Monarchs in New Zealand

[Rcjohnsen]

<< Subject: Re: Monarchs in New Zealand
From: cherubini at mindspring.com  (Paul Cherubini)
Date: Mon, Mar 20, 2000 6:41 AM
Message-id: <38D5555B.4FA6 at mindspring.com>
 >>
<< Monarchs that feed on milkweed sometimes get attacked by birds.
Lincoln Brower and his co-workers estimate birds kill and eat parts of
15,000-30,000 monarchs PER DAY at the overwintering sites in Mexico.
His research also shows that 92% of the monarchs overwintering in Mexico
fed on Asclepias syriaca as larvae. 

David Marriott, director of the Monarch Program in San Diego, Calif.
has watched and photographed kingbirds catching and eating one monarch
after another over a period of a month at the overwintering site at Camp
Pendleton
in Oceanside, Calif. Nearly the whole overwintering colony was 
devoured there in Oct. 1997 & Oct. 1998. 

Other monarch biologists in California such as Walter Sakai and John Dayton
have recorded numerous observations of bird predation at the overwintering
colonies along the Malibu coast, in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. In the
western 
USA, no one I know has ever seen monarch caterpillars feeding on any plant in
the wild 
except Asclepias spp. - never geraniums.

Paul Cherubini, Placerville, Calif. >>

Very interesting for I had always learned that Monarchs were an example of
Batesian Mimicry-that it fed on milkweed whose compounds were distasteful to
most birds and who upon eating one would not eat monarchs.  The viceroy and
Queens were touted as mimics and birds once having a bad experience with
monarchs would eat viceroys and queens either.  They were thus protected from
the normal amount of predation

see for example the sites at
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Environment/NHR/monarch.html

see butterflies at
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/origins/selection/exploration.html

and at
http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1995/mimicry.html

and
http://fig.cox.miami.edu/Faculty/Tom/bil101sp99/23_mimicry.html

Are you saying science is incorrect on this matter?
Weren't the experiments interpreted correctly?
Could it be that the birds were feeding on viceroys or queens?
Curious minds want to know!!!