Should I rear monarchs or not?

This is an issue that really depends on your personal feelings about individual monarchs. There are strong opinions on either sidefor you to consider, and a good starting place is our Rearing: Why or Why Not? page and this Monarch Joint Venture webinar on the topic.

• Pro rearing: you will, in all likelihood, save the individual monarch’s life. Only about 2-5% of wild monarchs survive from hatching to adulthood. You will learn about and become more connected to monarchs. If you report what happens through our Activity #3, you will help us learn more about monarch survival and natural predators. And, if you are collecting and rearing eggs from an MLMP site, you can tell us you are doing that in the site information section, and we will take that into account when we analyze your data. We won’t use your data in survival analyses, because you are affecting survival.
• Con rearing: there is good evidence that rearing inside affects monarch behavior (you’ll learn about that in the webinar). You might have the impression that you are helping the monarch population by saving some individuals, but you really aren’t—one, ten or even a hundred monarchs won’t make a difference. If you want to save monarchs, create habitat! Even if we do rear enough to be more than a drop in the bucket, without habitat out there for them, it won’t really matter.