Monarch butterfly release: Life's lessons sometimes come on the wing

Under the tutelage of STEAM Lab resource teacher Barbie Jackson, Limestone Technology Academy’s young students had followed that journey for a long time.

They had watched when female monarch butterflies began laying eggs by the dozens on milkweed plants, eggs that eventually hatched into baby caterpillars, or larvae.

The youngsters waited, perhaps impatiently, as those caterpillars devoured all the milkweed they could stomach to grow big and strong.

Then the students watched, no doubt wide-eyed, as the caterpillars split right down the middle and created chrysalises, in which they would spend the next couple of weeks preparing for the biggest change imaginable.

And finally the young Sandites witnessed the shocking metamorphosis when the small, jade-green “nuggets” broke open, and out popped butterflies, their wings wet and wrinkly from being cooped up.

“It’s one of the only insects that has two specific life forms,” Jackson said.

Last Tuesday’s release of 25 tagged monarch butterflies — 17 male, eight female — was a real coming-out party at Limestone.

Jackson invited the entire student body, and the kids lined up eagerly along one side of the playground as she and second-grader Tidas Cloud unzipped the mesh terrariums containing the monarchs.

As first one butterfly escaped the cage and then others followed, a series of intermittent shrieks rose from the students.

Within three minutes, all the butterflies had been released, and the palpable excitement had declined — but only slightly — from the fever pitch of moments before.

And that’s when a simple lesson about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly became something more.

Still in one of the mesh cages was an intact chrysalis, a soon-to-be monarch that would be returned to the STEAM Lab to await release another day with the other chrysalises still “percolating” there.

And one fully formed butterfly that was released just didn’t seem ready to head to Mexico yet, alighting initially on the hand of first-grade teacher Hannah Sloan before eventually nestling into the soft grass.

Development isn’t an exact science, Jackson explained to the students, and she didn’t know why the one butterfly hadn’t left. It wasn’t damaged in any way, she said.

“Maybe it’s just not ready. We should probably put that one in the waystation,” she said.

“Is it hurt?” one boy asked.

“I don’t think it’s hurt,” Jackson reassured him, adding that maybe the butterfly just needed a little more time and energy — and maybe a buddy — before it migrates.

Thanks to the butterfly’s tiny identifier tag affixed to its wing — no larger around than a pencil eraser and virtually weightless — students using a computer database might learn in a few months whether it eventually made it out of the waystation and south to Mexico.

The waystation, a bed of brightly colored flowers along one of the school’s sunniest walls, is chock full of milkweed plants, nectar sources and shelter that monarchs require as they migrate.

On this day, it actually had a couple of other butterfly residents, although they wouldn’t be suitable migratory travel buddies for the straggler.

Their wings, damaged since birth, will keep them from ever making that trip, and they will live out their days among the beauty and bounty of Limestone’s waystation.

That, too, is a lesson that Jackson stresses — that life can be good even when it’s not the same quality or quantity as everyone else’s.

“Everybody’s different,” she said. “Even in nature.”