hind wings. So they do look quite a bit alike. I find the viceroy a little bit smaller. And the previous speaker talked about butterfly gardening more. And again, locations, very important. You want a nice, sunny, sheltered location. Then you want to provide flowers and sources for the caterpillar, which is milkweed in the monarch, you know, all season long. Then shelter them from the wind with either brushes, your house or other structures provide water. And of course, we need pesticide-free gardens. So the life cycle of the monarch, it's one generation takes about 30 days. If we start with the adult that migrates up from the overwintering, Mexico, it takes usually about three to four generations before it'll get up here to North Dakota. The adult of the summer generations usually live two to five weeks. And once they get up here, they'll mate and then the females will lay three to 400 eggs per female. That seems like a lot of eggs to you, but unfortunately, only about 2% of them make it to the pupil or chrysalis stage. So 98% of them die. The egg lives or it'll hatch about three to four days into the caterpillar larvae. And then that takes about a couple weeks and it goes through five different growth stages. And each time it molds into the different growth stage or instar, it grows larger. And we'll talk about how you can identify each instar a little bit later. And then it'll go to the chrysalis or pupil stage, which is a transformation stage where it undergoes metamorphosis and transform into the adult butterfly. And this takes about 14 days depending on temperature. In the picture here, you can see a young chrysalis that's nice and green, and these are metallic. They look like gold, but they're not gold spots on the chrysalis. And it takes the butterfly three to four hours to expand the wings and pump blood into it, and then they need to dry before they can fly. And then when they go back in the fall to Mexico, so the overwintering generation we call it, they can live much longer than the summer generation, six to nine months. So in North Dakota, we're kind of one of the last stops for the butterfly. You know, it'll get up here in June, and you then usually it peaks in mid-August through the fall. And with our warmer falls that we've been having, you know, we'll see it into October. And if you like tracking butterfly migration, you might like the Journey North website. And you can participate as well, and this is a project if you're interested. But they report the first sighting of the adult monarch, and this was last year's data. And you can see in North Dakota that most of the sightings are late May and June into June. So, which is typical, and last year was kind of a cool year. If you go to the website, it's all animated, and it'll show the map as it's moving northward. There's many other species of animals on this website besides the monarch. But we're interested in getting more people involved in monitoring for monarchs in North Dakota. And we're doing that through the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. This was first developed in 1997 by researchers at the University of Minnesota. And they wanted to collect long-term data on larval monarch population and milkweed habitat. And the project yearly focuses on getting, you know, community science volunteers to collect the information on monarch distribution and abundance during the breeding season. So it was maintained under the University of Minnesota Monarch Lab through 2018. And now it is jointly led by the University of Wisconsin Madison Arboretum and the Monarch Joint Adventure Program. So we're going to just kind of briefly, it's a real involved program if you want to get real involved or, you know, you don't have to get it as involved. So it's up to you how much time and effort you want to put in. But the data is very valuable for monarch conservation. And Esther and I have been promoting it through our NDSU Extension IPM program and the Pollinator Objective. And we've been busy training master gardeners and NDSU Extension agents to get involved in this project. And I'll kind of just briefly describe the key activities that you can get involved in. So first off, I just want to say there's very, a lot of monarch community science programs that you can get involved in. I mentioned the Journey North one. So there's all different types of them. One just monitors for parasitoid of monarch. So it's kind of up to you to decide what you're interested in. But this one is an interesting one because not very many of them actually look at like the interaction between milkweed and larvae and then success of the adults. So that's what this one is looking at. And some of them are just focused in certain areas like California or Mexico or California again. Quite a lot of people like to tag monarchs and that's the monarch watch. So, you know, you can decide what's best for you, but we're hoping that you'll help us out on our monitoring effort here that we're collaborating on. And part of the reason I thought this was a good program for us because I got on about this is a two two year old map. And you could see there's hardly any observations in North Dakota. And then they're all near the major cities, none out in the western part of the state. So I thought, wow, I know we have more monarchs than that in the state than just nine sites. So it's pretty easy to get started. You just create your login ID. And then you have to get trained. They have a series of very detailed online training that you can go through. And also there's in person training if you want to go to Wisconsin. And then you need to find a site, you know, with milkweed. And you can either create one in your backyard and your garden or maybe you already have a pollinator garden with milkweed. Or maybe there's a park nearby that has some gardens with milkweed or a natural area. So you can, you know, figure out where's the close nearby place that you can work. And then you do your survey work and then it's entered into a data portal on their website. And maybe you don't want to get