Native milkweed plants — the kind good for butterflies — are coming out of dormancy and starting to sprout, so be patient. Southern California gardeners should be able to buy narrow-leaf ...

It’s hard to overlook the brilliant orange and black wings of a monarch butterfly as it moves through a garden of flowers. It ...

Monarch caterpillars can only eat the leaves of milkweed, a native wildflower. As milkweed has disappeared, so have the monarchs, to the point that they're at risk of extinction.

In their larval stage, monarch caterpillars feed on milkweed. Adult monarchs get their nutrients from flower nectar. 3. Monarchs can travel 50 to 100 miles a day.

Monarch butterfly populations are endangered, to the point that the 1.2 million Western monarchs counted in 1997 plummeted to fewer than 2,000 by 2020. Here are ways we can help them survive.

I asked Vanderhoff about the tropical milkweed problem. “Most of the scientific research is in agreement that tropical milkweed does indeed interfere with monarch migration habits,” Vanderhoff ...

Both the milkweed tussock and the monarch caterpillars eat the cardiac glycoside-laden milky sap of milkweed and have evolved mechanisms to retain those toxins in their bodies after metamorphosing ...

A delayed monarch migration. This is the reason Tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica), an introduced species native to Mexico, is developing a bad reputation among monarch biologists and ...

Gardeners are scrambling to help the threatened monarch butterfly by planting more milkweed, the insect's host plant. Drought, loss of habitat and pesticides have decimated stands of milkweed ...

Monarch butterflies depend on milkweed and its close relatives to complete their life cycle. The study’s findings suggest that when aphids attack tropical milkweed, they compromise this monarch ...

“This tells us what milkweed gardens look like and how monarch eggs are showing up in real life in actual urban places,” Hasle said. Citizen scientist Lorraine Kells finds a 3-day-old ...

In 2020, around Thanksgiving, a total of fewer than 2,000 monarch butterflies were counted at around 250 overwintering sites where they have traditionally been counted in the state of California ...