1st graders at Morris help butterflies take flightBy Kate Abbott
12:00AM / Wednesday, December 03, 2003
LENOX — They emerge from gilded vestments; they journey thousands of miles each year; they feed on honeydew; and they are born at Morris Elementary School.
Late this fall, Noreen Anderson tagged and released 15 monarch butterflies in the butterfly garden at Morris Elementary School. This year, for the first time, Morris students raised monarchs from egg to butterfly, first grade teachers Bonnie Carnevale, Lisa Slosek and Pamela Mason said last week.
Anderson supplied monarch eggs and young caterpillars to all three first grade classes and 15 more to a fourth grade class and the preschool. She also planted the butterfly garden. She gets the caterpillars through Monarch Watch, an organization that tracks and studies the migration of the monarchs, she said.
Anderson is a parent of Morris students. She got involved with monarchs simply by watching them and hearing that they are endangered, she said.
“What a resource Noreen is and has been,”
Carnevale said — a sentiment echoed by the other teachers.
The first graders fed the striped monarch caterpillars and watched each ice-green chrysalis form and turn clear to reveal the pupa within, before it hatched into a butterfly. The whole process took two weeks, the teachers said.
Monarch caterpillars are voracious eaters. They needed fresh milkweed leaves almost daily until they hatched. They chewed leaves like typewriters, back and forth, Carnevale said. The kids brought in milkweed leaves, and the teachers picked more and kept them in the refrigerator. The teachers had to take their caterpillars home over the weekends to keep them fed. Mason’s even accompanied her on a road trip to New York.
Monarchs are well-traveled butterflies in any case. Some tropical butterflies cover distances, but monarchs are the only butterflies to take a round-trip migration every year, from Mexico to the northern climes of North America, Anderson said. Millions of monarchs converge on one wintering area in Mexico, a cool, dry pine forest, where they cluster on the pine trees.
Monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed. The migrating female butterflies lay eggs on milkweed plants along the way, one egg to a plant so that each caterpillar has enough food to survive.
“One female can lay hundreds of eggs,” Anderson said. “You can imagine them frantically flying around trying to find milkweed.”
“We learned to spot milkweed easily,” Mason said. “Now I always check it for a chrysalis.”
The first graders kept their caterpillars in containers — Carnevale’s in a glass spider box — until they attached themselves to twigs and began to form chrysalides. After about a week on the milkweed diet, caterpillars find a strong stem or hard surface to hang from, in a “J” shape, and begin to form chysalides, Anderson explained. Monarchs have a gold rim and gold points or dots on their chrysalides, which gave them their name.
Before a butterfly hatches, its chrysalis turns clear, and the orange and black patterns of the butterfly inside show clearly, Anderson said. The kids could see this color change. The butterfly hatches from the chrysalis with a belly full of fluid and shriveled wings. Over the next 24 hours, it pumps that excess liquid into its wings, stretching and strengthening them.
It is hard to see the butterflies emerging from the chrysalides, Carnevale said. It happens quickly, and the kids rarely saw a butterfly at the right time. When the chrysalides formed, the teachers moved them into netting enclosures 3 feet long, where the butterflies hatched. The nets hung in the windows while the butterflies learned to fly in them. Once the butterflies hatched, the kids brought in fruits for them — cantaloupe and watermelon — and also fed them sugar water.
“The kids were just glued,” Slosek said. “In other years they have been interested, but they’ve never been this excited. They had to check on thebutterflies every time they came into the room.”
The teachers said they tried to incorporate butterflies into many fields of study. They and their students read books about butterflies and learned poems and songs. Butterflies offered a fun way to learn phonics and were also a science topic. The youngsters could track the caterpillars’ growth, draw pictures each day and date them.
They learned the difference between a moth and a butterfly, too: Moths come from cocoons, and butterflies come from chrysalides. All three teachers pointed out to their students that Eric Carle had gotten that wrong in “The Hungry Caterpillar.”
“It’s a fun unit,” Slosek said. “They have such a sense of discovery. There’s something they can run home and tell their parents about. They see butterflies on the playground and come in [yelling], ‘I saw this kind! Let’s look it up!’”
In the curriculum, the teachers have a running theme of life cycles, Mason said. They did one unit on metamorphosis and the animals and insects that go through it. The students watched it happen and even assisted it.
The lessons were not without drama. One of Carnevale’s caterpillars attached itself to a leaf instead of a hard surface. She taped the leaf to a stick, and the pupa in the chrysalis survived. One of Mason’s chrysalides fell during the pupa stage. She and her students tied a thread to it and hung it again, and it hatched, but one side of the chrysalis had crumpled in the fall, and the butterfly hatched with a crumpled wing. It could not fly and did not survive.
“We learned that that happens in nature,” Mason said.
Morris students have met butterflies before. First graders at the school have raised painted ladies for more than 10 years, Carnevale said. These came in containers with a green gel food supply. But the children never saw them eating, and they were less involved with the whole process. They certainly never tagged the butterflies.
“They’re less colorful, too. The chrysalides for monarchs are so striking. Even the caterpillars are more colorful,” Slosek said.
The children hated to see the butterflies go, Carnevale said. The teachers waited for a nice day, so the butterflies would not get cold. Anderson put a round sticker on the underside of each butterfly’s wings before she released it. The tags help scientists with Monarch Watch track monarchs and study their migrations. Anderson reports the number of butterflies she has tagged, the condition they were in and the place where she released them. The tags have contact information, so that anyone who finds a dead monarch butterfly can call Monarch Watch. Scientists also capture monarch butterflies at points along the migration paths, check for tags and release them.
The first graders took a trip to Magic Wings in Deerfield at the end of their session on butterflies. Magic Wings features butterflies year-round. The students’ butterflies headed south to Mexico. Up to four generations of butterflies may make the trip, Anderson said. In parts of Texas, flocks of them converge and darken the sky.
Future migrations may be in jeopardy, however, Anderson said. Mexicans have cut down many of the butterflies’ pines for timber. Monarch Watch and others are making efforts to persuade them to make the trees an asset through tourism instead.
Climate change poses a threat more difficult to combat. If global warming keeps on as projected, the butterflies’ wintering forest will become much wetter, and they will no longer survive the winter there, according to Anderson.
She said there are many ways people can help butterflies. She suggested planting milkweed or just letting it grow where it comes up naturally. People can also plant good nectar plants, such as marigolds, sunflowers, verbena, zinnias, impatiens, sweet William, alyssum, scarlet sage and others. And anyone who would like to raise their own butterflies can call her at 637-4809 or visit www.monarchwatch.com.
She said the experience will be worth it.
“You talk about magic. It seems magical,” she said. |
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