Growth and Development
Research Projects
Monarchs, like other insects with complete metamorphosis, undergo a development
process that appears to be very different from that undergone by humans. They go
through stages in which their body form changes radically, whereas human infants
have approximately the same form that they will have as human adults. However, we
humans do an incredible amount of developing before birth. Insects hatch from the
egg at a relatively earlier stage of development, so many of the changes that take
place are simply more visible to us. The pictures below illustrate this; the human
adult and his newborn son are much more similar in form than the immature monarch
and it's adult mother.
Research on monarch development has been focused in two
main areas: