Date: 08/13/2024

Number: 1

Have seen one adult egg laying female thus far, And she seemed to be having difficulty depositing the eggs onto the leaves. After following her around witnessing 15 to 20 attempts, was only able to retrieve four eggs. Of those four eggs one never hatched and the other came to the point of hatching with The remaining two, but then never actually hatched. I have collected other eggs, unsure of whether it is from the same female. It has been a bad year for casualties as I had another egg progress along with the others only to stop when the eyes are visible and never hatch. Personally, I have never seen this before so perhaps it was an issue with the mother. Had also two other casualties, One of which may have been due to mold as it has been extremely wet here and my milkweed is having a hard time making it through with a lot of yellow leaves and spots. It does not appear to be black death and none of the other cats were affected similarly . However, perhaps due to the unfavorable weather, the cats that did hatch, grew very slowly and had me worried . Especially the ones from July 30th which was the first one which is now in chrysalis and the ones collected on July 31st. The ones that were collected on August 2nd surpassed them with regards to growth. I know a chrysalis will wait an extra day for good weather to arrive, so I don't know if the cat s felt the impending storm . My unscientific gut feelings is that every The milkweed showed up earlier this year and grew faster, LOL , and I did have A few early monarch butterflies but they were looking to feed. In addition to the hurricane that came up the East Coast We had a tornado come through Medford on Friday August 2nd. After that first collection July 30th ( one egg) through August 2nd, it looks like I will have 11 that should reach maturity. 3 are in Chrysalis form, 2 are in J, 2 are nearly ready, 4 still have a ways to go. Have not seen any adult monarchs since August 2nd but butterflies are starting to return to my garden. Hopefully the weather will be good from here out and the monarch survived somewhere and will be coming through. I will post another report in about a month.

Medford, NJ

Latitude: 39.9 Longitude: -74.8

Observed by: Nancy
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