![]() “We live in an area where there is a lot of milkweed,” she says. The search for both monarch eggs and caterpillars begins around mid-June and runs through mid-September. “Once the caterpillar hatches, it eats only milkweed, and grows 12 to 14 days to approximately 2,000 times its body size before turning into a chrysalis. Once in chrysalis form, it takes another 10 days before the butterfly emerges.” “An egg takes about three days to hatch,” Peters says. “I just love the miracle of watching them grow from a tiny caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly,” she says. ![]() The last two of the 148 butterflies Peters released this year left her home Sept. Those were followed by five females July 5 and another male July 6. ![]() The first butterflies from those eggs emerged July 4, and were two males. She found the first monarch eggs on June 8. This year she gave up bestowing names and instead kept a notepad with key dates and statistics. In 2021, Peters raised and released 51 monarch butterflies, naming most of them. Adult monarchs need nectar from flowering plants during the spring and summer breeding seasons to support reproduction and during the fall to fuel their 3,000-mile migration to Mexico, where they congregate in mountain forests. I thought, ‘I could do this,’ and a hobby was born.”įemale monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed plants, and the caterpillars that hatch from the eggs feed exclusively on milkweed. I was glued to the screen every time I saw her videos, and I started looking online to find everything I could about raising monarch caterpillars. “Social media! TikTok has a woman who goes by Monarch CEO, who kept coming up on my feed. Kelli, now retired, but still working part-time as a legal assistant for a West Des Moines law firm, found she missed the socialization aspect of being in the office. A year later, they sold their Urbandale home and have been fulltime Lake Panorama residents since March 2021. Both she and John started working from home and chose to live and work mainly in their lake home. Chrystal was actually a male, so she renamed him Christopher, before gently releasing him to the world.įast forward to 2020. But by the time it emerged, she knew male monarchs have two black spots on each hind wing. She had already named the soon-to-be butterfly Chrystal. “When we came home from the lake, all that was left was a paper-thin shell. I started looking all over the house and finally found her on the side of our couch. I started tearing up I was so excited.” “I watched it all the time to see if I could see any change. We decided to come to the lake one weekend, and I wanted to take it with me, but John thought I was crazy, so I didn’t,” she says. Peters learned it takes approximately 10 days for a monarch butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis, but she didn’t know how long it had already been in that form. “It was a chrysalis. I took it home and rigged up a contraption with a stick to have it hang vertically. Then I looked online to learn how to take care of it.” “About four years ago, I was doing some yard work at my daughter’s home, pulled out some weeds, and this shiny thing caught my eye,” Peters says. Her interest in helping monarch caterpillars, which she calls cats, turn into monarch butterflies was pure accident. She and her husband, John, have owned a home on the west side since 2008. Researchers agree the percentage of monarchs that survive in nature from egg to adulthood is less than 10%, and some believe the percentage is significantly lower.įor the past two summers, Kelli Peters has been giving monarchs a boost from her Lake Panorama home. Iowa is in the center of the monarch’s summer breeding range, and about 40% of all monarch butterflies that overwinter in Mexico come from Iowa and neighboring states. Causes for the population decline include loss of milkweed habitat in the spring and summer breeding ranges of the United States, loss of overwintering habitat in Mexico and extreme weather events. The eastern monarch butterfly population has experienced an 80% decline over the past two decades.
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