Speaking for the officers of our great Niguel Shores Garden Club, we hope all members had a safe, happy and joyous holiday season. We felt sadness that we could not meet for our traditional holiday festivities and see your tanned foreheads (from spending all your time masked and observing social distances outdoors working in your gardens) and smiling faces. But we are looking forward to a happy new beginning this month.
NEWS FLASH: There is a Monarch living in Niguel Shores. Have you seen him? Still don’t know whom I am talking about? Well, it isn’t royalty although many think he is. He‘s the regal Monarch Butterfly.
Want to know more about this regal member of our community? Then come to our January19 club meeting where our member Tom O’Keefe will talk about a proposed new Garden Cub project: The Monarch Butterfly Garden Project. Your officers gave approval for Tom to present his ideas for increasing the Monarch habitat in Niguel Shores for the benefit of these regal butterflies.
The January 19 meeting will take place on the patio near the Community Center fireplace, or at our standby location in the park at the Community Center by the trees where we previ- ously met. An email with details will be sent prior to the event.
Here are a few facts I uncovered about the Monarchs, and Tom, I‘m sure, will provide many more. Butterflies may seem delicate but they are surprisingly tough. The Mon- arch’s crisp coloring is what makes it turn heads, but the creature’s greatest feat is its annual migration, which takes it from southern Mexico to the Canadian border. They lay up to 400 eggs in a single sitting. The tiny eggs are covered with a sticky substance helping to adhere on the underside of milkweed leaves, which are toxic. The caterpillar hatches and survives on these milkweed leaves, retaining the milk- weed poison in its body, thus protecting it from being eaten by predators. During migration, each butterfly relies for fuel on the huge volume of food it ate when it was a caterpillar. They smell with their antennae, taste by the sensory hairs on their legs and feet, and drink through a long tongue that works like an eyedropper drawing up nectar. The Monarch’s bright colors warn predators that they are poisonous, due to cardenolide (a steroid) which develops in their bodies from
the milkweed they feed on.
—Karl Kuhn
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