Landscape illustration made in internship with the John Pleasants Lab at Iowa State University. Illustration published in Bioscience December 2022 Issue: Monarch Butterfly Ecology, Behavior, and Vulnerabilities in North Central United States Agricultural Landscapes.

“A breeding female monarch butterfly surveys a midsummer agricultural landscape in the North Central region of the United States. The landscape includes soybean and maize fields, as well as roadside vegetation. To lay its eggs, the female must find milkweed plants, the only plants larvae will eat. The inset shows a larva on roadside milkweed. Female monarchs lay only a few eggs on a cluster of milkweed plants before moving on to find more milkweed. In the summer, the female, the eggs she lays, and the subsequent larvae could be exposed to insecticide spray drift from the crop duster plane depicted in the background. Earlier in the season, herbicide spray drift and insecticide runoff from maize and soybean seed treatments could reduce milkweed quality and negatively affect larval development and survival, respectively. Establishing new monarch habitat in North Central agricultural landscapes is a key component in federal and state conservation plans. How can we develop and use knowledge about the monarch’s life history, movement behavior, and responses to pesticide exposure to support habitat restoration efforts that maximize population growth?”