Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN)'s Native Plant Program was lucky enough to be awarded the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's (NFWF) Monarch and Pollinator Conservation Fund award for our project "Expanding Seed Sources and Creating Pollinator Corridors in the Madrean Archipelago." As a part of this project, we are working on planting 1,000 milkweeds across four wildland sites for monarch habitat enhancement and nearly 10,000 milkweeds of at least seven different native species in our farm plot for seed production.
One exciting project component has been our contracted intern, Finn Anderson, who joined our team specifically to focus on supporting the milkweed planting and monitoring monarchs at our planting sites! Finn has scouted for milkweed populations in the wild, cared for milkweed plugs in the nursery, and planted milkweeds in the seed amplification plot. Perhaps the most important responsibility that Finn has taken on has been to conduct monitoring on the BRN farm to gauge the presence of monarchs. This monitoring will contribute to research aimed at better understanding the presence of the iconic pollinator during its migration through Arizona and how planting milkweed may impact these transient populations. The monitoring protocols NFWF has asked us to use are those outlined by the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.
The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project (MLMP) is a project organized by the Monarch Joint Venture. It relies on citizen science to gather data on monarch larvae throughout North America over many years. In southern Arizona, monarch butterflies appear in the summertime (along with their host plants - the milkweeds) and breed, proceeding through multiple generations before casually migrating hundreds of miles back to their wintering grounds in California or Mexico. The adult butterflies feed on nectar from all sorts of flowers, but the eggs and caterpillars must live on milkweeds. They go through six life stages on their milkweeds before crawling off to build a chrysalis and later enter adulthood. Over the next couple of months Finn will be out in the field searching for monarch larvae in each of these stages on the milkweeds we have planted. The earlier stages are quite tiny and difficult to spot, while the later stages are handsomely striped and can reach two inches long. Wish us luck in finding them all!
If you are curious for more information about the MLMP, visit their website here. You, too, can participate in this citizen science effort!