Wednesday, August 15, 2007

By MAGGIE ASTOR
for The Montclair Times

Trina Paulus watches a newly emerged Monarch butterfly in the Montclair Times newsroom last week. Staff photo by Adam Anik

Trina Paulus does not have your typical living room.

It appears normal enough – cluttered and homey, with large windows facing east – until you glance up and see that the ceiling is festooned with what look like colorless, papery pushpins, with shiny, jade-green acorns dotted among them.

These are, in fact, former caterpillar chrysalides, along with new ones from which butterflies have yet to emerge. Stop by in the early morning, and you will see brilliant orange-and-black monarch butterflies doing just that.

Paulus, a Montclair resident for nearly three decades, has bred monarchs since 1997, when a female laid eggs on the milkweed she had planted in front of her house four years earlier.

The creatures have fascinated her for far longer.

“To me, [the monarch] is a symbol of hope that the situation you see is not final,” said Paulus. “It’s pretty daring to look at a caterpillar and imagine there’s a butterfly inside.

“I do so much work on issues of war and environmental degradation … I try to keep things balanced by breeding butterflies,” she said.

Once a monarch has emerged from its chrysalis and its wings have dried, Paulus releases it into her garden – a miniature sanctuary of tall plants and flowers. The flowers attract wasps as well, but Paulus chases them away, as certain parasitic wasps prey on butterflies.

The butterflies she sets free mate, and the females lay their eggs on the milkweed in the garden. Paulus hosts up to three generations each monarch season, which usually lasts from July to September. The butterflies born after the autumn equinox do not mate, but begin their annual migration to Mexico. The ones arriving in New Jersey each summer may be the great-grandchildren, or even the great-great-grandchildren, of those that left the previous fall.

Paulus also places some caterpillars on beds of milkweed in plastic containers, and hands them out wherever she goes – the Municipal Building, her bank, her doctor’s office … Montclair’s town manager, tax collector, town engi-neer and town clerk are but a few of the recipients of her living gifts. In this way, she increases the butterfly population all over town.

While the monarch is not considered an endangered species, two potential long-term threats exist, according to Michael Pollock, teacher/naturalist at the Sherman-Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary, the headquarters of the New Jer-sey Audubon Society, located in Bernardsville. The first is the potential loss of the monarch’s wintering habitat in Mexico, caused by illegal logging operations. The second is the diminishing supply of milkweed in the Northeast, where monarchs breed each summer.

Additionally, genetic engineering of crops can have unintended consequences for monarchs. In a study conducted in 1999, researchers at Cornell University discovered that pollen from genetically engineered corn in Kansas and neighboring states had blown onto the milkweed growing nearby. Monarchs migrating north from Mexico fed on the milkweed, and 47 percent died. Many of those that survived were deformed, said Paulus.

Paulus reports a 98 percent survival rate for the monarchs she breeds indoors, and an equal death rate for those she breeds outside. “I’m doing my little piece to improve the population,” she said.

Breeding monarchs indoors “will certainly help to supplement the natural population,” Pollock confirmed.

The Audubon Society encourages people to plant milkweed, as it is the only thing that monarch caterpillars eat. A single caterpillar can consume an entire stalk of milkweed before forming a chrysalis, said Paulus.

Paulus has even written a book about the monarch, titled “Hope for the Flowers.” Published in 1972 and translated into dozens of languages, it is an endearing, lushly illustrated story of two caterpillars’ difficult but fulfilling journey and transformation. Recently, after 35 years, Paulus wrote a corresponding screenplay. She is currently looking for an animator, and is trying to raise enough money to produce a movie.

Two lines from “Hope for the Flowers” encapsulate the symbolism of the monarch.

“How do you become a butterfly?” one caterpillar asks.

“You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar,” says another. “What looks like you will die, but what’s really you will still live. Life is changed, not taken away.”

Paulus borrows this last line from the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Dead.

Perhaps, in this case, a more accurate phrase would be “of the Reborn.”

Maggie Astor is a 2007 graduate of Montclair High School.



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