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If anyone is really concerned about their monarch caterpillars dying from Oe (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha) you might be interested in this presentation.
The presentation has been put together for a North American audience, mainly butterfly farmers: people who rear hundreds of monarchs every season. In North America some people say the disease needs to be eliminated. However, Oe is as natural as the intestinal worms that cattle, sheep, dogs, cats and humans get – or the common cold. No-one in New Zealand sees Oe as a significant issue. From time to time you might have an outbreak in your garden or butterfly rearing facility so it is good to be aware about it.
Personally, I have been raising monarchs for over 50 years and one season I did have a serious outbreak of Oe. What happened was that I already had a crowded butterfly house and someone in the same town (Russell) had pulled out all of their big swan plants (because they were messy) and was taking them to the dump. I saw the back of their truck, laden with dying swan plants which were covered with caterpillars, so I rescued all of the plants and caterpillars and put them into my butterfly house.
It would just take ONE of those monarchs to have an Oe spore for it to become a problem of plague proportions and that was what happened. I had to start again: pull everything out of the butterfly house, sterilise everything, buy new plants and collect more eggs. It was a good lesson: don’t try and rescue everything.
I have posted elsewhere about how wasps and mantises and Oe prevent the monarch populations becoming too large. Monarchs prevent the swan plant from taking over the world. (see my forum post “a plague of monarchs”.
So, don’t panic… but you might want to watch the presentation to learn more about this monarch disease.
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