Monarch Watch

Guess the milkweed species! 🌱

There are more than 70 species of milkweed in the United States, and while they can share certain similar characteristics (such as basic flower structure), there are many variances between species in plant height, color, leaf shapes, root systems, growing conditions, and more. Here are just a few milkweed species you may find in certain areas around the country.

To learn more about milkweeds, including which species grow best for your ecoregion, visit our website!

What's your favorite species of milkweed?


Photo 2 by Rebecca Wagner

Happy Pollinator Week!

This week, we're celebrating all the creatures that pollinate our world. From butterflies and moths to bats and lemurs - and everything in between - there are numerous creatures that contribute to the health of plants.

To learn more about getting involved with Pollinator Week, check out resources from The Pollinator Partnership , who manages this annual celebration in support of pollinator health.

And keep an eye out this week for a few more posts from us about pollinators and ways to support them this Pollinator Week!

Up next in our Monarch Biology Series: the Chrysalis

The chrysalis has long been a symbol of change and personal growth, and it’s no wonder why! During the chrysalis stage, or pupal stage, the monarch will undergo a dramatic transformation from larva to an adult butterfly.

As a late-instar larva, a monarch will already begin developing parts of its adult body internally, which start to be revealed when the larva splits its final skin when pupating. As an immobile chrysalis, the monarch will finish development into an adult butterfly.

Across the 10 to 14 days of the chrysalis stage, the pupa will break down its larval structures and tissues and finish forming its butterfly body. Certain groups of cells, called "imaginal discs," will rapidly develop body parts and systems like antennae, wings, and legs. Toward the end of the chrysalis stage, we can start to see the butterfly through the pupal cuticle as its pigmentation and patterns develop.

What happens after that? Come back for our final part of our series as we take a look at the adult monarch butterfly!

We have some more updates in our radio-tag first-generation monarchs research project!

After radio-tagging monarchs in Texas and Oklahoma, we also tagged and deployed monarchs in Lawrence, Kansas, toward the end of May. Like with the monarchs released in the other states, our goal is to study when first-generation monarchs would stop moving north.

After some smaller detections, several tagged monarchs started getting detected in different states. Here are a few highlights as of June 9:

📍 MW-KS-005 has traveled the furthest from Lawrence, with detections in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Manitoba, Canada!

📍Four monarchs have made it to Minnesota so far (MW-KS-012, -0018, -009, and -008).

📍 MW-KS-008 has been detected in four states: Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

Read more about this project on our website, and cycle through the images on the page to watch the progress of the radio-tagged monarchs. Link in our bio!


Monarch Watch has been participating in the Project Monarch Collaboration, an exciting research project led by Cellular Tracking Technologies and Cape May Point Arts and Science Center to deploy solar-powered radio tags on migratory monarch butterflies and study their migration. As an extension of that project, we've been initiating research to answer questions about the spring migration - specifically, when first-generation monarchs would stop moving north.