CHICAGO — An expert has confirmed what backyard gardeners and amateur naturalists have been saying for weeks: There are fewer monarch butterflies in Illinois this summer. At the national Monarch Larva ...

Nine monarch caterpillars that emerged late in the season would have faced certain death had an Evergreen Park man not ...

For monarch caterpillars, the world of horror movies is all too real. Killer parasitoids live and grow inside their bodies, then burst from their lifeless corpses. This gruesome relationship has been ...

Every Monday in August, Heidi Emmons is leading a group of citizen scientists into fields containing milkweed to count monarch caterpillars and eggs. The goal is to learn more about how monarch ...

The monarch butterfly life cycle begins with a whirl of wings in the heat of the summer sun. As a female monarch sips nectar from a wildflower, a male hovers nearby. A pheromone is released from tiny ...

Besides milkweed, monarchs need access to lots of nectar plants to build up their body fat for the long trip south. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) last week added the ...

In 2020, around Thanksgiving, a total of fewer than 2,000 monarch butterflies were counted at around 250 overwintering sites where they have traditionally been counted in the state of California. A ...