that involved and have a login ID. Well, then you can submit non-site milkweed and monarch observation where you may do just one or two observations a year. Everything counts, even the smallest observation is important. So if you want to get more involved on the site description here, it kind of, you just do this mainly at the beginning and then you're, you know, it really doesn't take much time after that. But each visit you would update it if something changed about the site. So it just doesn't take too much time, five to 15 minutes. And then we have the milkweed and blooming plants survey because they're looking at interactions between milkweed and larvae and blooming plants and adult monarch butterflies. And they want to take a look at diversity to see how that impacts the success of the population. And then there's the egg and larval survey. But you also record adults, so it's kind of confusing that way. So I don't know why they just called egg and larvae, but you do record the adults the same time you're out there. And that's weekly and it usually takes about an hour depending on how many sites you're doing. And you just look for the eggs and larvae and for the adults, you look to see what they're doing and, you know, their behavior. Are they flying low? Are they flying high? Resting? Mating? Are they feeding on nectar? If so, what plant? And etc. So I'll show you some of the data sheets. And here's a couple additional ones you can do if you want to get more involved. This one's bi-weekly, about 30 minutes it takes. And this last one is very, very involved. So I wouldn't do it unless you had a lot of time. Monarch parasitism and survival. It's a daily activity. It takes about 15 minutes. I could take more time because you're rearing the monarch caterpillars to estimate survival and parasitism rates from like to cannon flies or other parasites. So here again is kind of a summary of what we just went over. We're kind of just recommending you get involved with these top three at the most. But I said, like I said, if you have a lot of interest in monarchs and you'd really like to do activity for, you know, go ahead, go for it. There's lots of training online. You can spend days watching all these videos. So they've done an excellent job in the education. So here's an example of the milkweed and blooming plants survey. You put your species here and then for milkweeds, you know, the plants, we're getting an idea on density. So usually you have like a square meter and use number of plants and number of stems. And then you tally everything up here at the bottom. And then when you're looking at the, for the monarch observations, I here's the adults and you decide over over positions a lane. So what they're doing if you see an adult while you're out there counting the stems and what they're doing and list the species if you know it. And then look at the eggs and first through fifth in stars. And then the pupil, I'm surprised they list pupil because usually in the fifth instar, the caterpillar will move out to find like a shrub or tree to form the chrysalis. And usually they don't stick into or stay around in the milkweed patch. And there's hundreds of different species of milkweed in North America. But these are some that are most common in North Dakota. However, if you have a garden, and I know April talked about this last week, we're not recommending the common milkweed because it's so aggressive. We'd rather see you put in like the swamp milkweed. And I gave you a couple fact sheets. This is from their website and their fact sheets that are available for the Dakotas in Minnesota. And then here's the other sheet that you feel out measuring monarch egg and larval density. So it's very similar to the previous one number of milkweed species here. And then you decide which plants you're going to monitor and then monitor them consistently. And then plants with zero and then you tell me and then here you would list the number of plants with in the instar stages. Then again here at the bottom is where you would tell me everything up. And again, these are called miscellaneous. They're still important. So just so you can identify the eggs, they are very small, but you can see them with the eye. You know, you might need a hand lens the first time you start out, but then after that they're pretty easy to recognize. They're kind of elliptical shape and they're pointed at the end and then they have some lines running through it. They're usually white to green colored. And then this is one called the black head stage because the larvae has a black head set capsule. And it's ready to hatch when you see this stage. And here's the example of the egg. And then here's the latex drop from the sap of the milkweed plant. Hopefully you don't see this. This is a dead monarch egg. You can see in the bottom that the larvae is dead and it's liquid fight either parasitic wasps or maybe it died because the temperature got too cold or too hot. So let's go through the end stars now. There's the five end stars. The first end star, of course, it's very small. When it first hatch, it's kind of white to translucent. And also the head is black in this stage. And here he's eaten the eggshell, the Corian, which is rich in proteins for it and helps get that little caterpillar going for a good start. The other characteristic you look for is the dots. They're actually not dots, but they're actually little tubercles. And these are the front tentacles and then they have some hind tentacles as well. Then you could also identify the first end star by its feeding behavior. It's nice circular little cuts in the leaves. And sometimes it doesn't go all the way through because its mandibles are so small. So it kind of looks skeletonize. And this is a good video. It's not from their website. It's just one that Pat found for me. That is a very good at just letting you know what the key characteristics to use are and simplify the whole process of end star staging. And the second end star, of course, it gets a little bit longer and bigger as they grow. But now you can