Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Monarch Butterflies

Today we were lucky enough to be able to talk with Dr Barrie Frost from Ottawa, Canada who is a very clever scientist. He is visiting Nelson and staying with Amberley's grandparents. One of his research projects is to study the migratory paths of monarch butterflies. He showed us some incredible photographs that took our breath away. We learnt some really interesting facts about these incredible butterflies. Here are some of the things that we remembered....
  • Butterflies travel a long way and the sun is their compass.

  • Some monarchs live for only a month but the ones that have to survive over winter might live for six months.

  • The monarchs lay their eggs on the bottom of swan plant leaf.

  • The monarch has a poison in its body that it gets from the milky stuff in the swan plant.

  • The monarchs can flock on the trees in Mexico where they winter over.

  • They migrate across America between Mexico and Canada and it can take over five generations for them to return to the same spot a year later. Isn't that incredible. How do they remember where to go to get back to the very same spot their great-great-grandparents came from?
Dr Frost was a great speaker and really brought the topic alive for us. Thank you, Dr Frost.

1 comment:

Richmond Primary School said...

Your blog is so interesting Moturoa. You are very lucky to have Miss King's expertise so you can all become ICT experts of the future. I was very interested to read about your butterfly expereince. Next week all the Junior classes at Richmond will begin a NiE unit on butterflies. Maybe we might be able to enlist your knowledge to help us. We will put some butterfly work on our blog. Please leave us a comment when we do.
Keep up the good work.
Mrs Eden and Room 12 Richmond School. (PS.- all the Richmond School Blogs have a similar address- just different room numbers:) room12richmondprimary.blogspot.com