Animal Fact Sheet
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Queen Butterfly
Danaus gilippus
What does it look
like?
The Queen is a large chocolate brown butterfly. The wings are edged
with black and there are a few white spots on the wings, but the
predominant impression is chocolate. Its close relative, the Monarch,
has black wing veins above and is generally a lighter color of orange,
and larger. Male Queens have a black spot on the hind wing. The
caterpillar is brightly banded with rows of lime-green, black and
yellow. It looks just like a Monarch caterpillar, but has three
pairs of antenna-like tubercles instead of two. The chrysalis looks
like a one inch high lime-green jack-o-lantern with a trim of golden
dots. The chrysalis hangs by a cremaster from its host plant.
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Where in the world?
Queens are found from the extreme southern U.S.A. to South America.
They are generally found in open habitats, and are one of the more
common butterflies in the Sonoran Desert. Queens can be seen almost
any sunny warm day at The Living Desert.
What are some behaviors?
Queens like most butterflies are only active if it is both sunny
and warm. On cool mornings, you will see Queens basking in the sun
waiting for their body temperature to reach an optimal level for
flight. Some people think that butterflies should be called “sun
flies”, because of the importance of the sun to their daily
and annual activity cycles. No one is certain why they are called
“butterflies.”
What about offspring?
Butterflies go through a cycle of life called complete metamorphosis.
The cycle starts with an egg. The egg hatches into a caterpillar.
The caterpillar eats, grows, and sheds its tough skin several times
as it grows. The caterpillar then transforms into a pupa or chrysalis
from which the adult butterfly eventually emerges. The adult butterfly
sips nectar, mates and lays eggs. The cycle is complete.
Most adult butterflies only live one or two weeks.
Queens are unusual in that some adults survive the winter. Other
butterflies will survive the winter as eggs, caterpillars or pupae
depending upon the pattern typical of each species. Queens will
have several cycles in one warm season. Some species of butterfly
may have only one cycle with the egg, larva or pupa surviving varying
lengths of time for the annual cycle. |
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What
does it eat?
The adult butterfly visits a wide variety of flowers to sip nectar.
Nectar is all that an adult Queen needs. Nectar is just sugar water.
So an adult butterfly lives off the energy of the sugar and the
nutrition that it stored in its body as a caterpillar. Queens frequent
Milkweed family flowers and the abundant flowers on shrubby members
of the sunflower family, such as rubber rabbit brush and broom baccharis.
Queens have a particular fondness for mist flower, Eupatorium.
Plant some in your garden and Queens will appear.
The Queen caterpillar only feeds on milkweed,
Asclepias, and milkweed vine, Sarcostema. Milkweeds
contain cardiac glycosides, a toxin that the caterpillar, and subsequently
the adult butterfly, incorporates safely in its body. The result
is that any bird that tries to eat a Queen is very quickly poisoned.
The bird does not die, but very quickly and temporarily gets very
sick and vomits. The bird learns to never eat a Queen again. Interestingly,
some other species of butterfly have evolved to mimic the color
pattern of Queens and Monarchs. They benefit from the bird’s
reluctance to capture Queens and Monarchs. This is called Batesian
mimicry.
Is it threatened
or endangered?
Queens are common. The number of adults will increase during the
summer and decline during the winter. Some species of butterflies
are endangered with extinction. Of the twenty-two species of butterflies
on the federal endangered species list, fifteen are from California.
The causes of their endangerment are typically habitat degradation
or habitat loss due to human activities.
The Living Desert is one of the founders of the
American Zoo and Aquarium Association’s Butterfly Conservation
Initiative, and The Living Desert is a member of the Partnership
for California Butterfly Recovery. Visit these websites to see what
you can do to conserve butterflies for future generations. See www.aza.org/ConScience/butterflyresources/
or www.xerces.org.
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