Swan plants = food

• Most customers buy swan plants for food for caterpillars or they plant them so that female Monarchs will lay eggs on them.

• Female Monarchs can smell a swan plant from 2 kilometres away!

• It’s important that swan plants are NOT sprayed to remove aphids and/or caterpillars – or if they are, they are removed from sale.

• People who buy swan plants that have been sprayed can be very upset when caterpillars start to die – and this is very bad for customer relations.

Egg Ovum

Adult Imago

Monarch metamorphosis or life cycle

Pupa Chrysalis

Caterpillar Larva

Male and female Monarch

• Males have a black spot (or scent pouch) on each hindwing• The veins on the wings of a female are broader than a male’s

Interesting immigrants!

• Monarchs come from North America and ‘flew/blew’ here in the 1840s• The swan plant comes from Africa – and probably arrived here as a

‘stowaway’ in lifesavers, pillows etc. The silk is used by native Africans as a filler for soft furnishings… which may well have been dumped here when they outlived their useful life.

Swan plant is poisonous

• Temporary blindness• Skin allergies• Be careful!

• Bitter taste • Birds learn not to eat them

except for the shining cuckoo

More detailed information on www.monarch.org.nz

Tips to tell customers

• Observe, don’t touch • Chemicals can harm! These also include fly spray, sun screen,

hand cream, flea collars – not ‘just pesticides’• Plants may have different levels of toxicity : soil structure, type of

milkweed, humidity etc… This can also affect caterpillars.• Let caterpillars transfer themselves by putting the new plant next

to the plant which is devoid of leaves.