
I work in a lab with monarch butterflies. It's pretty interesting. I'm studying the successive brood migration of monarch butterflies as they make their way up to Wisconsin. I usually do not handle live monarches, so what I get to do is dissect the butterflies as they are caught in different parts of the world. Monarch butterflies can be found all the way down in Bolivia, up to Wisconsin. Male monarches of a characteristic black spot on their forewings. Monarches can lay upwards of up to 100 eggs (at least from my current observations). This one up top is feeding on milkweed.

The pupa are very sturdy and are usually fixed to a leaf of some sort so that when the catepillar comes out, it has something to eat. It's amazing how insects can find their way back to a place just by their current adaptations. They don't really look very complex: two sets of wings, a abdomen, antennae, and a thorax. That's pretty much all they need to figure out where they need to go. It's such a simple creature but so different from being a human.