Monarch Butterflies Reared in Captivity Lack a Crucial Ability

Every fall, millions of monarch butterflies engage in one of nature’s great spectacles, migrating from sites across North America to refuges in either central Mexico or coastal California, where winter temperatures are more tolerable. They fly south for thousands of miles, propelled by some innate sense of direction to places that neither they nor their parents have ever visited. But not all of them make the journey. Not all of them know the way.

Some proportion of North America’s monarchs comes from companies that breed stocks of the insect year-round and sell them to weddings, festivals, and classrooms around the United States. Others are reared by hobbyists, who collect wild eggs from their in the past decade. But , these releases might do very little to save the imperiled monarch migration.