{"id":381,"date":"2021-09-21T20:20:29","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T20:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/?p=381"},"modified":"2021-09-21T20:20:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T20:20:29","slug":"monarch-mismatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/2021\/09\/21\/monarch-mismatch\/","title":{"rendered":"Monarch Mismatch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Monarchs have been much on my mind lately.&nbsp; It is fall and I live on the western edge of the Monarch Highway.&nbsp; I have tagged Monarchs for Monarch Watch since 1997 but quit buying tags around 2015 when the urban Monarch population became so small.&nbsp;&nbsp; I had the chance to look back at some old Monarch information lately and found a copy of the tagging sheet from 1997.&nbsp; In Fall 1997, in our backyard, my girls and I tagged 188 Monarchs.&nbsp;&nbsp; Now I am lucky if a see a couple of Monarchs a week.&nbsp;&nbsp; I know the \u201chead\u201d reasons for the 90% decrease in the eastern migrating Monarch population, but this week it was the \u201cheart\u201d reasons that spoke to me so strongly.&nbsp; While hanging up wash in my backyard, I noticed a Monarch repeatedly hovering around my Plumeria or frangipani.&nbsp; On closer inspection I could see that it was laying eggs.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Monarch Butterfly Laying Eggs on Plumeria\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/w-pffVAEtwE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Monarchs lay eggs on milkweeds, preferably, native milkweeds, across a large swath of the United States.&nbsp; Milkweeds contain cardiac glycosides which when ingested by the Monarch caterpillar make it unpalatable or poisonous to vertebrate predators.&nbsp; But why on my Plumeria?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It turns out that Plumeria and Asclepias (the genus of Milkweeds) are both members of the same plant family, Apocynaceae or dogbanes.&nbsp; Both plants exude a milky white latex that is a skin irritant.&nbsp; I can only surmise that in the biological wasteland that is the average urban area, the closest that this mama could find to what she needed was my Plumeria.&nbsp; The eggs did not adhere to the leaves and the twenty plus eggs she did lay were lost to the population.&nbsp; My heart cried.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monarchs have been much on my mind lately.&nbsp; It is fall and I live on the western edge of the Monarch Highway.&nbsp; I have tagged Monarchs for Monarch Watch since 1997 but quit buying tags around 2015 when the urban Monarch population became so small.&nbsp;&nbsp; I had the chance to look back at some old&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-observations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":462,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emmysearth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}