see the color, the black, white and yellow bands appear. And then you also see the tentacles both in the front and back have grown a little bit. But the front ones still haven't grown that much. They're only about halfway. If we could bend those forward, it would only be about halfway to the tip of the head. Third end star, this is probably the hardest one. The bands become the colors become a little more deeper and more distinct. And the front extends to about the tip of the head. So, and then they also have a unique behavior where they cut on the little circles on the leaf edges. So it'll be right here where they would take out a leaf, a little half moon or whatever. And then the fourth end star, here we got the tentacles and the front really elongating two times beyond the front of the tip of the head. And also then they have the white spots on the pro lake. And then finally the last end star, which is the largest, they got the colors are just brighter. It's more plump. And they have the white spot again on the pro legs and the tentacles on the front extend three times beyond. And they often use those front tentacles for tapping the leaf in front of them. And I see them a lot of times they'll cut a little notch in the main vein. And then the leaf will fall over and they like to hang on those fallen parts of the leaf. So that's the fifth end star. Definitely. So we did do some monitoring and had more people involved this last year. We had a total of 38 sites and 24 users. And we looked at about 30,000 milkweed plants and we got some observations, you know, out here in the central part of the state and further north. So I'm really happy about the effort that we had this last year. And even here you could take a look at the density. And you can see there were a lot of eggs laid. July 17th is the blue. And then the orange is the first in stars and the next week there was an explosion of the first in stars. So it's kind of interesting data that we can produce so we know when, you know, the monarch is present. And this can be used in management too for the monarch. You know, don't mow the ditches when the eggs and larvae are present. So this is important. I hope to get more people or we hope I should say to get more people involved. You know, the monarch needs our help. This is important for conservation. We can work for habitat restoration by planting more milkweeds and pollinator gardens. And also they use this data to make baseline decisions about monarchs. You know, we look at the density of flowering plants when they're available. How does that impact the butterfly? And then also the same thing for the milkweed to diversity and density of milkweeds. That impact the success of the larval stage. And then also for gardens when we know what size your site is. So they can take a look to see how successful things were in smaller gardens versus larger natural areas. And there's a lot of research going on in population modeling for monarchs. So this is helping to refine some of these models. And here's some extension pollinator resources that we have available now. But we actually have, we just submitted one monarch publication to AdCom. And there's another one that's currently being reviewed. So we'll have two more for you on monarchs alone this summer. And with that, Tom, I think I've used up most of my time, Tom. And I'd like to thank you for your attention. Feel free to email me if you'd like more information or Esther. Okay, Jen, that was great. We've now it's time for questions and we got some that are already coming in. And one has to do with the life cycle. And they are asking, do the chrysalises over winter in North Dakota? Yeah, no, it's too cold here for the chrysalis over winter. You know, most of the butterflies in North Dakota probably over winter as eggs or larvae and leaf debris. I would say or migrate up into the state from further south. So we're pretty harsh for climate. So they do the reverse migration as you can tell from the storm coming. So most of them prefer to stay to winter in Mexico, huh? Yes, I guess the migration started. So I looked at the website there north, the north one, north way or something. And they were just getting up into, you know, Texas and so forth. They're on their way to a long trip. Yes. How about can we let Western Minnesotans participate in this project? Oh, sure. Yeah, go ahead. It's open to everybody anywhere. Even Western Minnesotans. Yes, anywhere in the US. Okay. If you wanted to buy some swamp milkweed seed or another type of milkweed seed, where would you go? Well, try to get a local seed so you can get the native plants that are from this area and not like Missouri. So there's quite a few of them in Minnesota. I know, I think Esther has a list of resources so she can probably address that better than I can. I go through Minnesota a couple of places. Like prairie moon nursery. Yeah, prairie moon nursery, or you can either get seeds or plants, a tray of like 40 plants. Or you don't have to buy that many. They have a three pack as well for smaller gardens. How about for those butterflies, what's the purpose of their rear tentacles? It's just a sensory. They use them mainly for sensory because they don't have good hearing. So they mainly sense movements. So, you know, that's how they would, their main function is just sensory, sensory movements. So they know if a parasitoid is near them or a predator, like a bird. Okay. How about, what is a female adult do after it's done laying eggs? Well, they continue to live, you know, they'll live two to five weeks. You know, she'll continue. And usually the eggs, you know, they start, it's like a bell shaped curve. So there's like a peak egg laying period. And then as she gets older, you know, the egg load starts to decline. Okay. How about, have we seen butterflies or monitors in southwestern North Dakota? I haven't seen any data entered from that area. But probably it's, it's, it's at least partial rates because our population's not, there's not that many people to observe it. Yeah, there's, that's right. There's a lot more