Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious By Nature.
I'm Allen and today we're going to go outside
and look at some common butterflies around the Museum.
Let's get started.
All right, so we're entering the savanna here and we have a lot of plants
that are both good nectar sources for adult butterflies
and is interspersed with host plants that the caterpillars need to feed on.
As I'm looking for butterflies, I like to scan along the tops of vegetation,
paying close attention to flowers, because they'll often sit to drink nectar
and that's when they're easiest to observe.
As they're flying, they can be really shy and be easily startled away.
Here we have a monarch butterfly.
Monarchs are one of the most widely encountered butterflies across the state.
Monarchs really stick out because of their orange and black colors.
Monarch butterflies are able to store poisonous chemicals from their host plants in their bodies
and then they have these bright colors to warn predators,
"Hey, I'm toxic. You shouldn't eat me or you're gonna get sick."
So monarchs will migrate to Mexico in the fall, towards the end of summer,
so they probably have about another generation to go here.
So those monarchs that come out after this generation are gonna fly
all the way down to Mexico, to Michoacán, where they overwinter,
just on a few mountain tops that are covered with fir trees that they need to sit on.
And then in the spring, they'll fly back a little bit north,
towards the southern end of Texas,
that's about as far as they make it.
There, they'll mate, lay eggs, then when those caterpillars hatch and eventually become butterflies,
then they'll fly up and reach Illinois, potentially making it to Chicago
or maybe even their kids will be making it to Chicago.
And then while they're here, they're going to be going through several life cycles
until it's fall again, when they have to migrate back down to Mexico.
So it's only the great grandkids of those that were in Mexico last year that go back down to Mexico
and somehow they know exactly where to go.
During the summer, an adult monarch will probably live a couple weeks, up to a month.
Those that overwinter have a lot more fat in their bodies.
They're built to survive longer and they have to survive the entire winter,
so they'll live for about three months or so.
So, here we have host plants.
These are common milkweeds that are host plants for monarch butterflies.
They're really great nectar sources when they're in bloom,
but for the rest of the season, when they're no longer in bloom,
they're still really important to have here in the garden
because this will get monarch butterflies not just to come visit the garden to drink, but to stay.
It's somewhere for them to lay their eggs and it's somewhere for their caterpillars to develop.
Butterfly caterpillars usually can only eat a specific kind of plant or a group of closely related types of plants,
so it's really important to have the right host plants available
for the butterflies you want to be in your garden.
Mexican sunflowers are great nectar sources for butterflies
because they produce ample nectar
and they have an appropriate shape for butterflies.
They need the nectar stored in kind of a long tube
so that butterflies can fit their long, coiled proboscis down into it
and they also need a landing pad, somewhere where they can hang on to, so that they can feed.
A proboscis is just what we call the mouth parts of a butterfly.
So it's a long, coiled up tube that they can extend and suck fluids through.
You can see here how the butterfly's proboscis is coiling and uncoiling to eat.
The uncoiling of a butterfly's proboscis occurs when a butterfly touches something tasty with its feet.
They have taste buds on their feet and they detect there's something sweet,
they uncurl their proboscis and take a drink.
And over here we have some black swallowtail butterflies
which are really common in our prairies.
Black swallowtails, interestingly enough, are one of the few butterflies that perhaps
have increased in abundance and in their distribution of range as human civilizations expanded,
because some of their most common host plants are weeds that grow along roadsides,
like wild carrot, wild parsnip, and poison hemlock,
and as our roads have expanded, proliferation of these weeds have expanded,
which creates more habitat for these black swallowtail butterflies.
So this herb is rue and it is a host plant for black swallowtail butterflies,
and our gardens around the Museum are filled with different host plants
for black swallowtails, which is why they're so abundant here.
They feed on a number of common herbs that you might have in your kitchen,
including dill, parsley, and fennel.
So as you're looking at butterflies along our walk,
you may notice that some look a little worn or tattered.
This can show the age of a butterfly or it can show that some predators tried to get a hold of it and it got away.
Large portions of a butterfly's wings tend to be expendable,
so if a bird were to grab a bite of the tail end of a butterfly's wing,
the butterfly can get away.
A chip of the wing might fall off, but it's essentially unharmed.
It always amazes me how butterflies can be both quite fragile yet quite robust.
Let's pause here to look at some skippers.
Skippers are a group of butterflies that are rather stout bodied,
and they have these antennae that have little hooks on the end of them.
So silver spotted skippers are probably one of the most recognized skippers,
because they're very large and easy to identify.
A lot of skippers are small and brown and hard to tell what it is,
but silver spotted skippers have this big white-yellow patch on the underside that makes them really obvious.
This one's called a fiery skipper and
they're really interesting
because we're on the northern edge of the range.
They can't survive the winter here.
So they have to migrate up north every year,
and as the years go on, we're potentially seeing more and more every year,
and by tracking their populations we can maybe track the effects of climate change.
So butterflies can be seen all around the entire Nature Museum building.
They can also be seen in your neighborhoods, in your gardens, in parks, just keep your eyes open.
That's our show today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I hope you learned a lot about the butterflies outside the Museum.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below
and subscribe so that you never miss an episode.
We'll see you next time on Curious By Nature.
