Monarch butterfly
The monarch is a big orange butterfly with black veins and white dots on the black edges of its wings. It is famous for its amazing journeys. Every autumn, huge numbers of monarchs fly south from Canada and the United States all the way to Mexico and Florida.
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Fun facts
On its autumn journey a monarch can fly thousands of kilometres.
No single butterfly makes the whole trip back north in spring. It takes several generations, children and grandchildren, to get home.
Another butterfly, the viceroy, looks almost the same, but it is smaller and has an extra black stripe on each back wing.
In Hawaii there is a white kind of monarch.
It belongs to a group called milkweed butterflies, named after the plant their caterpillars eat.
Most asked questions about Monarch butterfly
?Where do monarch butterflies go in winter?
Monarchs from eastern North America fly south to Mexico and Florida. Monarchs from the west often go to southern California.
?What do monarch caterpillars eat?
They eat milkweed plants. The grown-up butterflies drink nectar from flowers.
?How big is a monarch butterfly?
Its wings are about 9 to 10 centimetres from tip to tip.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Danaus plexippus
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Nymphalidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Nymphalidae
- Lives on
- North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Oceania, Asia
- Also known as
- Milkweed, Common tiger, Wanderer, Black-veined brown
Where the facts come from
- Monarch butterfly (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Rhododendrites. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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