Raiders of the Lost Monarch

Besides the weather and insecticides that have brought the Monarch numbers down on the charts in the last few years, the Monarch also has it's place in the food chain. There are some birds, mice, several insects, and some parasites that eat monarchs. 

It isn't known much about the insect predators, but the birds have evolved their own ways of handling the toxins in monarchs. The monarch is pretty much protected by the toxins in the food it eats.....it makes them poisonous. 

It stores the poison called cardenolides, that it gets from the plants it eats.  

How potent the monarch is depends on the potency of the plants it ate when it was a caterpillar.

However, there are some birds that still can tolerate the toxins.

My numbers from this year compared to last years have really dwindled. At this time I had 84 eggs, caterpillars and chrysalises. But even though I have only twenty this year so far, I am only behind in the number of chrysalises by 2. Wondering where the ancestors of all those little butterflies are who visited here last year and left all those eggs.

 Still waiting for more.