Sun Current | From egg to butterfly

Sun Current | From egg to butterfly

The kids living around Marion McNurlen’s Morningside home love to set free the monarch butterflies raised by McNurlen.

Marion McNurlen holds the mesh lid where caterpillars have turned into the chrysalides that will eventually produce monarch butterflies. McNurlen finds the eggs on milkweed leaves, keeping them in her home until they turn into butterflies and are set free by the neighborhood children. (Sun Current staff photo by Lisa Kaczke)

Her 2-year-old granddaughter watches the egg become a caterpillar that turns into a chrysalis before letting the adult butterfly go in her grandmother’s yard.

It’s about teaching children so they’re interested and raising children who will be advocates for critters, McNurlen said.

McNurlen has let 60 monarch butterflies go over the past several years that she found as eggs and raised to butterflies in her home. Her love of monarch butterflies has turned a lot of friends on to raising them as well.

This has been her best year yet at finding eggs. Two years ago was too hot and many monarch butterflies died while migrating, she said. She found a few early on in the summer last year, but then didn’t find any more eggs for the rest of the year.

The monarch butterfly population has declined an estimated 90 percent in the last 20 years, and a petition was filed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last month to place the monarch butterfly on the endangered species list. The amount of habitat the monarch butterflies use in Mexico has gone from 21 hectares in 1996 to 0.67 hectares last winter as the population has declined, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The declining population is due to “deforestation, illegal logging, increased development, agricultural expansion, livestock raising, forest fires and other threats to their migratory paths and summer and overwintering habitats,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Monarch butterflies, Minnesota’s state butterfly, migrate 3,000 miles from the state to the warmer climate of Mexico, the only insect to do so. McNurlen puts it this way: A monarch butterfly weighing half the weight of a dollar bill flies to Mexico in a month.

Monarch butterfly migration is also a multigenerational feat. It takes four generations of monarch butterflies in a year to migrate from Mexico to Minnesota, but the fourth generation is the only one that migrates back to Mexico, McNurlen said.

“I think it’s a miracle,” she said of their multigenerational year.

McNurlen has always been an “outdoor gal.” After working with children with cancer as an oncology social worker, a job that comes with a lot of sadness, she decided she wanted to spend retirement volunteering outdoors with children. She works with preschoolers and school groups at the Richardson Nature Center at Hyland Lake Park Reserve in Bloomington, digging in the dirt and finding critters with the kids.

She also manages the group that checks for monarch butterfly eggs in the park.

McNurlen became fascinated with monarch butterflies when she visited the monarch butterfly sanctuary in Mexico in 2003. She learned more about the butterflies and realized she could easily raise them herself.

One in 20 monarch butterflies make it from egg to butterfly in the wild, but most of McNurlen’s survive to become butterflies.

Monarch butterflies only eat milkweed. The females also only lay eggs on milkweed, tasting the milkweed through their feet to ensure they’re on the right plant.

“All of that is what makes me crazy about them,” she said.

McNurlen checks the milkweed in her yard for eggs, found on the underside of the leaves. Several of her neighbors have milkweed in their yards and she knocks on their doors to check their milkweed for eggs, too.

She puts the leaf with the egg into a glass container covered with mesh in her house. The eggs last for five days before they hatch. Two weeks after hatching, each caterpillar turns into a chrysalis for 10 days before emerging as a monarch butterfly, tagged on their wing by McNurlen before she sets them free so they can be tracked. The entire process occurs in a container the size of a fish tank.

People can help by planting milkweed, McNurlen said. Save Our Monarchs, begun by Edina resident Ward Johnson, provides milkweed seeds through its website, including the first three seed packs for free. In addition to the Edina organization, residents who have milkweed can sign up to participate in the University of Minnesota’s Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. A map of monarch sightings, as well as children’s educational material on monarch butterflies, can also be found on Journey North’s website.

To raise butterflies, all people need is milkweed and a container, McNurlen said. She added that kids love watching the process and letting the butterflies go while learning about them.

“It’s rare to do something to help nature that’s easy,” she said.

Info: saveourmonarchs.org, MLMP.org and journeynorth.org