The Gift of Flight

ACC Students Grow, Study Butterflies Through National Project.

A fragile monarch butterfly forces its petite body through a slight opening in its wispy chrysalis.

Three monarch cocoons are shown in different stages of metamorphosis. Left: A larvae in the middle stages of its transformation. Center: A cocoon following the emergence of a butterfly. Right: A butterfly nears emergence and is visible through the chrysalis wall.

It will cling to the pod for a few hours, letting moisture dissipate from its paper-thin wings. From there the monarch will complete its metamorphosis by testing its wings and eventually fluttering away to the next stage of its life.

It is a breath-taking transformation to witness, one that students in the Anne Carlsen Center had the opportunity to see in mid-December.

In November the Anne Carlsen Center was one of more than 400 schools and homes across the United States to receive monarch rearing kits through the Monarchs in Space Project.

This national project through Kansas University’s Monarch Watch is intended to have students raise butterflies as NASA experiments with butterfly life cycles on one of their space stations orbiting Earth.

“The Monarchs in Space Project is testing a variety of things: if pupating times change, or if a butterfly’s wings will dry with the loss of gravity,” said Mary Lewis, a teacher at the Center whose class raised the larvae.

A monarch butterfly clings to a cocoon after its emergence and allows its wings to dry.

The class turned a plastic spinach salad container into an insect apartment, gluing plastic pop bottle tops along one wall to hold food. When two of the six larvae – now butterflies – emerged from their cocoons on Dec. 14, they took up residence in the ACC solarium.

“We have plants here the butterflies would be attracted to normally,” says Lewis. “We have about as natural an environment as you will find.”

The experiment teaches students an amazing lesson in biology, but also encompasses many of their journeys to – and eventually from – the Anne Carlsen Center.

More information about the Monarchs in Space Program is available online at www.monarchwatch.org.