observations from out east, you know, near the large cities and, because there's a lot more people to observe it. But I saw, when I lived in Minot, I saw quite a few monarchs in. So I would expect they go through that area. Yeah, it's pretty windy. Probably go fast with that. Yeah. A bug. But the late spring this year, what can we do to help the monarchs? Should we start our plants now indoors like those milkweed plants, for example? Um, I think the seeds need a period of cold in order to germinate properly. So what you, like if you're doing a natural area, some people will seed on top of snow and then let the snow move the seed down into the area. But really, um, you know, you don't want to get your pollinator gardens waking up too soon because they're not going to get up here until probably early June. Okay. So we really don't have to worry. Um, I guess, you know, encourage, if you have people further in the southern states, encourage them to plant plants for the, uh, both the adult for nectar feeding and the monarch larvae milkweed. We've got someone who lives along the Red River and they have milkweed, but they've never seen a monarch larvae eating the leaves. What can we do about this? Well, it's, uh, uh, I, I live close to Buffalo State Park and I monitor a lot of their milkweed there and a lot of times they don't see. Uh, it's just due to not as many monarchs as there used to be. So it's harder to find them. And there's a lot of other, we don't know much about how they select their sites for egg lane. But I would assume it's, you know, natural areas. They, they like more open, you know, sunny locations. I don't know if it's a treat area or not, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's hard. I, you know, it's hard to say why one site's more preferred than another. Maybe just have to be patient. Yeah. Got the milkweed there. Make sure you have the flowering nectar, uh, plants for the adult butterfly, as well as the milkweed for the larvae. That's a good idea. Uh, we got a comment there question about should somebody or should we start collecting larvae and raise them to adults? There's a lot of controversy about that. Um, but one it's not easy to do. Uh, you have to have a special knack for raising monarchs. Um, so I'm, I'm not doing it because it's very time and labor intensive. You need to be there, you know, every day to check on them. So if you're willing, yeah, check the resources out on their website. If you're interested and there's a lot of other good websites, um, and YouTube videos on how to raise them, but it's, it's not an easy task. How about birds? How do they affect the monarch populations? Well, you know, as you know, they carry the coloration with the indicate danger or the poisonous cause they, when they larvae, they ingest the toxin in the milkweed plant carc, carcinolids. So, uh, in general, most birds will avoid them, but I have seen some birds that seem to not care about the, you know, make some distasteful poison. They probably fly away and die, huh? Yeah. You didn't die. Those are the stupid birds. Right. How about, uh, what's the best plants that, uh, for attachment of the chrysalis arm? Is there a recommendation? Was it just something sturdy? Isn't that what April? Yeah. Yeah. And something that's protected from winds, you know, high winds. Um, Okay. Okay. What's just trees and shrubs? I would recommend, um, Well, like, uh, Nana berry, uh, Oh, I don't think I don't know if anyone who has done a study on that, or I've never seen a list for the chrysalis, but I'm sure somebody has one. But even a bench would work. April said, I think they like trees more, um, Or they move away from the milkweed patches. So you may find a mature fifth instar crawling far away. He's looking for a protective place where he won't be found from by birds or parasitoids. How about, uh, This person with their milkweed, some milkweed gets like a black tar substance on the leaves. It's sticky. It's not a black mold. Do you know what that is? Yeah. That's probably from all the aphids, which excrete a, uh, sugary substance. And then on that you get black mold growing. Okay. Just sooty mold. Yeah. Sooty mold. Yeah. Is it beneficial or detrimental to capture caterpillars and keep them in glass jars? Kind of. That was it. Or so they can make a cook. Yeah. From watching. I guess I'm not recommending that unless you have the time and. Yeah. To, you know, feed them every day. Make sure the humidity is right. Um, if it's too dry, they won't properly go through the mold. And, uh, I brought in not monarchs, but I brought in, uh, thistle caterpillars into my office and I didn't have enough humidity. So they weren't molting or, you know, and then one emerged and died because it was too dry in that house environment. How about, I know as there's into B lawns with growing clover in the grass, does that help a monarch butterfly having clover in the yard? Yes. They do like, um, alfalfa and clover. Okay. Um, just got a couple of minutes here. How about there's a question like, what is a parasitoid? You mentioned that. Oh, it's the, uh, a wasp, uh, parasitic wasp. I'm an after was usually they're very tiny. Uh, they're parasitic. So they'll lay the egg usually inside the larvae. Uh, the body of the larvae and they eat it out from the inside. And then eventually, um, instead of the butterfly emerging, you get the parasitic wasps emerge and some of them are, um, they'll have multiple eggs within the body. So you'll have, you know, hundreds of parasitic wasps because they're very, very tiny, many of them. A terrible way to go, huh? You just be eaten alive by guts or being eaten alive by wasps. It's like an aliens movie, huh? Yes. Many of the horror movies we watch are based from entomology. Is that why you're an entomologist? You're a closet lover of horror movies. I actually don't like to watch them at all. Okay, Jen. Jen, thanks for your talk tonight. And if anybody's interested in working on this project, please contact Jen or our next speaker, Esther and, and, uh, we can get a great team for me. Thank you, Jen.